Invisible flowcharts and calculations can't be given the keys

Why I'm cheering for artists and creators to pave the way, and AI to be a tool and nothing more

I have a cartoon in my head, in the form of a New Yorker comic, of a group of friends in the future, 100 years from now, browsing a gallery of visual art. Some of what they are looking at are photos of an era, say 2025 New York City or San Francisco 20 years after the pandemic. The visuals resemble what we’d likely see today in a gallery: a large print, encased behind glass, as a series telling a story, with a blurb about the creator’s intentions and how it was made.

The curveball is that every single image was created with AI, built by ethnography of the time and some of what the narrators think happened, based on historical accounts and personal experience, but drawn up like a forensic interview enabling a sketch artist to directionally illustrate what they are hearing and computing. Things look abstract. An image can resemble a distant presence but something is amiss. The images weren’t created by the person presently in the moment, or with a tool like a camera or a canvas. There was no movement to capture, no miss of a shot, no accidental snap. It was all built by code and logic, driven by invisible flowcharts and calculations.

I’ve played around with this thought experiment in my head and keep coming to the same questions.

How do we emotionally connect with a visual created artificially? How does AI inform our history? What do we call people who create with AI? Does AI augment our storytelling or cripple it? Can AI tell me a story about what it felt at the moment? Did the AI learn anything…and understand what, if anything, was contributed? Did someone cry, smile, or laugh when they made the image? What did the air smell like?

I get riled up and disillusioned when I think of this future for my kids.

And this week, as the world learned of the ousting of Sam Altman, OpenAI’s CEO and the current guru of AI, the talking points all centered around the surprise of his ousting, the sharpness of Microsoft and Satya Nadella to protect their billions in investment, and the potential irrational decision-making of the OpenAI board. What appears to be a massive blunder from a soaring company could, in the months and years to come, be seen as the rupture of any safeguards put into place by those believing a technological revolution of this magnitude should be thoughtfully planned and orchestrated, against those who have already tasted a wealth the world may likely be seeing for the first time.

In a world where we’re combatting knowing each other as humans in a better way, to connect so we’re not at war, to understand each other’s perspectives and unique imprints on our society, we’re simultaneously being driven to a future where aesthetics without emotion will be the norm; an allure and blindness to “what is possible” versus what we should be grateful for. Our collective story is a story without presence in the future. And the idea of that is leaving me gutted.

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I miss mixtapes

I wish I could fully remember the wonder and addiction to creating and distributing mixtapes on cassette. Based on my email list, I think a lot of you will remember things like recording songs off of the radio or creating playlists for friends on TDX tapes that were handed from friend to friend and back again.

There’s been so much “augmenting” of humanity in the last 50 years that we’re truly at a place where we long and remember the things that don’t seem that tedious anymore. We have let tech-obsessed capitalists think they are solving some insignificant muscle memory (which they have in a lot of ways) but have actually completely depleted the things we find meaningful. Technology has always done this. Sometimes I think about frozen dinners and the paleness of 1950s dining. It’s taken an entire movement of farm to table and an appreciation of fresh foods and a democratization of cooking techniques to finally get people to realize that eating a frozen dinner every night in front of your television is a really fucked up way to live.

We’re living on the precipice of a lot of fucked up ways of living, things that are sold to us with time-savings and energy conservation, but feel more like scaling inertia. How many frozen TV dinners are we signing up for with the promise of AI?

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My “dinner for five”

A few months ago I deleted Twitter. I didn’t write about it, instead letting the episode dissipate like a fart in the wind, because that’s sort of what I thought about Twitter at the end. David asked if I’d taken the time to download my data and I didn’t see a need. I shuttered at the thought of decades worth of ephemeral thoughts in a zip file left for my great-grandkids to discover. No way. I’d rather they read postcards and this substack. Or sift through the thousands of polaroids and try and make sense of my fascination with both Rage Against the Machine and Radiohead by listening to the records I’ll leave them. And I continue to think about that about broader social media participation, broadly speaking because my choice to invest in it feels sort of like letting some gas out: relieving but wafts of shit abound.

I’ve longed for community my entire life, partly because I’ve never really felt like I’ve belonged to specific clicks or groups.

I’m not going to make a big show of it when I delete Instagram from my phone. I don’t think I’ll go as far as Twitter and delete my handle. I’ll let it sit there like a ghost, coming in and out like a cold shiver. The lede is buried a bit here, but I want to invest in more challenging spaces, with more commitment at the epicenter. I’ve written extensively before about “slowing things down” and I’m adding “substantial” to that environment. So if you’ve made it this far and see me elsewhere, I won’t be there. I hope to write more here, share more photography projects, ask dumb questions, and have people comment and participate. Hell, I’m even longing for email lists where we can share music playlists and articles. Who wants to start one? Maybe we can swap postcards and physical mixtapes. I don’t want the robots to keep stealing those experiences by promising us convenience and automation.

A few moments of gratitude below.

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After a very long hiatus, Beirut is back with a new album. It was like greeting an old friend back in the house.

Happy Sunday. Practice gratitude. It could save your life.