Just in case any of my readers were wondering, no, I won’t be using artificial intelligence to write, create cartoons, or really, to do anything creative. I don’t want there to be any doubt about that, and I thought this post could serve as my general statement on the matter. I’ve done enough reading about how these LLM (large language model) tools work (pattern recognition on a massive, massive scale), as well playing around with ChatGPT, Bard, Dall-E, and some of the others to appreciate their possible uses, but for me … it’s a big fat nope.
That’s not to say I wouldn’t use them the way I occasionally use a dictionary, an encyclopedia, or the Chicago Manual of Style (and they’re a long ways away from being accurate or trustworthy enough to be useful even in that regard), but I won’t be using them to create. You see, it wouldn’t be me, and the point of fiction, cartoons, or any art or entertainment is to communicate a voice and a point of view. As Stephen King has said on more than one occasion, writing is a form of telepathy, a way of transmitting my thoughts and emotions to you.
What would be the point of using an A.I. to do that?
I think some people are fooled by these things just as there are people who are fooled by master illusionists. If anything, they’ve proven how far from A.G.I. (artificial general intelligence) we really are. They don’t know anything. It’s very doubtful they’ll ever develop a theory of mind. They’re just stochastic parrots, regurgitating patterns to please you. And while I don’t quite agree with Noam Chomsky that they essentially amount to high-tech plagiarism, I think you can definitely make a convincing argument that’s the case. Sure, humans copy and borrow all the time, and almost all art is derivative in some fashion, building on the works of others, but this is something different. I do agree with Chomsky and Gary Marcus that what these LLMs have done is prove just how remarkable the human mind really is.
Right now, most of what they create is just boring, which is no surprise considering how they work. It’s like taking all the ingredients of a delicious beef stew and putting them into a blender. Yes, all the same overall contents may be there, but I can assure you it’s not going to taste nearly as good.
Even if they could do it “better,” however you define “better,” it wouldn’t matter. It still wouldn’t be me. It wouldn’t be my voice, my point of view, and my decisions. What if it made my life easier? That’s another common rejoinder. And to that, I say this: I don’t write because it’s easy. I write because I enjoy it—even when it’s hard, maybe especially when it’s hard—because when it goes well there is a kind of magic that happens, a beautiful transmission from my mind to yours. It can happen across vast distances of time and space. You may be reading this post five minutes after I wrote it in a house just down the street from me me. Or you may be reading it five hundred years from now in your dome on a moon colony around Jupiter. Who knows.
It’s a beautiful thing, when it works. I’m always chasing that outcome. It’s worth the struggle to get better at it.
I suspect most people agree with me on this, which is why I’m not all that worried about losing all of my readers, but I thought it worth stating my opinion on the matter. If I put my name on something, I created it. Simple as that.
Enjoy the comic?
Click HERE to receive
a FREE Run of the House
every Monday.