[AI is scary clickbait title]

Admittedly, it's been quite a long time since I opened up this site. Life's been doing its thing, you know?So I crack open the blog page to write, and I see all these AI tools. That's not a surprise; it's literally everywhere online. But I think to myself, "It'd be funny to get an AI to write an article about how AI writing blog posts satirizing AI writing." So I did it, but it wasn't funny.

Again, not really a surprise.And I think that was the ah-ha for me. AI is supposed to be this big amazing tool for efficiency and content and innovation and whatever. It's supposed to WOW us, and maybe it did for a bit, but mostly, I think, out of novelty. AI was novel. Now it's just a thing that's either useful or annoying.

I think it would be useful in future discussions to divide AI's use into categories. It seems to me, off the top of my head with no expertise or critical insight, that we see AI either out in the open or hidden behind layers of code and process. "Content AI" and "Process AI." Maybe. We can workshop it.

Mostly I'm concerned here with Content AI. When it first started popping up, it was, like I said, novel. Now, it's mostly in the way. The vast majority is obviously slapped together for clicks, the user responsible hoping they've finally found the key to making that sweet social media money. At the very best, they trick some unobservant people with emotional engagement, but no one actually sees any sort of value or skill or merit in the content itself.

Obviously I'm not an expert, but I've never seen anyone write about how impressed they are by these sorts of videos or images.Based on that, I think the artist is not threatened by the actual image or text itself, but in the battle for engagement. Real art takes time and care; it can't adapt on a whim because it's an emotional expression of the artist, not an algorithm reading trends in user data. Real art will always be superior to AI content in that it's for something besides engagement. But that's not really what AI content wants to do. It wants clicks for attention and/or money. 

And that's the reason I think there needs to be a distinction between "Process AI" and "Content AI." Ultimately, they're both tools to maximize profit, but one is honest and the other is deceptive. "Process AI" could, could be used to maximize productivity and reduce scarcity. It could make everyone's lives better, assuming it isn't weaponized to put people out of jobs. It could get us Star Trek, basically.

But "Content AI" will always be a lie, a tool to simply grab your attention and pretend to be expressive. It's troubling not because it replaces the art, but because it bends how we engage with our interests and emotions. It affects us at a psychological, social, and economic level that removes our well-being as a variable in how we spend a vast swatch of our waking hours.

I was about to wrap this up, but I had one more thought. How is this any different than marketing firms and their graphic designers? Haven't businesses employed graphic designers to create engaging advertisements for their products for, like, forever? So it's not really an issue of the thing itself. It's a matter of scale. Before, a business could make a commercial and trick people into buying their sandwich or gadget or something. But now, nearly anyone can make a little video and get you sucked into Clickbait Hell and literally rewire your brain.

Neat.