Many people loved the installment of Dorothy Gambrell’s Cat & Girl webcomic in which Gambrell confronted her feelings about being one of a few thousand early webcomics people listed as having had their work used as training material for generative models.
I loved it too. I haven’t been following C&G since the start, but for close to two decades by this point, without any doubt.
So The Markup did a short interview with Gambrell about the experience and the comic and *waves hand* all this, and she dropped what is basically a very succinct and oddly beautiful precis of James C Scott’s Seeing Like A State:
Eons ago we lived our messy, imperfect, edge-case lives in a universe we couldn’t understand. And then we got numbers, and the numbers were so much help. How many oxen does the tax collector say we have? Five? Is the baby ox a whole ox? Is the ox dead? Is the ox near death? Five is not a perfect description, but the numbers help us distinguish our herd versus the neighbors. They help the state understand the limits of livestock in our area. Five is good, it helps us understand, and before you know it we’re calculating the heliocentric solar system. But somewhere along the way, instead of the numbers being the abstract shadows of our gross messy lives, the numbers became the real thing. And we became the shadows. And the parts of the shadows that didn’t exactly reflect the numbers became problems.
I hope that, with AI mastering the parts of illustration and image that its programmers consider important or skilled, that we see just what that leaves out. That we see the parts the numbers don’t, and can realize how real and how important those parts are.
When I was talking last week at the launch of The Breath of the Doing, the latest collaborative foresight book from Media Evolution1, a lot of people were surprised—pleasantly, i think, but still surprised—when I insisted that I know, on a level beyond language, that an LLM will never be able to do what I do when I sit down to write a story.
To be clear, that’s not at all to claim I’m particularly hot shit as a story writer! Because the same is true of any human being who ever sets out to write a story, no matter how crudely or inadequately—and for exactly the otherwise inexpressible reason that Gambrell makes in the last paragraph quoted above.
It’s kind of amazing that we’ve let people try to convince us otherwise… but also in some ways amazing that anyone would try to?
I was talking to Tobias Revell last week, and he suggested that the motivation might be, at base, a sort of fin de siecle nihilism among the founders and vencaps: sensing an oncoming “AI winter”, if not an outright extinction event, and confronted with a world that no longer thinks the sun shines out of their arseholes, they are left with the kind of trollish deflation of other people’s passions that became the mark of New Atheist partisans and other early forms of replyguy.
They know very well that the “art” that comes out of generative models is derivative shit. That’s the entire point. In a world where they are no longer special, all that remains is to make sure nothing else gets to be special either.
I’m pretty sure that we will soon notice what Gambrell calls “the parts the numbers don’t see”—in fact, I think we’re already noticing. The question that remains, in politics as well as tech, is just how much they will have smashed for smashing’s sake before we finally decide to take their toys away.
You could, I suppose, turn this around on me, and say that I’m the one doing the trollish deflation of other people’s passions, sniping from the sidelines at the brave value-creators who are trying to build The Future.
But I know that The Future is dead, and I’ve learned not to trust anyone trying to sell me parts of its corpse.
You cling to your relics all you like. I’ll be over here, dreaming new gods.
- Typing this has caused me to realise that, while I plugged it on LinkedIn—of all places!—I haven’t really mentioned this book on VCTB, nor the project from which it emerged, nor the five original stories by me (!) that it contains. In my defence, lots of client work is happening, which is a Very Good Thing, but which is also stealing time that might otherwise be used for casual blogging… but I’ll catch up soon, I promise. ↩︎
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