You Have Been Hacked
We Lose the Wordless World at Our Peril
Generative A.I. does not belong in a classroom or a studio, because it has nothing to teach us, it is the opposite of learning. How can we believe that a construct that purports to offer us rich practice is built to negate the practitioner. Teaching demands a deep understanding of pedagogy and an ethical and empathetic framework for supporting human flourishing. The pilots of the tech giants are programmers, software engineers and hucksters and are driven by market cap. We are being sold an addiction as if it is a cure for an illness it has given us.
From the minute we are born we learn by interacting with the world and challenge the limits of our knowledge through active engagement. Drawing is built on non-verbal semantics, a language without words, relying on the visual, sensual, and tactile experience that informs cognition and leads to insight. This is where imagination resides in a rich semantic landscape.
Words have offered us the opportunity to communicate through syntax and formal constructs the intensity of our engagement with the world. Language and words are an overlay ontop of our semantic foundation of meaning. The problem with generative A.I. imagery is the bounded syntactic prompt and the resulting flattened semantic image layer stripped of context are not creative thinking. We are not developing new capabilities for us as humans, this is not enriching the active language of exchange, it is replacing creative curiosity with passive certainty. The shallow answer instead of the deep question.
The prompt world of A.I. mistakes the tool (words/language) that we developed to share our thoughts with the act of thinking. The internal cognitive process in our brain is completely separate from the linguistic construct we use to communicate through words and language. It is like we are equating the telephone and cable lines strung between poles with the meaningful content that pulses along their length. But we are offered a soulless pattern replicator as a substitute for the rich imagination that seeds each person’s pictures of the world. Our inability to discern the difference or to comprehend the slick surface of A.I. slop that is blinding us, makes this one of the most critical problems of our times. This isn’t just an issue of visual literacy, or political and economic malfeasance, we have been hacked. The carrier virus of social media found the crack in our psyche that allowed perception, and cognition to be overwhelmed by sensation to feed a constant cycle of addiction.
The entire approach of generative A.I. is not only wrong, it is evil, because it demeans both the utility and purpose of words and the power of our embodied knowledge expressed in images. The last place we should be promoting the use of generative A.I. is in schools and especially in art schools. But the terrible ideas just keep coming …
If you don’t believe the rush to all things A.I. is driven by megalomaniacs, this YouTube of Sam Altman and Jony Ive celebrating their new partnership and undoubted shared genius is proof positive. At one point Altman pronounces, “We have magic intelligence in the cloud…” and then he complains about the limitations of hardware, how, if he had a question to answer in a discussion with another person, he would have to open a laptop, launch a web browser, explain to ChatGPT the question and then get an answer. You know, important stuff like, ‘I need to know the details of Bill Belichick’s personal life, now!’ All that terrible time wasted between needing to know and getting an answer. You’ll be happy to also know from Altman— “San Francisco is the city that represents the leading edge of CULTURE.” Sorry New York, Mexico City, Paris, London, Berlin, Barcelona…The two of them are at a bar, but drinking coffee—-no idea what it is laced with. “An embarrassment of riches for society”, is Altman’s shiny, happy future. Ive, just keeps saying it’s all about values, “Our motivations and values are completely the same.”
This was shared by Gary Marcus on his Substack—- aptly titled, Black Mirror was a warmup act. This is not an actual prototype, but the shared Sam and Jony device may be wearable, or kept in your pocket, or on your desk—-with a camera and microphone—-better to watch and model your every move. A week ago, when the Mexican sailing ship smashed into the Brooklyn Bridge, my 25 year old son showed the video of the tragedy to his friends, one of them asked, “is this A.I.?” That’s the future we are choosing, a world of simulation that will force us back in time to only believe our lived experience and our narrow and ever diminishing view. There are no riches worth trading for the actual engagement with another person based in trust and truth. We will pay for our choices.