I just bought my first new computer in a decade, and as I opened up Word to work on a story, a little icon appeared by every paragraph… like a goddam Elder Sign.
It was for Microsoft’s AI named Copilot.
Stephen King once opined that writers should throw their thesaurus into the garbage, because “Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule.”
The same thing applies here. Any word a writer needs to outsource to an electronic homunculus isn’t just the wrong word; it’s a brick in a self-made prison, and the prisoner is your creativity. Art isn’t something to be procedurally generated, slapped together as an empty pastiche of other people’s stolen work.
In short, art matters.
And artists matter.
A person who launders creativity through AI, using it to write their dialogue, describe their scenes, come up with their story, is only an “artist” when preceded by the word con.
We already have virtual customer service assistants, AI summaries of books and discussions, and AI-driven searches (that hallucinate as much as they succeed). Do we really want AI expressing our thoughts, too? AI actors in AI-produced films? AI painters and writers spitting out soulless stews of other people’s work?
If we’re okay with removing humans from art, what about politics? Do you honestly want to hand over the legal governance of our lives, the Forum of ideas and democracy, to a machine? Want the cold calculus of social credit scores and efficiency algorithms to replace Constitutional protections and Enlightenment values?
How about our social lives? It takes time–sometimes an entire minute–to send a “hello” or “happy birthday” or “how are you doing, friend?” Should AI do that, too? Do we desire a circle of NPCs over real, flesh-and-blood people, each calibrated to never challenge us, never offer a new perspective, never get us thinking in new ways? An audience of digital sock-puppets to reinforce the tribalism and cultural dementia that has invaded every sphere of public life?
And how about AI teachers who will grade our AI-written tests, so we can be free to watch movies no one made starring people who don’t exist with our friends who never were? I mean, the one thing we definitely need more of is further social detachment and depersonalization, right?
Creativity (and democracy and social life) are NOT an optimization problem. Tools are great. Tools can make things easier. But when tools replace humanity in all things, that’s extinguishment. And sorry, but that’s not okay. If we stop believing that artists matter, that thinking and reading and deciding for ourselves matter, then we really have stepped into the Matrix. If we’re okay with our paintings and books and films and games and music being cranked out by the cold equations of automation, then we’ve committed a type of human sacrifice. If we sit back and accept that creativity can or should be replaced, then this really is the last invention of the Krell.
I’ve sent my Copilot to the garbage. I’d encourage others to do the same.