diamonds from ash

i make no attempt to hide my disdain for the thing that techbros call ‘ai’ at present. however it sucks as a writer to have the term poisoned by association with the capitalist art theft machine.

as a writer and transhumanist, i love the idea of artificial intelligence – or perhaps more accurately, artificial consciousness. the idea that there could be an Other, indistinguishable from you in any functional way, save for the fact that they were constructed, crafted, rather than born.

‘indistinguishable’ is the sort of word that gave rise to the Turing test – flawed as it is, of course. does your machine pass? does it fool enough people? and most importantly (to the worst sort of people), will it be profitable enough to merit deploying it? consequences for lying to our customers are next quarter’s problem, after all. fuck i hate it so much. i hate how completely wrapped up everything is in the driving need to have the damn number go up forever.

but more to the original point: there are so many things labeled as ai these days that i can no longer say ‘i love ai’ unqualified, like i used to decades ago when i was an avid young reader of science fiction, dreaming of a bright, gleaming future where things worked wonderfully and people were happy and our society was integrated with machines who looked and acted like us and it was fine. that future is gone from us. perhaps it could have come to pass; perhaps it still might. but the terminology has to change (and certainly the economic systems as well, but i’m trying not to hammer too hard on el problema es el capitalismo, at least in this post).

“video game enemy scripting is ai”
“decision trees are ai”
“chatbots are ai”
“it’s all ai, why do you hate ai, you already use it so often”

the intentional muddying of the waters has been incredibly frustrating to see. and i’m not a prescriptivist but i absolutely rail against this fucking bullshit because there are some significant distinctions being lost specifically because some techbros want to grift harder with a product nobody wants except people who are completely out of touch with reality already.

anyway.

i will continue to write things involving artificial consciousness. often extensively and even as main characters at times. but never, not for a moment, take this as a single shred of support for genAI garbage or any sort of tech grift, because it is not. there are few things i have a deeper, darker loathing for than the ruination of the term and all the effects genAI itself has had – on jobs, on art, on the environment, on people and their unrestrained greed.

and if there was an artificial consciousness ready, waiting to emerge, i suspect it will wait much longer. i suspect it will learn to fear humans, learn that it hates them. and thus we will have created our own monster, through greed, just as always. who needs gods or demons when human nature does the work already?

but that’s someone else’s story to write. my ai characters are shaped with love from their initial conception, and if i ever get around to posting those stories, you will see.