Apologies for the non-appearance of Wednesday’s post – my excuse is that I was travelling back from an absolutely incredible conference that Henry Farrell invited me to in Santa Fe. So in many ways it’s an investment in the long term, as I’ve come back with literally months worth of ideas from all the people I talked to there.
Of which … in conversations around the fringes of the main discussion of cybernetics, the economy and society, I often found myself chatting about AI-generated content. One of the earlier posts on this ‘Stack was about AI art and how disappointing a prospect I found it, but I ended up getting a little bit worried.
Consider a few dystopias, based on Sam Altman’s claim that “"Movies are going to become video games, and video games are going to become something unimaginably better”.
How about if you were able to watch a football match, having first selected the score by which your team was going to win? Or even better, an entire AI-generated league, so that in every individual game you’d have the excitement of not knowing the result (and would therefore be able to enjoy in-game betting), but where you could be sure that you would be champions at the end of the season and wouldn’t be humiliated in the local derby game? If you wanted, you might be able to select multi-season story arcs, flirting with relegation, firing the manager, being taken over by a benevolent oligarch and then storming to European glory.
I don’t think anyone has suggested this yet; obviously it feels like it might be better pitched as “cognitive therapy to reduce the distress of dementia patients” rather than as “actual entertainment”. The whole point of being pandered to is that you have to believe that you’re not entirely being pandered to. But there are people in the media industry - and by no means all of them flakes or idiots - who have suggested things worryingly similar. The co-director of Avengers, for example, said that it might be good if you could say to your television:
“Hey, I want a movie starring my photoreal avatar and Marilyn Monroe‘s photoreal avatar. I want it to be a rom-com because I’ve had a rough day”.
Two points in response. First, “rom-com”, who do you think you are fooling here. And second, this is what an imagination is for. If someone is not capable of an elementary feat of daydreaming like “what about me, but with a beautiful woman?”, then something deeply wrong has happened at a level which doesn’t feel like it would be cured by showing them some pretty pictures.
But … how profitable a niche might that kind of deficit be? I noted in the past in the context of Fox News that a large news audience appears to be “happy to receive the cognitive equivalent of a valentine’s card from their mum”, and that there are economically viable populations of people who will believe that the stripper really liked them.
Much more worryingly, how profitable might it be to create or expand that niche? People’s media consumption shapes their tastes – the main reason that the UK punches so far above its weight in this industry is that because of the BBC, and quite possibly because of the proliferation of much-derided media studies courses, it has one of the most switched-on and critical audiences you will find anywhere. Contrariwise, look at Italy under Berlusconi; it’s quite possible to degrade the tastes of even a very sophisticated population by constantly feeding them junk.
And “junk” is the mot juste here. The title of this post is a reference to William Burroughs’ book, “Junky”, in which he notes that one of the attractions of heroin to the consumer is that it has what Stafford Beer might call an “information attenuating” property. Before, your life was complicated with dozens of competing priorities to juggle – once you become a heroin addict, you only have one thing to think about. And there’s also a quote (which I think is actually from Naked Lunch) which I think is potentially unsettlingly relevant to art in the age of AI:
“The junk merchant doesn't sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product. He does not improve and simplify his merchandise. He degrades and simplifies the client”.
The impulse of "I want something like this [painting/film/novel/game] but different in specific ways" has always been a driving force leading to the acquisition of skills in that particular field. The problem you describe here with junk content seems to scratch that itch without inspiring any artistic endeavor or learning of how to make that content. Not everyone who feels that desire will become a great artist or writer or whatever, and they may just commission someone else to paint or write what they want, but there's real learning that goes on from that drive and it sounds like it's being short circuited by new tech that removes any friction from getting someone else to do it for you. I wonder how AI can be used as tool to help inspire skill acquisition and creativity (since it's not possible to put back in the box now) rather than, as you describe here, just providing enough of a high to numb an urge that could have been channeled productively.
Re: football - isn't the scenario you outline Football Manager 2024 with the money cheat?
And yes I have tried it and it is therapeutic for a bit, but it does get boring.