I was
always drawn to the personal essay, which has -- fairly or unfairly -- been
regarded as inferior to the novel, the play, or the poem, the runt of the
litter in literature. The form has frequently been dismissed as an exercise in
self-indulgence and navel-gazing.
It is also the perfect “anti-AI”
literary device.
You devour essay collections by E.B.
White, Philip Lopate, and David Sedaris. You enjoy nonfiction by Joyce Carol
Oates, Zadie Smith, Toni Morrison, Arundhati Roy, and George Orwell. You read essays
by Filipino writers Conrado De Quiros, Jessica Zafra, Butch Dalisay, Simeon
Dumdum, and Kerima Polotan-Tuvera.
Why?
You read those writers’ essays because
you want a front-row seat to their experiences; you want to know their
opinions, which might -- who knows? -- shape your own. You laugh out loud at
Sedaris writing about his time working as an elf at Macy’s department store;
you marvel at De Quiros’s wisdom as he deconstructs in a column why Gloria
Macapagal-Arroyo is as trapo as it gets and shouldn’t be reelected, and why you
should instead vote for Raul Roco (I did; he was the first-ever Philippine
presidential candidate I voted for, and I didn’t regret my decision).
An AI program might tell you his (or
her? -- let’s stick to “its”) experience climbing Everest, for example, and how
on the descent it unfortunately had to be carried down by a Sherpa to be
airlifted to the nearest hospital. But the experience, obviously, is another
person’s (or asshole’s); you asked (PROMPTED) the machine to tell you about its
Everest experience, but it told you someone else’s, passing it off as its own.
A lot of people might say, why should
we look for something anti-AI in the first place anyway? Majority of those who
might say this, of course, have discovered that AI has made their jobs easier.
And there’s nothing wrong with that.
Just like there’s nothing wrong with
opting for a dumbphone instead of the ubiquitous smartphone, if only to enjoy
life at its fullest. (Six years ago when I backpacked Guatemala, I brought a
rudimentary point-and-shoot camera, which was already going extinct at that
time because of smartphones. I also bought a dumbphone and a local SIM,
relegating the smartphone to my bedroom whenever I needed to message my wife,
who stayed here in Mexico while I went on that backpacking trip. I can honestly
say I enjoyed my time more with that dumbphone in my pocket for emergencies,
and the obsolete digital camera to take pictures with, than if I brought along
my smartphone, for which I would have surely been tempted to check my social
media accounts instead of enjoying the beauty of my surroundings.)
I posted more than a year ago on
Facebook that while people point to the Internet as one of the biggest problems
plaguing us today, we should blame social media instead.
Life was good when we only had
dumbphones. Life was good when we could only access the Internet through a
desktop or laptop, and that everything started going to shit when Steve Jobs
decided that we all needed a computer in our pockets, and when Android followed
suit.
Of course, that I posted that rant on
Facebook through a smartphone wasn’t lost on me.
Just like it isn’t lost on us that AI
makes a lot of jobs easier -- that’s the reality now. Just like when article
spinners a few years ago purportedly made content writers’ jobs easier. In a
lot of ways, those article spinners were a precursor to today’s AI chatbots,
much like the original T-800 terminator cyborg assassin was to the T-X or the
terminatrix. (If you thought you’d finish reading this and not encounter a
single reference to “The Terminator,” think again. LOL.)
When an employer reached out to me
many years ago and asked me to work for them as a content-writer-slash-editor,
I showed up at the interview. But when I found out that the work consisted of
running articles through a spinner and then just cleaning up those “articles”
before posting them, I declined the offer.
If I wrote, I wanted to write from
scratch; if I edited, I wanted to edit human writers’ work. I’ve been fortunate
enough to be able to do that all these years. But with AI evolving as it has,
I’m not sure how long I could still afford to do what I’m doing right now, what
I had been fortunate enough to be able to do all these years.
My biggest issue with AI is that it
has always relied on a repository of writers’ and artists’ work and passing off
that work as its own. Let’s call a spade a spade: this is plagiarism --
stealing -- plain and simple. This blatant theft, in turn, has made AI
companies a fortune -- at the risk, of course, of writers and artists losing
their jobs. Artists and writers, by the way, who have always been underpaid but
still decided to stay in their line of work anyway.
American artist and writer Molly
Crabapple hit the nail on the head in an op-ed she penned for the Los Angeles
Times late last year. Crabapple wrote:
“AI pushers have told me that AI is a
tool which artists can use to automate their work. This just shows how little
they understand us. Art is not scrubbing toilets. It’s not an unpleasant task most
people would rather have the robots do. It is our heart. We want to do art’s
work. We make art because it is who we are, and through immense effort, some of
us have managed to earn a living by it. It’s precarious, sure. Our wages have
not risen for decades. But we love this work too much to palm it off to some
robot, and it is this love that AI pushers will never get.”
Of course those AI pushers will always
say that there’s no stopping technology, and they’re right.
The book I’m currently reading is an account
of Lance Armstrong’s climb atop the Tour de France’s record books as the only
seven-time champion and his subsequent fall from grace as the drug cheat that
he is. It was written by Irish sports journalist David Walsh, who claimed that
Armstrong used performance-enhancing drugs throughout his career. Walsh, who
had been writing about cycling since 1984, was one of the first journalists to
accuse Armstrong of using performance-enhancing drugs. Needless to say, Walsh,
throughout his career, has been at the receiving end of Armstrong’s retaliatory
attacks.
Walsh wrote in the book that the 1998
tournament -- the year before Armstrong won his first Tour de France -- was
marred by a doping scandal known as the Festina affair, when a large haul of
prohibited performance-enhancing drugs was found in a support car belonging to
the Festina cycling team just before the beginning of the race. As a result,
cycling authorities conducted an investigation, which revealed systematic
doping involving many teams in the Tour de France.
The 1999 tour that Armstrong won
should have been the year that the Tour de France had been cleaned of doping, a
tour that organizer Jean-Marie Leblanc, at that time, declared “saved.” But as
Walsh -- and other cycling journalists -- chronicled, it seemed as though the
race had two speeds: the group of riders who were legitimately free of PEDs
perpetually at the tail end of the peloton, and Armstrong and his ilk, who
seemed to zoom by everyone else while hardly breaking a sweat. Anton Vayer, a
retired cyclist who testified against the Festina cycling team, said he found
it “scandalous” that Armstrong rode at an average speed of 54 kph. “It’s
nonsense,” said Vayer. “Indirectly, it proves he is doping.”
Vayer added: “What is being achieved
in professional cycling these days is a joke. It is way beyond man’s natural
capacity.”
Armstrong had tried to soften the blow
of being uncovered as a cheat -- and being stripped of his seven Tour De France
titles as a result -- by saying that even if he doped, he didn’t have an undue
advantage over his rivals because everyone in cycling dopes anyway. In an
interview with Oprah, Armstrong also promised to apologize to Walsh.
The journalist never received an
apology.
A lot of people would say, just stop
the anti-doping measures, just let every cyclist take whatever drug they want,
and may the best athlete win.
You can’t stop progress. You can’t
stop technology. Doping is part and parcel of every Tour de France now. Records
are made to be broken.
Others, though, pine for the good ol’
days when cyclists competed on a level playing field. The pace was slower,
sure. But the struggle was part of the beauty of the sport.
Artists and writers can’t stop AI from
stealing their output, which is part and parcel of how capitalists keep using
the terms “progress” and “technology” to justify the theft, just so they could
continue to enrich themselves at the expense of those who actually did all the
hard labor.
But artists and writers, just like
old-school cycling enthusiasts, can still dream; we can still cling to romantic
notions. We’re still allowed to rage against the dying of the light.
We’re still human after all.
