Human Tears and Robot Fears
Today I came across a post on LinkedIn in which someone had actually been brought to tears by the ‘promise’ of Generative AI.
Kathryn Taccone, who runs Open Pixel Studios, an independent women-owned animation studio in Arizona, outlined her fear at the loss of said promise for studios like hers.
In the classic form, denial, anger, depression, acceptance (not reached) she touches on an underlying sentiment that I think of as the necessary inversion of those who can’t stop talking about the shiny promise of this new technology.
The core innovation (at least from a business standpoint) seems to be the ability to produce content faster and cheaper than ever before - or as Taccone puts it, a ‘race to the bottom’.
Never mind the old adage about only ever being able to pick two of three when it comes to ‘fast, cheap or good’ - with the velocity of production we’re now facing a veritable wall of sound of output - with all of the maximalist qualities that endeavours.
As someone with a foot in the tech world, I can understand and commiserate with the position that something drastic, powerful and not-entirely understood is going on right now.
When your key metric is profit, your key operating model, the ability to optimise productivity to within an inch of its life and your ability to critically assess quality of output, is shall we say, limited at best - it makes sense that you’d go all in on something like GenAI.
My only kick back is that in lamenting a very real issue that we’re only just seeing the start of - there can at times be a tendency to over-romanticise the ‘the way things were’.
Has human creativity and originality ever truly been valued by big commercial operations?
For independent studios, artists, and in many more cases, employees who are suddenly being discovered to be not quite as valuable as they once were now the majority of their tasks can be outsourced to an AI - the issue is clearly existential.
But to say that industry itself is changing (if anything we’re seeing a catalyst of an attitude already entrenched) feels more tenuous - at least from this seat.
As I see writers, grapple with, lament, and increasingly, figure out how to adapt to and ‘learn’ the skills that GenAI apparently is now blessing us all with (over-seeing writing as managerial function, writer as factory boss and somehow also production line worker) - I wonder if we’ll look back on the time just before GenAI as not quite the garden of Eden it might seem now - but rather a perfect breeding ground for the optimised mindset that’s quite frankly flourishing at an alarming rate as I type this right now.
