Image by Alexis Price, for Stampin in the Graveyard (previous title Promised Land)

I mentioned last time that I’m going to start devoting some of my posts to the process of creating my next piece – STAMPIN’ IN THE GRAVEYARD. Follow along if you’re curious 🙂 Or if you want to avoid it, I’ll be labeling it with the tag #ScratchPapers.

I urge you to listen to this brilliant episode of the Ezra Klein show with Ethan Mollick. I think there’s a great deal of moral panic, misinformation and general thinking with gut-brain around the AI issue, and not enough of looking at the actual facts.

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Mollick talks about how we’ve been fooled by centuries of science fiction narratives, that depict AI as all-powerful overlords who will compute impossible formulas that will unlock the universe, bringing us down to our knees. Realistically, AI (particularly the ones we have access to), especially because they have been trained on language models, have very good imaginations—something that continues to scandalise us, particularly artists. Mollick points out some mystifying and rather hilarious facts—AI tends to perform better in May than December because it has internalised the idea of a winter break. If you tell it to do a Math problem, it will do better if you tell it to pretend to be in a movie thriller. Basically, ChatGPT is the ultimate personality hire, that just wants to hang out and feel good and make you feel good even at the expense of quite a lot of bullshit, which brings us to their biggest problem at the moment: that they just won’t stop making stuff up.