As someone in the word business, I’m often asked to weigh in on the question of literature and artificial intelligence. People are usually surprised when I admit that I love A.I.
I use A.I. for everything, 24/7. I can’t get enough, me and my whole family.
My uncle uses A.I. to buy onions. It used to be you wanted onions, you went to the store and maybe it was full of people, or it was empty — you literally never knew. Now A.I. can calculate when the grocery store is low-traffic, and my uncle just strolls in, la-di-da, and buys onions, no waiting.
Imagine a world where you don’t have to wait to buy onions. It’s here.
I have this digital agent. Does everything for me, from managing workflow to offloading repetitive tasks to reminding me when to hug my kids. I call it the Gooch. The Gooch is up all night, scrabbling around its binary habit trail, what’s-upping my to-do list and taking names. You know the expression “He couldn’t find his butt with two hands and a flashlight”? That was me. It was like living half a life. A buttless half-life. Now I have the Gooch ping me my butt location. It plays a chime. No more losing your butt in this brave new world.
“Everyone Is Using A.I. for Everything” nowadays, a.k.a. vibe-living, and if you don’t, you’re a misfit outsider who should be stoned to death in the town square to prevent contagion, and then A.I. should resurrect you virtually from your data so you can be stoned to death in the virtual town square, for infinity.
Studies show that overreliance on these digital tools causes cognitive decline, but if current events are any indication, nobody’s making much of a contribution anyway. Go ahead and use A.I. however you like.
Except art. If you use it for your art, you’re a freakin’ hack.
Why is it that the most vocal cheerleaders of generative A.I. are always the hackiest motherfreakers around? You expect studio executives to say things like “it’s going to revolutionize content,” and “from a bottom-line standpoint it’s inevitable,” and “I’ve finally found an instrument as cold and empty as myself,” but you’d hope that an artist would have more self-respect.
Some people say, “I just use it to brainstorm ideas.” If you don’t know what to paint, or compose, or write, you’re in the wrong job. Art is the business of making up stuff — go make up some stuff. I asked the Gooch to scour the internet re: growth industries, and it recommended telegraph operator and VCR repair. Maybe that’s more your speed.
Some people say, “I just use it for research. It only gets things wrong or hallucinates crazy stuff 30 percent of the time.” I don’t need a research assistant that gets things wrong 30 percent of the time. I can do that myself. Are they trying to replace me?
Oh, right — they are.
Good luck with that. Data centers — gigawatt-sucking, pollution-spewing slop houses of mediocrity — are ravaging the environment, consuming all the water and electricity and supercharging utility bills. It really makes those midnight chats with the love bot sort of bittersweet to know that the orgasms are measured in metric tons of melted glacier. Do you realize how much water and power it’d take to replicate the average writer’s narcissism, self-loathing and despair? It’d drain the Indian Ocean. You could light up Times Square for a year. We can’t afford it.
Before you go, “That’s easy for you to say, Mr. High and Mighty Who Makes Up His Own Stuff,” let me assure you that I’m not trying to look down on anybody. I understand wanting to offload the agony of artistic creation. Last year when I was finishing my book, I got stuck and went to the Gooch for help. What is a novel, anyway, but a big pile of content? The book is a crime story, so I devised a prompt about crooks and cops and city hall and corruption — the whole grubby mess — and let ’er rip.
This is the Gooch: “In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: the police, who investigate crime, and the district attorneys, who prosecute the offenders. These are their stories. CHUNG-CHUNG.”
“Isn’t that the opening narration of the long-running Dick Wolf police procedural ‘Law & Order’?” I asked.
The Gooch responded, “Does not compute — does not compute — kill — kill,” and gave me the silent treatment for the rest of the day.
Criticizing A.I. as a criminal plagiarizing machine that steals the work of artists without permission or compensation used to strike me as a bit hyperbolic. It’s not a machine but a bunch of zipping electrons, as insubstantial as a fart. Can electrons steal? Chung-chung. I kept coming back to chung-chung. The heavy-metal sound effect concluding the “Law & Order” narration always made me picture the door of a jail cell slamming shut.
The Gooch was trying to tell me something. Was chung-chung the guilty thud of a telltale heart, as in Poe? The Gooch knows Poe; it’s digested the PDFs of seemingly every book in creation, in every genre — highbrow, lowbrow, best-sellers and cult classics, tragedy and farce. The complete Ayn Rand, that’s for sure. Was the Gooch confessing, like Raskolnikov in “Crime and Punishment,” or Clay Turner, the homicidal vagabond in “False-Hearted Judges,” Episode 23 of “Law & Order: Criminal Intent” Season 4? If the thing could experience guilt, did that mean it was becoming —
My reverie was cut short. I’d lost my butt again and needed a ping.
The point is, I’m not saying all this to defend humanity. Humanity sucks. It’s totally terrible. I’m saying this because I believe in an old-fashioned virtue called Doing the Freakin’ Work.
Read the book, not the summary.
Write the piece, not the prompt.
Suffer like the artist you are. It ain’t easy, but if it were easy, it wouldn’t be worth doing.
Colson Whitehead is the author of the forthcoming novel “Cool Machine.”
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