AI art is margarine for the soul

Ai is a bit like margarine for the soul.

Let me explain - I’ll need to tell you a bit of food history, so buckle up, buttercup - or indeed, butter.

Throughout human history people have needed or wanted to travel, and they have needed to eat. Sure, to begin with a lot of the traveling was to do with eating, we followed our food sources as they traveled to follow theirs, be that buffalo herds, shoals of fish - whatever. Eventually, we learned how to make the food stay still, we farmed it, we stored it, a constant battle to store what we made in the good times, for the bad. Once we’d learned how the salt meat and so forth, that also meant we could travel further and with a different purpose. We’ve been colonising each other for centuries, hell, I’m British, and am quite prepared ( and ashamed) to hold my hand up to a national history of colonisation and cruelty almost second to none - in fact, probably not second to none - but during that time, these acts of colonisation were so often facilitated by food, the stealing of it, the storage of it in the hard times, the need to take it with us. 

The biggest innovation in this need to bring a packed lunch to a fight, came with the advent of industrialisation, which was in turn built on the industrialisation of human suffering in the Atlantic slave trade, when we discovered how to create trans fat and produced margarine - not quite able to believe it wasn’t butter.

See, the biggest issue with transporting food, is that natural fat spoils quickly. Anything like tallow, butter or olive oil has a shelf life, but it’s the best source of nutrients out there and makes everything taste great. There is some thought that it was only when our far distant ancestors discovered that if you bashed things with rocks, they could crack open bones and eat the nutrient-rich marrow within, that we had the right cocktail of goodies to give our brains the evolutionary kick up the butt they needed to get to where we are now but that’s another story - I just want to underline how important fat is to us. Once you had something that looked like fat and could be transported without the need for refrigeration - margarine doesn’t melt, even if you leave it in the full sun - we could convince everyone that the biscuits, cake and bread they were eating were just as good as the real thing. Better for the for producers of course, because they didn’t have the risk of their fats going off, so their costs were lower and profits higher, as they could sell the finished goods at a price point people were used to. Less great for us though, as it turned out, because turning natural fats and oils into fats which can’t go off - vegetable oil, sunflower oil etc - changes them on a molecular level our bodies are not fully able to digest. It instead lays them down in places we don’t want fat so much, and that causes us problems.

The other thing is does, is take the means of production away from the regular people, and gives it to a corporation. This is seen as freeing us up, but mostly it freed us up to work in factories, come home, eat marge with jam on bread and go to bed exhausted, which is mostly what working class people did in Victorian days. However, the fat genie was out of the bottle, and we began to industrially process more and more food, to produce it cheaply and quickly, with scant regard for its quality, especially when combined with corn syrup, another no-spoil, cheap ass product. Sure, it’s plentiful, and in Western countries we don’t see the mass starvation of previous centuries - though I could argue here that was much more due to war, politics and environmental damage than not being able to buy chicken nuggets - but what we have now is is a mass epidemic of life shortening and life limiting disease. Being over-weight is not a marker of the rich but of poverty; nothing demonstrates the wealth gap in the West more clearly than access to fruit and vegetables - food which, let’s be honest, literally grows on trees but has been replaced by factory produced, high trans-fat and high syrup foods.

So, how is AI the same as margarine? Because it is a facsimile of human experience, without actually being so. It is a fake, it is a mass produced short-cut to something we once had control over and are now giving up to big corporations. Let’s not kid ourselves that it is in some way democratising art or writing - it is doing the opposite. I passionately believe that every one can create art, just like everyone can produce food, but it takes effort and it takes sweat and it takes fear of failure. Much as there is nothing as satisfying as eating the bread you baked yourself, the creative process to make Art really is not about the destination, great though that is, it’s about the journey, and when we look at art, the end product moves us not only because of what it is, but what it cost the to make it. When we type words into a program that spews out a regurgitated mishmash of images slickly polished to appeal to our most easily satisfied nature - ultra processed food for the soul - we’re fundamentally not understand what the point of Art is. If our only creative expression is through the chat bots programmed by vast tech corps, how much control do we have over what they let us think, feel or experience, if those things do not allow them access to our wallets in some way? You cannot disrupt the machine if you are part of the machine - as Audrey Lorde so fantastically said ‘ The Master’s tools will never bring down the Master’s house.’ If we only arm ourselves with the weapons given to us by those in power, we’ll never win the fight. AI is dangerous because it is margarine - it is made not for us, but for them, and it trains us to believe that only through them can we create. It sells us the lie of convenience, when it’s the hard work that counts, it’s the failure and the endless hours of practice and the sheer brass neck to put something out there and stand by it. It tells us that everything we can do is not actually good enough, when they can do it so much ‘better’ - instead of letting us redefine for ourselves what ‘better’ means. 

It’s come for art, it’s come for words, it’s come for truth - but we can still choose to make our own tools, people, we can just say no.

For now.