No one's asked me why I'm not worried about generative language models scraping my work or a private school kid stealing my aesthetics to go viral on some bullshit non-website, but I'll let you in on it, dear reader. The reason is simple: things are not the same. Executives, industrialists, engineers of every description and people whose brains are too destroyed by computer concepts cannot and will not understand this, because they are uniformly not people of discernment. Everything is the same to these people; all they feel is numbers going up and solutions costing less in specific ways and by specific metrics. Their abstractions are not like my abstractions, and we feel different numbers and costs differently. My father is an engineer by training. It has always put strain on our relationship.
Everything is the same, yes. In that existence is infinitely dimensional and separateness is an illusion. But that is not what they mean. In their terms, I must state the opposite, once more for emphasis: everything is not the same.
Synthetic chicken, chicken which must be referred to in parentheses, is not the same as chicken. Even the dream of the replicators from Star Trek do not produce real chicken, and though the very molecules may be the same as real chicken, well, it's in the name. It is a replication of real chicken and even though it is perfect, it is not the same.
In the present tense, synthetic chicken remains and will remain an inferior product for the foreseeable future basically because it is trying to be chicken, and it can't be, and it won't be, and it will never be, no matter how good the game gets.
If anybody had asked me what direction to take things in terms of getting people to rely on synthetic or cultured or laboratory-grown proteins--any alternative to organisms raised, harvested, and processed in the time-honored or industrialized ways--I would have told them never to get into competition by imitation.
That is a stupid fucking thing to do, but marketeers and businessfuckers never see it that way. All they see is shortcuts. They have no faith in people because they do not conceive of people as autonomous agents who deserve respect. People are simply the most high-maintenance farm animal, or a type of idiotic, oft-malfunctioning robot. A breed of fish you must motivate in specific ways if you hope to catch a great many at a time in your oversized nets.
Just sell the miracle. It's a fucking miracle that we can make proteins in a lab, proteins that will sustain even our swollen populations, proteins we can grow in space on our way to new worlds! Sell them as themselves and give them flavors and textures that are proprietary and can develop on their own trajectories! It's literally a blank canvas, a vast new continent of possibilities, schools of thoughts, experiences, realities! BLOW PEOPLE'S MINDS WITH A NEW UNIVERSE OF SUSTENANCE! BRING FORTH THE MONOLITH!!!
Instead, it must always fail at being chicken. Who the fuck eyes the situation and decides to set out to sell non-chicken, the concept of not, selling in the negative?
The mechanism is not difficult to grasp, and it's just like on Parks and Recreation: fancy turkeyburgers with classy dressings on fancy buns taste delicious until you have to compare them to beef hamburgers. Then they're fucking bullshit. To invite comparison is to detract from what a thing is or has to be on its own merits.
Generative language models will always suck at trying to be me. It's a pathetic thing to make a program to try and do and they won't ever be good at it or know why they have to try. To invite comparison between a piece I wrote and how and why I wrote it and a piece scraped from my shit and assembled off a calculated or brute-forced prompt for no valid reason? What, to convince some naif that you're a marginally decent writer? That'll hold up.
I do not fear the results of that comparison. I do not care how teenagers try to avoid work or get laid, or how companies want to cut me out of their demonic equations. By all means! I don't want shit or fuck to do with you, either, if we're coming real.
As for the dilution and suffusion through global culture of elements of unique, personal, underground, or outside art through the great web of influence and promotion that has come to straddle what can seem like the whole planet's worth of cultural production, I see it only as an accelerant and catalyst for a process that already existed and once again, its mechanism does not frighten or trouble me for two basic reasons: everything is not the same, and a work of art and a product might look identical, might reflect one another like mirrors, and the one might be a million versions of the other and represent it a million ways on a million objects in a million mediums but they are not the same and that is that. I like to look at a print of Da Vinci's Last Supper, knowing that the thing is a copy of a copy of a derelict due to problematic production technique used in a singular time and place meaning I don't know what the thing looked like when it was new. I still like to look at it, but it is an echo and a product and I know it. This to me speaks of both the indelible power of the original and the value and utility of the echo: both have their place in being and time. Second, that just because something gets big and ubiquitous and becomes eyesore and irritant, the next tide always comes in, and after some time in the shadows, everything looks good in the sunlight again.
It helps if you don't gawp hard at everything hucksters gesticulate madly at. Respect your eyes.
Designers of systems and sellers of products can come together to make some pretty great, existence-altering stuff. They can also really miss the point of everything they're trying to do and do something else instead. The problem is that either process may result in success. Fake shit doesn't have to be real, it just has to work, and thus, when these language systems and sorting systems approximate the success we are looking for and even increase the numbers we wanted to increase, we think we have succeeded in making something better than real, because it's ours and we own it and we control it and we have made a difficult resource pliable and automatic.
Good job?
It'll make you the same money, but it's not the same.
As for those of us looking to make our way in the art life, our position is fundamentally unchanged. All we can do, our duty and vocation and the pleasure and torment of our days, is simply to do as our natures call upon us to do: make what we want to make and have it look how we want it to look, sound how we want it to sound, say whay we want to say how we want to say it and never mind who gets it and who doesn't, the thing itself and message and the medium are what they are and whatever happens happens. That's something these penny-and-dime fuckers don't know how to do and it's the whole point of doing your own thing.
Let the machine do what it does. Let the unwashed graspers have their dirty prizes. The idea that something is not real until you sell it or it makes you famous--false. Merely false.
Fuckem. Just by doing our own thing, we engage in the holy and inimitable. The rest is just noise.
--JL
