Removing the grit

Otago Daily Times

2 days ago

AI, Botox, weight-loss drugs ... are we in danger of losing the wrinkles that give life its grit? asks Eva Wiseman.
Two moments from the depths of the half-term holiday: scrolling with my children through videos of animals doing unlikely and adorable things (such as the parrot who waddles along the back of a sofa to announce "Hi babe" and "I love you" into the camera, and who we mimic now on lazy mornings or when we need to make up) my eyes glaze slightly. And I'm thinking now about work or lunch or war, so when a kitten emerges from a honeyed slice of toast it takes me a beat ("kitten is toast?") before I hurriedly swipe the screen away, before the AI takes root in their soft brains.
Then, some days or months later (perhaps it's gauche now to comment on the duration of school holidays, but since lockdown even a long weekend brings a kind of breathlessness, all these boiled and formless hours), they are suddenly both fixated on drawing an axolotl and immediately right now.
If you're not accustomed with this critically endangered paedomorphic salamander, the axolotl is a pink fish that walks and has the benign vibe of a stoned but lovely drag queen. Anyway, I brought up a Google image search and my daughter instantly went: "nope that's AI". These interactions have become like a dystopian episode of Is It Cake? , with me alternately insisting that fake things are real then real things fake, but with no sharp knife to cut through to the sponge for proof. We had some high-pitched back and forth then, during which I cursed once again the robots that are raising us, that are both complicating and smoothing our lives in ways that only become evident once we have already set up home in the uncanny valley, built our little huts there out of marshmallow and Bitcoin and it's far too late to leave.
It's the smoothing aspect that bothers me today. Both in the aesthetics of AI imagery (kitten is toast) with its inhabitants made of glazed rubber and its nature made of nostalgia from racist leaflets, and in its intentions.
You see the impulse with modern cosmetics, too: the products to blur the skin, the Botox to freeze the muscles. Again it's both an aesthetic smoothing and a philosophical one, a decision to remove signs of real life in a way that makes the journey through this said life so much simpler. It's something I think about a lot during discussion of weight-loss drugs, the way they iron out hunger and a certain desire. A day without hunger, what a thing! How is a day without hunger a day at all? A day might as well be a swimming pool or a shoe, so ill-defined its shape, so abstract its use. But what it is, what the drugs do very well, is sand the edges off a life in order that its owner might move through it faster, more productively.
And so it is with AI. Students, all of who will have originally signed up to a course intending to learn something, when offered the opportunity to write an essay with ChatGPT (the Child Catcher offering sweeties) allow themselves to take it, to outsource the brain. People are doing it with love as well, both those paying for AI girlfriends to message them at night and, to an extent, my friends who have given up on dating altogether after infinite scams and ghostings and app-based sexual terrorism. A smoothing occurs. Life is simpler, but also lesser.
The writer Will Storr, noticing the similarity in style of a glut of viral personal essays on Substack recently, found that they'd been written by AI. He describes the essays as "gruel": thin and tasteless, "and yet you have the vague sense that swallowing it is supposed to be somehow good for you". In this case, it's not just the value and production of the essay that has been blurred, it's the humanity of the readers who are responding to it, claiming to be deeply moved by these banal self-help memoirs, crying at their computers at an algorithm's poem on grief.
The soul itself has been smoothed to avoid discomfort. There should be no pain — emotion is controlled, intellect blunted. A friend posts their daily ChatGPT therapy online, and I am always shocked, first by the toadying tone of its compliments and advice, but also by the fact that my friend keeps going back for more.
And yet I understand. I love comfort; I love closing my eyes and the warmth of the sun and hitting the shrug emoji upwards of 15 times a day. It's far harder to interrogate one's behaviour and attempt to change, of course, far easier to take the advice of a machine designed to keep you feeding it crumbs of your own humanity. The thorns of our rose bushes are plucked one by one, the spines from our cacti. In this way, our lives become easier to handle, but stray further from (and sincere apologies for sounding like AI Substack) what it means to be human.
There is much to resist, today, much to focus on, much to do. If the chance to cut a little corner, to shave off an hour, arises then the choice not to do so instantly becomes harder and more political. Another world is right there, tantalisingly close, and by anaesthetising ourselves to what is real by creating something that is almost so feels sometimes like an act of protection.
But the blurring brings its own discomfort, like tinnitus or the forgetting of words — if we don't grit our roads we will slip on the ice. The axolotl is real, I insist, with increasing hesitance. — The Observer