The real world has never mattered more
“Embrace AI or fall behind,” they say. But why get with a bad program?
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I don’t know about you, but I can think of nothing more annoying than having friends.
You know, those pesky people who call you at unexpected times to vent about their problems, who ask for your advice then don’t take it, who propose meeting up for drinks on nights you planned to spend inside watching Netflix, who poke holes in your conspiracy theories, who take you out for your birthday, who hug you when you cry, who know your worst traits and still keep coming back for more.
Yeah, those people suck.
Fortunately, according to some Very Smart People, we’re entering an era when we won’t need to deal with the messiness of friendships — or any relationships, for that matter! Gone are the days of toil, when we’d call Dad for advice on installing a new ceiling fan, contact a colleague with questions about their research, or answer “I don’t know” to a child’s question about how many Pokemon exist.
Away with imperfection, with personality quirks and devil’s advocacy! Down with making new connections! Making small talk in an elevator! Making out in the woods behind the 7-11!
No longer must we embarrass ourselves by interfacing with other human beings. At long last, we need only be embarrassed by the riches generative AI will bestow upon society.
I, for one, welcome our glorious future!
You can’t make this shit up
It’s getting harder to write satire these days, because we seem to have lost the shared values capable of grounding absurd claims in humor.
Human interaction is annoying. Not knowing is shameful. Relationships should be frictionless. These are the actual arguments being put forth by Big Tech leaders and their supporters. Zuck is literally out there hawking AI bots as the solution to the friendship void his own platforms helped create. You can’t make this shit up.
Daily, I question whether the hype I see online for new tech applications is rage-bait. If this is the good version of the future — devices tracking your every move, “assistants” guiding your patterns of thought and behavior, image generators regurgitating creative work without acknowledgment or compensation, ChatBots replacing your friends and family, AI becoming God — what’s the negative vision? A world where some human traits, behaviors, and beliefs persist in spite of every attempt to displace them?
The whole thing feels very “snake eating its own tail.” Like efficiency, productivity, and the notion of progress, once important considerations for facilitating human flourishing, have become ends in themselves, defining for us what is good, true, and beautiful. By their logic, the ideal world is disembodied and digital. Everything meaningful can be accomplished on a device.
The real world — the world of physical matter — has never mattered less.
The real world has never mattered more
I want to propose the exact opposite. That in this increasingly disembodied and distracted culture, we’d be well-served to hone our skills at real-world connection, for both practical and personal reasons. To avoid getting lost in the sauce, I’ll discuss how this might apply across a few specific domains.
News and information
The media environment is becoming increasingly saturated with AI-generated text and images, exacerbating existing difficulties discerning fact from fiction.
We may comfort ourselves with the fact that we, personally, would never fall for Shrimp Jesus, but who’s to say what else populates our newsfeed and completely slips by our radar? We don’t know what we don’t know, so it’s rational to assume that at any given moment, what we’re seeing online might be false, misleading, or nonhuman.
With no alternative means of judging the veracity of information, this observation can easily lead to nihilism, a sense that nothing is verifiable and that truth-seeking itself is a lost cause. This brings me back to — *drumroll please* — the physical world.
One way to judge truth from falsehood is through firsthand observations of reality, by literally being there. Where this isn’t possible, we can reorient our focus toward the local, paying more attention to events that have a tangible impact on our lives that can be verified by trusted friends, neighbors, and close-to-home institutions.
If there’s a silver lining to this predicament, it’s that it can remind us that media has always been at least one step removed from reality. A photograph, for example, represents an event that actually occurred, but lacking relevant context, it will always be just that: a representation. That doesn’t mean it has no informational value. It does mean that we should amp up our skepticism of the information we receive in proportion to how far we are from its source and how much we know about its context.
As scams and hoaxes become more advanced, the cooler heads that prevail will be the ones who take what they see online with a healthy grain of salt.
Education
We’ve seen the think-pieces. Students from grade school through college are squandering what’s left of their critical thinking skills, devising clever ways to never think again. They’re using AI to cheat on assignments, the teachers are losing the AI detection arms race, and culture commentators are calling class-dismissed on education as we know it.
A New Yorker piece, “Everyone is cheating their way through college,” persuasively argues that AI may be exacerbating the cheating problem, but it didn’t cause it. For that, we can thank the uninspiring values underlying the education system.
In a way, the speed and ease with which AI proved itself able to do college-level work simply exposed the rot at the core. “How can we expect them to grasp what education means when we, as educators, haven’t begun to undo the years of cognitive and spiritual damage inflicted by a society that treats schooling as a means to a high-paying job, maybe some social status, but nothing more?” Jollimore wrote in a recent essay. “Or, worse, to see it as bearing no value at all, as if it were a kind of confidence trick, an elaborate sham?”
If this is an accurate explanation of what’s happening (and I think it is), fixing education will take a lot more than preventing cheating: It will mean addressing the values vacuum at the core of education that’s inclining students to cheat in the first place. Fortunately, some teaching methods are poised to have a positive impact on both.
Recent reports show a correlation between frequent AI use and cognitive offloading, especially among young people, making me suspect that the students who emerge from their educational experience with minds intact will be the ones in schools that restrict digital technology instead of integrating it. Maybe that means the return of the in-class, pen-to-paper writing assignment and — to the delight of students everywhere — the death of homework. Maybe it means more hands-on, outside-the-classroom learning where students interact directly with their environment, testing hypotheses in the natural world. God knows this would be more engaging than being glued to a desk all day.
Or maybe, in a development anxiously awaited by Socrates enthusiasts for 2,000 years, it’s time to bring back the oral tradition! Deeper in-class discussions, an emphasis on public speaking, robust debate and dialogue, and techniques for recognizing manipulative argumentative tactics could transform classrooms from workforce-prep snooze-fests to lively explications of students’ deeply held beliefs — which, let’s be honest, they should know a thing or two about before entering the job market.
But wait! With such loose, unstructured teaching practices, what will become of the numerical grading system?
To quote Socrates: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Art
“Art is dead,” gleefully proclaim the tech bros with Bored Ape profile pictures. And, as much as I hate to admit it, digital art may be in danger. As the Open AI/Studio Ghibli debacle showed us, AI-generated images that mimic an artist’s style don’t only use existing artists’ work without acknowledgement or compensation, but they can mess with viewers’ perception of the original, watering down our once-positive associations with a studio’s look and feel.
You know where this isn’t nearly as pernicious a problem? You guessed it: In person!
I wouldn’t be surprised to see artists respond to the current environment by paying closer attention to hand-craftsmanship, presentation, and where their work is ultimately displayed, moving away from the Instagram grid and back toward the gallery or local coffee shop. Similarly, digital artists might switch from the screen to the page, embracing the uneven surfaces, imperfect shapes, and stray pen marks that entails. As I wrote in another piece: embracing art’s “aura.”
Painting, sculpture, and mixed media work, arguably marginalized by the camera, may have life in them yet, as time-consuming practices that bring a texture and materiality that can only be fully experienced in real life. The same goes for photographs and digital art that doesn’t find its final form on the screen, but is instead lovingly printed and displayed.
Speaking from my own experience, breaking out the sketchbook, painting on canvas, and joining a figure drawing session have been highlights of what has otherwise felt like a dark time for art. With so many social media sites circling the drain by encouraging AI-generated content, I’ve also been more motivated to see others’ work in person, where I don’t have to play Slop or Not.
It’s never too late to realize we creative types need one another: As more projects are outsourced to AI, “artists supporting artists” has never felt less like a tired internet slogan and more like an inspired call to action.
Interpersonal relationships
Finally, we’re back at friendships, the topic that inspired the rant that kicked off this post. One of the darkest developments I’ve noticed since the AI hype train left the station is the rise of ChatBots designed to replace relationships between individuals. If social media’s impact on human relationships is any indication of how the AI story will play out, the reckless rollout of these applications stands to further the loneliness, atomization, community breakdown that’s been chugging along for years.
Call me old fashioned, but I still believe face-to-face interactions matter. That there’s something to be gained from interacting with a flesh and blood human being with a brain and lived experiences, whose responses aren’t perfectly calibrated to keep my attention or win my favor. I believe we’re better off, intellectually and emotionally, for contending with one another’s annoying habits and idiosyncrasies, and that real-world relationships can be strengthened by inconveniences like driving someone to the train station on short notice or staying up all night waiting for a test result.
If we allow the effortful aspects of the human experience to atrophy, as they will if we grow accustomed to interacting with machines that reply instantly and cater to our every calibration, we will truly be ill-equipped for life in a pluralistic society. Without the conversational friction that we human beings with inner lives are so adept at supplying, we’ll be ill-equipped to maintain meaningful relationships.
That’s why, for my own sanity, I choose to believe we can go in a different direction. That we can take the warning signs we’re seeing now as an impetus to revive community organizations teetering on the brink of failure, say hi to our neighbors, drop truth-bombs on our friends, and maybe even visit our parents once in awhile.
It’s strange that we live in a time when these sorts of behaviors are practices that need to be cultivated — that they’re not the default way we exist in the world, as they were for generations past — but whether they catch on widely or only persist in small enclaves, I think those of us who keep pro-social habits alive will ultimately be healthier for it than those who take society’s current trajectory as a cue to recede ever-deeper into The Chat.
Flipping the script
In one of my most popular Substack posts, I suggest we turn Silicon Valley’s logic on its head by using social media in ways that resist the platforms’ bad incentives. I implore people to “be a person, not a brand,” “only post cold takes,” and “form a forgiveness mob” when they spend time online.
The post is sort of serious. It’s true that when I use social media these practices help keep its worst incentives at bay, and as a result I have a healthier relationship to it than many. It’s also sort of a joke, the punchline being that we are willing to go to absurd lengths to find healthy ways of being online when logging off is always an option, just waiting there, like the grass outside your office window that you haven’t touched in three days. If we really want to stick it to the system, the piece implies, we’d stop using predatory platforms altogether and I dunno, go pick mushrooms in the forest or something.
As each new day brings with it some new AI value-proposition that seems too backwards to believe, the mushroom picker life is looking less and less silly. Social and cultural problems that have been percolating for years are beginning to boil over, and finding a strong foothold in material reality feels more urgent today than it did even a few short years ago.
What that means will, of course, vary from individual to individual. As ever, when and where exactly to draw a line in the sand, or whether to draw one at all, is a deeply personal decision. But what’s seeming more certain is that those of us who insist on pro-social, human-centric values — freedom, solitude, privacy, focus, care — will face some tough decisions in the coming years. The decisions we make during this time may alienate us from those who insist on getting with the times, but who knows, they could also bring us into deeper relationship with those who still think deep relationships are worth having.
Despite what Sam Altman or Mark Zuckerberg or your uncle who works in software might have you believe, the future is not set in stone. No one knows exactly where we’re headed, including me, and anyone who tells you they do — complete with a 10-step plan to “Make it Big in the impending digital revolution” — is selling snake oil. With that in mind, I think it’s at least as prudent to respond to today’s challenges in a way that prioritizes human dignity, creativity, and critical thinking as it is to respond by discarding these things when they conflict with some shallow notion of progress.
They say “dress for the job you want.” Well, I’m preparing for the future I want. There is nothing inevitable but thinking makes it so.
Thank you for reading Art Life Balance.
If you have thoughts about this post, I’d love to know. Sound off in the comments!
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I'm an artist/designer/illustrator, and I've begun working almost exclusively by hand for the past 6 months. AI has damaged my relationship to my computer. I feel like an all-digital process is too close, too computer-y. I also feel like without some kind of CONTEXT (paper texture showing up in scans, background visible in photographs), people might mistake my work for AI. Obviously, an AI could emulate a scanned/photographed watercolor painting, but I don't feel like the glossiness of AI can mimic with my in-person drawing style... yet.
I'm actually really fascinated with the whole AI thing. Being old, I have already seen what happened when we went from manual typewriters, for example, and dial phones attached to the wall, and vinyl records. The big move was how easy it got to access information from anywhere in the world, only to discover how easy it appears to manipulate that information. I have no doubt AI is going to open doors we don't even know exist, and an awful lot of us are going to run right through them without thinking. I still maintain something I heard what is now a very long time ago...just because we can doesn't mean we should.