Have you ever been in a Home Goods, Hobby Lobby, or other such store where the walls are lined with mass-produced ‘art’ designed by committee and spat out of a factory, and have you ever been to a real art gallery full of unique works made by individual minds, and which do you prefer?
Human art has become a luxury for the rich. Corporations have taken the innate desire and need for art that all of us have and mass produced gruel to satisfy that desire at the barest minimum possible, and they have fed us trash for so long that the majority don’t realize they walk around with malnourished souls. They’ve done it with art, they’ve done it with food, they’re doing it with with music and all forms of design, and now they’ll do it with books.
In a generation or less, contemporary human-written books will be as rare a sight in someone’s home as is contemporary human painted artwork. Bookshelves will be lined with novels by “Penguin” or “Harlequin” with no person’s name on the cover, manufactured by AI and perhaps a team of editors given no credit and paid the bare minimum. And that’s yet one more outlet for the soul removed as a possibility of income
because you are not a star, you are not a beautiful spark of creative energy with something to show the world, you are a shovel, and you will dig your ditch and do nothing else, and wouldn’t we love for machines to work the slave labor jobs and disgusting or thankless jobs we’d be glad to eliminate, jobs one would weep with gratitude to never have to do again, but those are not the jobs that are replaced and removed, those are in fact the only jobs left.
The creation of all human joy, art, film, literature, music and even relationships–human dialogue, sex, all of it has been or will be replicated and monetized while people are still digging ditches night and day, scrubbing toilets and shoveling shit, digging holes in order to fill them back up the next morning so they can afford to have virtual sex with their robot paramour then watch a movie shat out by a computer.
Do you want this world? Do you love digging your ditch? Do you shrug and say ‘well that’s how it is,’ do you sigh and think ‘this technology isn’t going away, I guess I’ll just learn to live with it’? Or are you sick to fucking death of your place on this earth shrinking and shrinking, sick of every single thing you love having the edges sanded off and the life drained from it so it can be mass produced and shoved in your face 24 hours a day until the last dollar has been extracted and you can’t stand the sight of it anymore? Do you actually want that? Do you look forward to that?
When was the last time you were excited about the future? For me it was before I woke up to the fact that every new technology is only used to drain more money out of me, and that the goal is never for a better world or even a better product, but instead to flood the market with the cheapest most easy to produce shit possible, so that it’s all you’re aware of.
Electronic books aren’t more affordable because they are cheaper to produce, like people thought they would be, they are instead more expensive because they are more convenient. And the convenience of AI writing will cost us. Not only will it cost yet another piece of the human soul, but it will cost actual money, because that is all they ever want. We’ll all pay for it, and gain nothing but a profusion of bland gruel in return.
Is there no going back? Is the ‘genie out of the bottle’? well I don’t want to go forward into the soulless hellscape being built for me.
Ban all AI, burn the datacenters, Butlerian jihad
Jonas David 