Lately I have been bombarded with advertisements for BOTS that write blogs. Their hook is that writing can be tiring and cumbersome, so purchase Artificial Intelligence and let it knock off 1000s of blogs a day. Despite this decade being an oozing shit show at every turn, this ad may have made me sadder than I have been in awhile.
Much like music and art, technology has now gotten involved with writing. Singers have had auto-tune for decades, artists have countless graphics programs and now bots are writing blogs. As someone who has a love/hate relationship with writing, I agree that writing is tiring and cumbersome. It is a chore. It is often the thing that causes writers to do other chores to procrastinate writing.
Writing is also the source of humanity and love and horror and poetry and wonderment. All of the great authors were summoned by a force bigger than themselves to put pen to paper and create the worlds that were living in their minds and souls. It was dark depression that guided Sylvia Plath, angst that guided JD Salinger and unbridled lust that guided the authors of smutty paperback books that we all read in our adolescence.
I know that all blogs aren't great works of art.(With the exception of this blog.) Some blogs are technical and mechanical and informative. Some blogs are even highly lucrative. (With the exception of this blog.) So I guess if you make a living writing blogs on finance or engineering somehow AI can understand that algorithm and mass produce similar blogs? (I don't know. I didn't click on the ad for the Blog Bot, so I am not sure the mechanics of it all.)
I try not to be pessimistic or an old fart, but the thought of creative writing becoming just a part of a giant interlocking of data on the information super-highway makes me severely heartsick. If the robots write the songs and the sonnets and poems, where does that leave us? Where would be the heart and humanity in their computerized prose that make us laugh and cry. If the machine's job is to make us feel, then what is our job? To be productive? To use our limited time on the planet consuming products and art that were made by automations that can survive for an eternity?
Maybe I wrote this blog too early. Maybe there is some silver lining that I have yet to understand. Maybe I penned this out of misguided emotions, which ironically is something an AI Bot could never do. (Take that, you animated bunch of wires that doesn't understand irony.)
Join me next week when I talk about kittens! (JK, I got darker than my normal fluff, so I had to offset my existential crisis with a cat joke.)
Let me know if technology scares you or makes you hopeful in the comments below!