Angry Open Letters

The biggest marketing campaign in the world, funded by Silicon Valley technocrats whose hubris is matched only by their short-sightedness, has won the hearts and minds of the populous. The campaign is so intense, so unrelenting, so insidious, that one can’t be faulted for mistaking it as a Positive Force for a Better World. The masterminds behind this will not tolerate a discourse on the relative value of their product; question its goodness and you invite yourself to instant mockery. Artificial Intelligence is here, baby, and you’re gonna love it whether you like it or not.

Despite the strong tide discouraging anything but unconditional positive regard for this technology, I have concerns. My distrust of AI doesn’t primarily stem from the potential for misinformation, its effect on climate change, or the fact that it was forced on us without discussion or consent; although those would all be valid reasons for tepidness. My beef with these robots stems from the malignant narcissism of their creators and the environment that has enabled them.

America so loves an inventor. We admire the architects of culture and their great minds, quirky personalities, and the ability to see beyond the present, beyond the obvious, and into the future. For most of this country’s history, we’ve embraced innovators in multiple arenas. From Edison and Einstein to Carole King and Diane von Furstenberg, we recognized genius in whomever she blessed.

But somewhere in the digital revolution, there became an overvaluing of STEM and an undervaluing of the arts and humanities. Information, as it were, is more important than context. Efficiency is more important than craftsmanship. Newer is always better. Nowhere are these mantras more startlingly and starkly evident than in AI. 

Silicon Valley and their electronic Damian seem to be saying to us– the writers, the filmmakers, the painters, the musicians, the thinkers, the artists– what you do is so much less valuable than what we do, that even my robots can do it, and do it better. 

What Big Tech fails to realize is that artistic creativity and its byproducts are what define culture, and culture defines a civilization. 

Creation comes from a flow state: a connection between your consciousness and the currants of Earth’s energy. Art comes from your soul, your experience, your world view. Art is communal catharsis. Its meaning comes from the communion between the creator and the recipient. Someone made your favorite TV show, wrote the book that haunts you, the photograph you can’t unsee, the art instillation that made you rethink previously held assumptions, the words and music that saved your life more than once, the movie that made you feel seen for the first time or makes you laugh every time you see it. Their work affects you because they are humans sharing their mystical gift with other humans, reflecting the human experience through something so holy and reverent it can scarcely be explained.

The economic turmoil of the last twenty years, rising cost of living, unending housing crises, stagnant wages, lack of upward mobility, and the corporatization and commodification of the arts has made living as an artist in the 21st Century virtually impossible. 

We let the tech companies kill the television, film, and music industries via a business model that further enriches the C-suites and impoverishes the artists. Yet the few people who find a way to succeed in entertainment are labeled as “liberal elites” whilst we let an unhinged Nazi-sympathizing billionaire tech bro walk on stage with a chainsaw and inform us of his plans to dismantle the federal government. I don’t think we’d let Greta Gerwig do that. 

We’ve been marginalized and devalued as our work is sanitized of sacrament and blindly labeled as “content.” Our creativity is something for them to collect, digitize, and monetize. Netflix and Spotify are billion dollar companies that pay artists fractions of a penny on the dollar. And now, like the proverbial jock cheating on the test by looking at a nerd’s paper, Silicon Valley has taken our work and claimed it as their own. We are the dreamers of dreams, the piper of songs, and they stole our work so that a computer could learn how to do it “better.”

But, you know, it saves so much time.