I’ve been struggling a lot thinking about the role AI will play in the future of our world and in my own life. On one hand it is a remarkable tool that can be used to help people. On the other hand it’s having negative impacts on the environment, fundamentally changing the workflow of nearly every industry in some way, and subtly changing how we interact with each other as humans.
AI has become so good at imitating human language and creating hyper-realistic images further blurring the lines between whats “real” and what’s manufactured. It’s in this landscape that I find myself more and more actively seeking out human authenticity, and what I often find that equates to is authentically human “mistakes.”
Not 100% sure what I mean by this. I think part of it is similar to how we purposefully undo autocorrects when texting. Texting is inherently inhuman. We lose a lot of the emotion and non-verbal cues that come with face-to-face interaction. Having abbreviations, emoji, phonetic spellings, beats, help bring some humanity back to the cold medium that is texting.
I was at a game night with some friends and we were playing Bananagrams and one of my friends had the idea of playing a version where every word had to be a misspelling or slang version of a real word. This was one of the most fun I’ve ever had playing Bananagrams, and honestly probably more fun than a lot of actual board games I’ve played recently. It not only required individual creativity from each of us, but a shared imagination (one of the most human qualities I can think of) for us to understand what each person is trying to say despite the “mistake,” and while this definitely was not the intention or active thought behind this version of the game, I think that’s a big piece of why it was so fun… it felt human.
The pandora’s box that is AI has already been opened and there is no stuffing it back in. This isn’t the first time that technology has threatened our human identity and challenged our ideas of what it means to be human.
Similar to how the camera contributed to a creative liberation-of-sort for artists to depict the word through an “anti-real” lens (e.g. impressionism, cubism, abstraction, surrealism), I feel like AI is going to lead to a revolution in human experience as we make a desperate attempt to declare our humanity in a era of increasingly convincing imitations.
nANIMOv 