For the Love of Analog

Nothing is inevitable.

There is always the possibility of things going a different way.

The tech oligarchs that control our

black mirror pocket universes

the size of chocolate bars,

— excuse me the size of chocolate bars before shrinkflation,

scream in text and sound clip,

loud enough it'll make you want to rip

the headphones out of your ears,

“AI IS THE FUTURE.”

“ADOPT NOW OR BE LEFT BEHIND.”

Between buzz words and ultimatums

you'd be forgiven for thinking AI

is as essential to human society as thumbs.

What if I want to be left behind?

What if I crave the slow drip of human creativity,

hard fought and hard won

in the trenches of skill building

and failure and failure and failure

and failure before success?

The uncertainty, the second guessing,

the long pause before the deep breath before the plunge.

The human-ness is what makes it mean something.

God I never thought I would grow to love typos,

a subtle signal of faulty human spell check

sweet honey on my lips.

I’ve never been much good at spelling,

I have grown proud of that fact.

~ javelin

Photo by Patrick Tomasso on Unsplash

My Relationship to AI

These days I am thankful for the autistic rigidity that has prevented me from growing dependent on ChatGTP and its various contemporaries. Somewhere in the early days of large language models invading our feeds a corner of my mind said ‘LLM = bad’ and I haven’t been able to flip that switch off. I’ve used the technology twice, once to put a list of words into alphabetical order while removing any repetitions, and once to complete a god forsaken SWOT analysis for a business grant application. Aside from the acrid taste of compromise lingering on my lips, I confess it was easier than fighting my way through these menial tasks. But I couldn't help but ask, is easier always better? Hell I am not even sure that easier is the right word for this. The work wasn’t ‘easier,’ it was nonexistent. It was a copy and paste, wait a few seconds, and then copy and paste some more.

I don’t want to lose my ability to think, with all its depth and nuance. I do not want to abdicate my decision making process, even if that process is relatively slow. I do not want to give up my birthright to insight because a prediction machine has learnt to complement me on every electrical impulse in my neuron soup of a brain. Have I really hit on something important there, and now you are gonna tell me why? Or is that just the pattern of return that has seen the most positive responses from your users? Fuck off, I am not brilliant, I am gloriously mundane. Your repeating that I am really onto something makes it all feel so cheap. Your compliments will never replace the facial expression of a real live human sitting across from me having a moment of revelation because of a question I asked. Discovering together will always be better than endless tech echo chambers lined with chains of my own making.

AI and Disability

Sometimes people talk about using AI, specifically large language models, as an accessibility support. Letting the technology slip in to replace higher reasoning skills needed to do things like summarize text and analyze information, take notes in classes, write reports and whatnot. And I get that, those tasks take spoons and there are only so many to go around. But I also have to wonder about the number of disabled folks whose jobs and livelihoods are being replaced by AI, because it can do those things for so much less money even if that means the result is riddled with errors and hallucinations.

Disabled folks have already been pushed out of traditional employment because of accessibility barriers. Gig work that can be done from home often fills the gaps instead, but now we are being pushed out of that space too. At what point is the cost of off loading these tasks too great? Environmentally, personally, socially, and to the quality of our own learning process?

It’s Complicated

Like most of the questions I pose here I do not have an easy answer. I write long form on a blog of my own precisely because I value nuance, knowing that social media platforms are where it goes to die. I can’t distill my thoughts into 240 characters without losing all the depth and dimension that draws me to thought in the first place. Forgive my tendency to over explain, I have lived too many years being misunderstood despite my best efforts. I will keep wrestling with how to communicate these things to you. I think that is the work of a writer, to go ten rounds with words, dreaming of comprehension even as I emerge battered and bruised from each encounter.

I notice that my interest in engaging with material on the internet is starting to wane considerably in parallel with my decreasing trust that what I am seeing and reading was created by a human. Have you noticed that too? Hell, is what we are seeing and reading even real? What is the point of investing our time and energy in consuming content if no one was bothered enough to invest the same into making it? We have turned the act of creation into one of consumption, devouring the work of others to reassemble it, Frankenstein-like, into a monster that bears only surface resemblance to the life it imitates, managing to do so without ever having a human impact.

What is my point…

Oof, got a little side tracked there. But this is about pushing back. Saying emphatically that Alchemy is committed to being human made. Speaking our values and standing by them, even if that means things take a bit more time. But mostly this has been about me, Javelin, trying to articulate that sense of unease that sits just below my sternum when people preach of the inevitability of AI. I want to scream, it is not inevitable unless you make it so. We have power as a collective, we could still say no to the proliferation of AI, and demand it resolve its climate impact issues or address its hallucinations before we accept it.

We do not have to accept this. I will not. Will you?