I know it’s silly but one of my favorite shows is Gold Rush. Big boys playing with big toys and everyone gets upset when one of the toys breaks and if someone wants to take one of their big toys and go home, then everyone gets really upset. Mind numbing brain candy at it’s most glorious. However, it’s no small thing to say that mining gold is a pretty solid metaphor for writing. It’s the process of finding something valuable (artistically) and refining until only what is left has maximum value.
Back in the original Alaskan Gold Rush days speculators flooded the north with dreams of riches. Some of the dreams were simple, some were complex. The best way to get rich, however, in the gold mining days (and probably beyond) was to sell things to the people trying to make their fortune. Some people sold legitimate tools like shoves and pans. Other people created elaborate scams like the infamous gold sniffing gophers of the Trans-Alaskan Gopher Company. The gophers purported to be a better way of finding gold rich land than the more reliable method of panning. If anyone bought the gophers, travelled to the Klondike, and then set them loose to find the color, they’d be at a sore loss.
AI in its present mode is nothing but gold sniffing gophers. AI isn’t actually Artificial Intelligence, as the name would suggest. Some nerds in a cube farm in a consulting firm have come up with a way to convince a lot of people in decision making capacities they need to buy into the infrastructure to chase an electronic way of making things better, cheaper and faster. Same way they did with saying everything online was “cyber” as a way to make it sound like the science fictional utopian age is just right around the corner. Because they are using sci fi terms in a way to render the original term nonsensical tells me it’s a scam.
The use of AI has reportedly made people fundamentally dumber and less capable, as well as returning unreliable results. The tools the companies are developing for its use seem to me to be almost entirely focused on corporate use rather than improving the lives of people.
I don’t use AI in any capacity in my work, nor shall I be using it for any of my creative endeavors going forward.
Christian D Nicholson 