Why is a copy insufficient?
I remember in Star Trek: First Contact, that moment when Picard places his hand on the prototype of the rocket equiped with the first warp drive: his expression one of awe, reverence, almost disbelief, that he is finally able to touch an object that means so much to him, that changed so much of the world. And Data, of course, was like, who cares? You’ve seen this thing a million fucking times.
But it’s different, isn’t it? When it’s the real thing. When you can reach out and touch it. It connects you to another human in a way that’s difficult to describe, but deeply moving to us at some primal level.
This is what I think about when I think about LLM output standing in for human art, for human creation, for human thought, and communication.
When it comes from an LLM, there’s no soul behind it. No actual intelligence trying to communicate. It’s an amalgamation of averageness, of spicy autocorrect guesses that we give meaning, but from which meaning isn’t flowing the other way.
As someone whose day job career has been masticated and spat out by the LLM machine, this was on my mind when I picked up Molly Tanzer’s And Side by Side They Wander, about a ragtag group of misfits trying to pull off a heist to get humanity’s original art back from the aliens that took it in exchange for giving us all world peace and prosperity.
That’s right: an end to all sickness and horror, and all you have to do is give up your art.
Oh, the aliens said, you can still have COPIES of it. We’ll make you wonderful copies, all the copies you could want! You’ll never be able to tell the difference! But the real works of art, including the monuments, the architecture made by real human hands, we’re taking all of the originals. That’s the bargain you’re making.
It sounds like a wonderful deal, doesn’t it?
Every work day, I’m asked to negotiate output with a program that has illegally sucked up all the output of the world’s greatest artists and thinkers (and the least great, too, and mostly, the average), including my own, and reassemble it according to what ends up being the averages. I am told that someday this spicy autocorrect will transform the world, though what exactly it’s transforming it into is as yet unclear. Month by month, the output gets more and more sophisticated. It can render short videos. It can design powerpoints according to programmed specifications. It can wring out an ad that sounds exactly like an ad. It can hoover up all the data from your various software programs and offer advice on what it all means. About 20% of the time, what comes out is still garbled, incorrect; the more input it has, the more it makes things up. But it has given CEOs everything they ever wanted, and that is a “worker” who does exactly what they ask, and never talks back, and praises them for every one of their ideas.
It’s unsuprising, then, that with the arrival of that technology came the bloodbath in human creator jobs. Many of them bullshit jobs, don’t get me wrong. Designers complain endlessly about spending 12 hours every day, day in and day out, making powerpoints. Writing SEO-optimized articles is excrutiating. I have spent literally months of my life writing and designing websites that never actually launched, or that got shut down a year later. All gone, tears in the rain.
The internet was already filling up with trash made to be consumed by Google and its ilk, not actual humans.
The pace of that output has accelerated 10,000%.
We are drowning in a world made of copies of copies of copies.
But why does that matter? Why is it so demoralizing?
It is not just the utter obliteration of our jobs, or how it has devalued the decades of experience and expertise we bring to our work. It’s that humans are missing now at both sides of the equation.
Tanzer’s work is a short meditation on questions like this: why human art matters, why we feel reproductions aren’t sufficient, and what we’ll do to get back the real thing.
While reading the work like an insightful exploration of art and LLMs, I was of course chagrined to read in the ackwnowledgements that the author’s inspiration for the idea went all the way back to 2003/4, and was meant as a wholistic medidation on humans and our relationship to art, after having read an essay by Walter Benjamin that explores the effect of photography on this relationship. Quoting from the essay Tanzer shares in the acknowledgements, there is, he said, a sense of presence, of existstence, in sharing time and space with a peice of art that “withers in the age of mechanical reproduction.” Sharing time and space with a peice of art is a very different experience than viewing a copy, however moving the copy may be.
It’s why people still visit the Louvre to catch a short glimpse of what turns out to be an incredibly tiny painting of the Mona Lisa. We want to share the same space. The same air. To – if at all possible! – get as close to touching that past as we can. Because to touch a work of art is to connect with a time and a place we will otherwise never know. It is the same feeling I get when I approach a two hundred or three hundred year old tree and press my hands against it. It’s this feeling like time is a flat circle. That we’re connected to everyone else. It’s why many will pay $5,000 for an original painting whose $15 print they loved. We want to share the space.
Art made by humans in reproduction is also powerful, of course. Every peice of art we create has a point of view. Many of us create things, especially writing like this, like Tanzer’s book, like this essay, to figure out what exactly it is that we think. And that’s not a need that I can fulfill by filtering comments through the extrusion machine.
We have been promised world peace and prosperity in exchange for our souls, for our art, for our water, for our jobs, for our livlihoods.
I really wish we’d at least get that, in exchange.
Instead, I find myself mucking about in a soulless copy of a copy of a copy at my day jobs, my gooey brain in a black box fumbling around in the dark, still wanting desperately to connect with other gooey brains in their black boxes while being served up an endless smorgasbord of regurgitated content.
It’s not what I want. It’s not what any of us want.
We may never outrun the copies, but we’ll never stop valuing and making and yearning for the real thing.
It’s why making and consuming art has become more precious to me than ever.
It reminds me that I’m still human.
All of us, still human, no matter how much the world wants to take it away from us in exchange for shareholder value.
It is a CEO’s very worst nightmare.
Existing in a world that is still human.
But here we are, and here we remain, even and especially if we have to steal it all back.
