Recently my boyfriend was looking into buying some loppers for doing some yard work. We were in a couple of local big box stores, but the selection was limited and the products looked to be pretty flimsy. So, he decided to search online for a better alternative. Unfortunately, like so many products these days there are a lot of different options out there, but they are all of a terrible quality. Part of the race-to-the-bottom mentality of so much modern manufacturing means that you have to settle for something that’s flimsy and unlikely to make it through a single season let alone years of use.
As proof that we need some serious gardening tools around these parts, I offer up this picture of a seriously massive rhododendron bush from our yard:
Even if you were someone willing to pay more for a product built to last, there really isn’t anyone out there manufacturing something sturdy and decent. Quantity has certainly replaced quality where gardening tools are concerned, and alas, in many other areas as well. He eventually settled on a pair of loppers that were the best of a bad lot. These loppers came with a “lifetime warranty” that as one helpful reviewer pointed out doesn’t cover the blades or the handles. Which begs the question what exactly is covered?
Anyway, the struggle to find a gardening implement that isn’t just a flimsy piece of garbage, got me thinking about all this AI nonsense that seems to be everywhere these days. AI is really just a different version of this cost-cutting mentality that has infected the manufacturing sector, where we are sacrificing quality for quantity.
Right now literary magazines and other publishers who have long received WAY more content than they could ever publish find themselves getting absolutely swamped with subpar submissions penned by artificial intelligence generators. Of course artificial intelligence is really a misnomer of a term. AI is not actually sentient, it’s computer code that is designed to scrape content from the internet and then regurgitate it as its own “original” output. If this sounds like blatant theft to you, well, that’s because it is.
Besides the thorny issue of stolen intellectual property and plagiarism (I suspect we are going to see a LOT of lawsuits in the not too distant future stemming from people attempting to use this AI “generated” content.) the problem with the stuff produced by AI is that it isn’t that good. Even on their worst days human creators produce artwork, novels, and music that are one hundred times better than the garbage that AI produces. Yet, there are some true believers out there who think AI art and AI content are the future. Let’s hope not.
It will be a sad and boring day when the entertainment we consume is produced by computer code stealing and regurgitating original content as opposed to actual creative individuals. I’d like to believe it could never happen, but I imagine if someone from say thirty or forty years ago suddenly traveled forward in time and found themselves with the prospect of having to buy gardening tools to do some yard work, they might be mystified by what had happened to quality in our modern age. It might all come down to what folks are willing to sacrifice in order to save a few bucks.
Perhaps we won’t even realize how bad things are because our AI overlords will be telling us how great everything is. Recently on the Zazzle forum, someone had consulted Google’s Bard AI to ask for information on different print on demand platforms. They received and shared a very knowledgeable sounding reply about the different platforms out there and the services they offered. The problem was, most of it is was complete poppycock. It wasn’t just that a few facts had been misreported. The AI took it upon itself to fabricate information that sounded knowledgeable, but wasn’t based on any kind of reality.
More proof that AI is not exactly producing the best stuff can be found in this Gizmodo article.
So much of AI seems to be about solving problems that don’t exist. There is no shortage of creative content available nor, thanks to the internet, is there a shortage of information. Like poorly made gardening tools the AI model seems to be about producing an inferior product for less money. Sigh.
Well, until the AI overlords take over, I’ll be here doing a little gardening and enjoying some beautiful spring weather.
— Alissa
Weekly Inspiration
What I’m Reading: A Death in Door County by Annelise Ryan
What I’m Watching: Rain Wilson and the Geography of Bliss
What I’m Listening to: “Need to Feel Your Love” by Sheer Mag
Find out more about my books at alissagrosso.com
Find out more about my digital art at alissacarin.com
My apologies for the typos and such this post is almost certainly riddled with.
Hey Alissa, that rhododendron bush is amazing! We have a much smaller one in front of the house. Half of it suddenly died in the late fall - we never did figure out why. What remains is flowering like a champ, though.
We've always had good luck with Fiskars, though since they're at Home Depot I imagine what you were looking at was not so impressive.
Re AI...it's an awful lot of hype right now, and (like the internet itself did) could easily go in several different directions. It lies...it lies a lot. And plagiarizes. But it can also be trained to do important things over and over without getting tired and screwing up. (Of course the flip side of that, is that people who were getting paid to do those things - and getting tired and screwing up occasionally - won't have those jobs anymore.) I work in IT, and we can all feel the sand shifting below our feet, but there are things to be hopeful about too - mainly improvements in the quality and consistency of work that can be routinized, so actual breathing people can go figure out other cool things to make the world a better place...hopefully (please, please).
I do agree about 90% with your point about generative AI being a waste. Certainly now it can't hold a candle to an actual person when it comes to creativity - as you point out, it isn't actually creative at all, it just remixes whatever it can find. In limited domains that's okay; in only 2-3 years we'll need a LOT fewer copywriters, paralegals, and medical narrative writers. But unless we completely lose our humanity and become extensions of our technology instead of the other way around (phone-obsessed millennials, you getting this?), human authors will always be necessary to plumb the depths and heights of the human experience, and to find new experiences. They might be inspired in some way by something AI comes up with, but it's their touch that will make it worthwhile.
I love this post! So REAL! But - I also loved your telling us what you are reading, watching and listening to! Thumbs UP!