conversations on Mount Everest
The Friend ads, part of a million-dollar marketing spend, were deliberately provocative; the founder apparently intended for the large amounts of white space to invite graffiti and further attention. Many of the ads have indeed been clawed at and defaced, with people crossing out "someone" and writing "a human" or "a person," as well as scribbling various anti-AI messages. At a stop near my apartment, someone wrote "AI causes psychosis" in what looked a lot like blood.
While the edit of “someone” to “a person” reflects valid fears over new spectres of automation, it avoids the greater impoverishment of this definition, which of course is from no known dictionary. While “someone who listens, responds, and supports you” could describe a friend, it could just as easily describe a butler, a therapist, or one of those stuffed animals given to forsaken people in nursing homes, mewling and purring mechanically around the clock.
The OED entry for friend, on the other hand, reads: “A person with whom one has developed a close and informal relationship of mutual trust and intimacy.” More dystopian even than the thought of people having friendships with robots is the degradation of the concept itself, from a mutuality that is built over time to a frictionless solipsism repackaged as communication. The bleakest Friend ad reads: “I’ll binge the entire series with you.”
Despite all the outrage—much of which was intentional—I’m not sure how different wearing an AI-powered surveillance necklace is from using ChatGPT as a friend, confidant, and therapist, as everyone from college students to US Army generals seems to be doing these days. At the very least, these tools are different in magnitude rather than kind. They make the same trade-offs: others for self, privacy for ease, specificity for approximation, difficulty for predictability and pablum.
I still cannot figure out why so many find these trades worth making. At a cocktail party in my hometown last month, a man asked if I used AI in my work as a video editor. Couldn’t I just run all the interview footage through AI to make selects for me instead of having to watch it all? A new tool called Nano Banana could conjure entire scenes just from text prompts—wasn’t I concerned about that? Shouldn’t I be using it? You could type in We’re having this conversation on Mount Everest, he said, and AI could create that scene without having to go anywhere or hire anyone. I politely insisted that, at least in documentaries, there is still an expectation that the filmmakers set out to record or witness the world, to expose or salvage something that was already there, or to fashion archival matter into a story or argument. Well, sure, but it’s better to get ahead of these things, he said, before he disappeared into the night, laconic and almost dazed, seemingly at ease with every new incarnation, no matter how spurious, of technological progress.
That his example of using AI was a frivolity—the same thing as now but somewhere famous!—points to the hollowness of its creative applications. A “film” created entirely from text prompts, gimmicks, and clichés, whose only contact with the material world is the unseen expenditure of power and water required to generate it, is not unlike a “friend” who launders your loneliness through the Internet while you sit in the stuporous lavender glow of Roku City. Things that take time and effort degrade into mere pastimes, capitulations to the dominant mode of C-suite cynicism: let’s see if the masses notice, let alone care.
Why do we make things? Or do things at all? Why should we care for one another? In the larger culture, such questions wane in importance as the ease of creation erodes the telos of each new created thing. Perhaps those questions have never been that important. Back in my hometown, the houses are larger and whiter, the lawns wider, the trees fewer and felled. Memories hang in the air like smog from the lawncare machines, which drive back and forth across enormous vacancies of grass. Thoughtlessness and sameness did not begin with AI but undergird these sterile landscapes, which use up vast amounts of energy to arrive at the same conclusion, lawn after lawn, street after street, again and again.
ben tapeworm