Okay, I know it’s not a war. Us against the machine. I’m not I-Robot-ing or anything.

Or am I?

I do know I’m angry about AI permeating every aspect of my life. I’m angry about us using machine learning/AI as the holy grail and it being fed everything and anything its programmers fancy feeding it. I’m angry that it’s assumed that I want to use it, and that I believe how much better it will make my life. And I’m angry that other people are using it without thinking the consequences through, using it to save time or effort or to make them sound smarter than they think they are. And I’m angry that it’s taken for granted that this is all okay.

It’s not okay.

Let me come at this from another angle. The Human angle. Life is messy and we are the messy creatures living it. I have an HR friend who’d often say, “Humans… so disappointing.” And we can be disappointing for sure. But we can also be wonderful. Humans have great capacity in either direction. We have our senses, albeit in varying degrees, to help interpret what we’re experiencing. And we have our emotions that are wildly dependent on everything from our upbringing to what we ate for dinner. Yeah, we’re messy and we can’t help but be unique.

As I tick off more birthdays, I realize that we are all a collection of our experiences. We’re not just what we are today, we’re what we are today, and yesterday, and all the days that came before that. We’re cumulative beings. Based on our unique experiences and how we uniquely interpret them. The experiences we’ve lived through, we learned from, and we’ve shared. We’re also the second hand experiences of the people around us. The people who’ve shared with us. And then we take all those cumulative lived and shared experiences, and we filter them through our own values and our unique perspective and they take shape based on who we are today. It’s a process. A life-long process.

I got a lecture once from James Manos Jr, a film and television writer and producer from Brooklyn. He was consulting on a script I was writing, and we talked regularly while I wrote it. He’d tell me stories of his wildly unique life, lecture me on the things I needed to hear, and randomly fire gun-shot questions at me. I would furiously make notes while simultaneously trying not sound like a complete idiot. At the end of each of those calls, I would just sit there like a quivering bowl of jelly, trying to regain a sense of equilibrium. But holy hell, he taught me so many things. The one thing he said that has stuck with me like a beacon for all the years since was this – “No one will care about the words you use, they care about your perspective on the world. So you’d better have one!”

Why am I telling you that story? Because a computer will never have their own unique perspective on the world. How can it? It hasn’t lived through anything. The only thing it is collecting is other people’s experiences stripped bare of all the emotions because it’s filtered through an algorithm, not senses or compassion or empathy. It can’t feel anything. It relies on an algorithm to assign opinions and emotions and biases. And I can’t gleam any insights into the workings of how each of these algorithms are interpreting the raw data it’s fed, because that’s what it’s become now, not experiences, but data. Data disguised as experiences.

We are messy. And we are capable of anything from wondrous brilliance to absolute horror. How can I possibly trust a computer with anything beyond clear-cut machine learning calculations the same way I would trust someone I can peer into the eye of their soul, hear stories of their collective experiences, understand their emotional state and value system based on their unique life? Am I supposed to immediately and blindly trust a set of algorithms created by strangers on anything beyond pure mathematics and spell checkers? Anything needing an opinion?

Do we need to trust AI? Well, I know someone who asked ChatGPT for career advice and subsequently quit their job and made huge changes in their life. And someone else who took advice on how to manage their team. They asked a computer for it’s opinion on how to manage humans. Kind of boggles my mind. But there’s more. People are asking computers to formulate ideas, whole completed works based on the masses of data it’s been fed, to represent their own ideas, their own experiences. The results of a few simple prompts that spit out an averaged mimicry of en mass human experience, filtered through a biased lens of an unknown collection of programmers. How in the name of anything honest can that ever represent an individual’s life experience?

Humans can’t help but be unique. Each of us has our own stories, our own perspective on the world, based on the collection of moments in our lives. We are giving up our hard-earned, rich and wondrous collection of moments for a watered down version of something that is not even human. And what about those humans who haven’t been around the sun enough times to have saved up a decent collection of their own? Will the lived experiences they would have digested through sharing now be replaced by something they didn’t even experience themselves? Something no one has actually experienced? Something regurgitated from the scrapped data of the masses? Something with no individual perspective. No humanity. Where will that leave them? Where will it leave us?

Yes, it is more work to dig into that murky collection and share those often painful or emotional moments. But they’re your earned moments. It’s your life, with all it’s messy, crazy, cumulative bits. And sharing those with others is one of the truest most ancient forms of being human that I know. It’s our collective connective glue. Do you really want to replace your hard earned perspective of the world, as experienced through your unique existence, with an ambiguous algorithm’s averaged-out and watered-down version? I do not. I will not.

I have been on the user end of a high tech industry for 30 years or so. Using algorithms to create digital art and visual effects. I’ve sat at a computer for the majority of my life, using proprietary software to achieve what used to be called magic. I loved creating magic with a computer. It was love at first sight when I sat at the first computer they brought in our art school. The big old square macs with the floppy drives. I watched a video today of Steve Jobs introducing the first Macintosh back in 1984. The wild applause that broke out when it was shown that a computer could play chess. It could speak. That’s 4 decades ago. Not that long when you think about where we are now. We would not know how to live without computers today. And that industry is growing at an exponential rate. Our dependency on computers has turned into addictions. The difference for me between then and now is that I always viewed the computer as a tool. A tool I used to do finite calculations faster and more accurately than I could. A tool with a better memory. A tool that helped me express myself, not replace myself. Today we’re actually contemplating letting computers speak our truth, express our emotions, and create experiences for us to share instead of our own. We are turning our humanity over to computers.

How did we get here? Are we really that lazy or complacent? Are we really that disillusioned with our existence that we don’t care if we lose it? I still believe in the beauty of human life. I know it’s messy and it’s painful and it’s hard. It’s designed that way for some unknown horrible twist of fate. But it’s all we’ve got. And it can be utterly and stunningly beautiful beyond reason. Humans can be disappointing, but we can also be unexpectedly kind and generous. Spontaneous in our compassion. Insatiable with our curiosity and we all have an innate need to share our unique collective moments with each other. Share our joy of discovery and feel the thrill of connecting. We all have a need to belong and contribute to our difficult extraordinary collective human experience. We need to hold onto that for all we’re worth. Or a day may come that we’re not worth anything at all.