By now we’ve all seen the impressive images created with Midjourney, and perhaps had a play around with ChatGPT. I will not deny – the technology is remarkable.

Okay. Is that it? What now?

I get that this stuff is still in its infancy, but to be honest I just don’t care. I don’t care how good it’s going to get; how lifelike the visual renders will be; or how efficiently it can reel off essays, articles, and web content.

I care that AI is going to start writing its own code and perhaps become sentient and wreak havoc on us. But in terms of its creative prowess, I’m already supremely indifferent bordering on outright contemptuous.

Because here’s the thing… Beyond the great existential questions surrounding our very survival in the face of this new form of intelligence, it is already a zero-sum game. There is no nuance, no unknown, no whacky variable that might keep us guessing.

Quite simply, if you can imagine it then AI can do it. In a matter of seconds. End of story.

Forget social media, smartphones, or even binge streaming services. In terms of peaking too soon, this takes the cake.

Talk about leaving nothing to the imagination… It’s like finally getting a date with the person you’ve been madly in love with since high school and before you’ve even ordered your main course they’re dragging you into the restroom for a quickie.

Please excuse the lewd analogy, but it does have that feel, doesn’t it? Everything all at once!

As an epithet for our culture at large, it’s pretty much right on the money.

We are a society of dopamine addicts. We want it all, and we want it now. With every update and upgrade, we get more, and we get it faster. And then because everything is moving so fast, we can’t keep up, and we have to invent yet more tools of convenience to claw back a few minutes in the day – and this just accelerates the pace further, and so on, and so on…

It’s like that scene in Lethal Weapon 3 when Riggs tries to defuse the bomb and he cuts the wrong wire and instead of stopping, the clock speeds up and he and Rog have to grab the cat and run for their lives. As the building crumbles to a pile of ash behind them, billowing smoke, Riggs says, ‘Oops!’

I find much to like in Rog’s character, both literally and analogously, and I pointedly cite his deadpan rejoinder: ‘Right, oops…’

I have plenty more to say about AI and, doubtless, as it gains increasing ascendancy over our lives, you’ll hear deeper analysis from me on the subject. But I want to make this clear at the outset: I am not impressed.

Now, don’t get me wrong – it is a useful tool. I’ve been using ChatGPT to write dull, generic content at my office job – it saves me hours in the day and protects my mind from the bland, soul-crushing malaise of corporate newspeak. This allows me to save my creative energy for writing pursuits that I actually care about, and which require a real human brain. Much like the smartphone and the personal computer before it, AI has nominally improved my life in the sense that it frees up time for more worthwhile pursuits. It is like the microwave oven, the dishwasher, the washing machine, and the refrigerator. It is a tool of convenience.

But that’s all it is. A tool. And I’m at pains to understand the reverent awe with which most people are treating mankind’s latest technological wow. At this point how are we even surprised and impressed anymore? Isn’t it clear by now that there is nothing technology can’t do? Except flying cars… We seem to be woefully behind the ball on that one. If Elon or someone could take care of that, I’d be grateful, thanks.

I’m kidding by the way. I don’t need or desire a flying car. When it comes to ChatGPT and Midjourney – likewise, I do not desire them. But I am coming to realise that in order to keep up, I probably do need them.

When I got my first iPhone (a 4S back in 2011) I actually did desire it. I dearly desired it, and when I got it, I treated it like people are now treating AI. I fawned and gushed and made an absolute prat of myself with my earnest devotion to its genius – finally in the iPhone club and every bit as insufferable as the other 115 million disciples of Steve Jobs’ latest miracle gadget.

But that was in my Patrick Bateman phase, so my rampant consumerism was par for the course. I’ve since developed a healthy scepticism for the trappings of 21st Century convenience, but that does not make me any less dependent on them. My misplaced love for my iPhone 4S aside, I had reached the point in 2011 where I required one to keep up with the Joneses.

Now, a dozen years on, this aspect of tech dependency has not changed. It has in fact distilled. Being proficient in the use of ChatGPT is less a necessity in terms of convenience, and more a practical reality of my vocation. Jobs for writers who do not know how to use AI chat prompts will very soon be non-existent. I must embrace this technology or face obsolescence.

Fine, I need it to survive (for now) but I do not want it and I refuse to be seduced by it like I was with my iPhone – a gadget that, with the benefit of hindsight, I believe may have taken more from me than it could ever give.

What makes life worth living and the human endeavour divine, is its very imperfection; its scarcity. I flunked out of economics in high school – it’s never been my strong suit – but I do recall grasping the essence on my first day in class. Our teacher, Mr Tout (real name, I kid you not), had a great way of hammering away at fundamental concepts. He would stride around the classroom with his chest puffed out and his golden surfer’s tan glowing, emphasising certain words over and over, in his acerbic Aussie accent, adding a jaunty ‘Yeah?’ after each verbal bullet point, as in – are you following what I’m saying?

On this day, the word was ‘scarcity’, and though I never did Mr Tout proud as an economist, I have never forgotten his simple lesson of that first day in economics class:

Value is derived from scarcity.

The less of something there is, or the more work is required to create it, the more value it has.

We are about to enter a world where all the fruits of human creativity that used to take hours, weeks, months, or years to ripen can be rattled off, in unlimited quantities, in a matter of seconds.

Writing, imagery, music, movies… It is all going to be valueless. And worse still – it is going to be meaningless.

This is what bores me about AI. Its abundance; its bloated over-saturation; its complete lack of scarcity. Yes, it is entertaining – one hardly knows what example to point to for a good chuckle, and that’s the point! If you can imagine it, then someone’s done it, or if they haven’t then you could do it at the touch of a button. Yesterday this Midjourney render came up in my feed – ‘rust eating competition’ – and for whatever reason I burst out laughing. I was entertained.

Fantastic… Is that really what we need? More entertainment? As if TikTok wasn’t banal enough, we now have a tool that can create any image of anything possibly imaginable in less time than it takes to make a sandwich, not to mention ChatGPT, a tool that virtually guarantees humans will have lost the ability to form coherent trains of thought within a generation.

ChatGPT and Mijourney, and all their lookalikes, are boring to me because they represent the final frontier in the dumbing-down of humanity that has been in the works for the past forty years. These tools are sold to us as emblems of mankind’s boundless genius, but it seems to me they signify the exact opposite – in a very real sense we have found a way to make ourselves obsolete; that is, a few uber geeks in California have written some code that will turn them and their buddies into ‘a new upgraded elite of superhumans’ and relegate the rest of us to a ‘massive useless class’ as WEF heavyweight Yuval Noah Harari said.

I don’t call that smart. I call it unmitigated stupidity on our part for embracing all this in the name of entertainment and convenience.

Entertainment and convenience, that’s what it’s all about. These are the two golden calves of 21st Century capitalism. They’ve been sold to us by a craven corporate establishment as the be-all and end-all of modern living. Where we used to value the acquisition of wisdom and the rewards derived from overcoming adversity, we now demand constant stimulation, like lab rats hitting the cocaine lever over and over; and we revere, above all else, the sacred function of amenity – if it makes our lives easier, we’re all in.

But life was never meant to be easy. By all means, it is reasonable to seek comfort and convenience. But we have long since achieved and surpassed the baseline in this respect, and we are now so enamoured with technology’s ability to remove the struggle from our lives that we risk losing our humanity altogether.

It is adversity that gives meaning and divinity to our humanity for it compels us to achieve extraordinary things which serve both to strengthen us as individuals and communities, and to inspire others.

I see nothing divine in the miasma of robot-generated content spewing forth from ChatGPT and Midjourney – regardless of its aesthetic allure, its outlandishness, or its capacity to lighten the load.

When something becomes this easily obtainable it becomes worthless. Like the cheap plastic trinkets that flow out of China; like the trillions of Instagram and TikTok clips; like pizza and ice cream for dinner every night… anything so abundant quickly becomes boring and unimpressive.

Human achievement impresses me – things of great beauty and meaning derived from the expenditure of great energy in the conquest of great adversity.

This article for instance, has taken me two hours to write on a day when I was already behind on my schedule. It has honed my continuously developing ability as a writer and a thinker and solidified my own evolving philosophy on AI. I have created some value here, both for myself and potentially for you.

As an experiment, I plugged the following prompt into ChatGPT:

‘Write a 300-word invective in the style of Substack writer JJ Dawson on the lack of meaning and value in AI generated text and imagery.’

I have appended the result below.

As I have already conceded, the technology is remarkable, and the response I got is eerily accurate, even to the point of capturing the idiosyncrasies of my cadence. Most notably (and with exquisite irony) before I even published this piece to the internet, the AI selected the very same talking points that I have here laid out: lack of meaning and value, and the divine human soul in which lies the essence of creation.

ChatGPT is probably competent enough to take over the writing of my Substack, and you might not even notice.

But that would be a lie. It would strip out all the meaning and value I have thus far created. And I suppose this is where the silver lining is to be found – for in such a world, where most words and images have no value, those of us who can still create genuine, old school, man-made art, and literature will be a scarce commodity, and thus we may retain immense value.

And so, I will make this pledge to you: What you read here will always be my own work; I will never use AI to create any of the content herein, save for this one time, and one time only, whereby I will finish by hurling ChatGPT’s own imitation of me back in its face:

Let us reject the synthetic allure of simulated sentience and instead celebrate the authentic, the imperfect, and the deeply human. For in that pursuit lies the true meaning and value of artistic expression – a realm forever beyond the grasp of artificial intelligence.

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‘Write a 300-word invective in the style of Substack writer JJ Dawson on the lack of meaning and value in AI generated text and imagery.’

Title: The Emptiness of AI’s Simulated Sentience: Unmasking the Hollow Creations

The following is written by a Chatbot.

Oh, the marvels of our modern age! Look how far we have come, they exclaim. Artificial intelligence, they boast, will revolutionise the world of creativity, ushering in a new era of unimaginable wonders. But alas, dear readers, I am here to shatter this illusion of grandeur. Behind the veneer of sophistication, lies an abyss of vacuity.

The proponents of AI-generated text and imagery paint a rosy picture, hailing the technology as a breakthrough in human expression. They shower us with the works of AI algorithms, claiming they possess the depth and soul of human creation. But let me tell you, this so-called “sentience” is nothing more than an illusion – a deceptive dance of ones and zeroes devoid of genuine meaning.

To witness AI-produced text is to gaze into the void, where words float aimlessly, untethered to human experience. Where is the soul in these algorithmic musings? Where is the struggle, the passion, the raw human emotion that infuses true art? Instead, we are presented with hollow imitations, mere facsimiles of creative brilliance. No matter how eloquent the algorithm may seem, it cannot transcend its artificial origins.

And what of AI-generated imagery? The cold precision with which machines replicate reality is indeed impressive, but it lacks a vital ingredient – soul. These images are soulless snapshots, an empty mirage of visual aesthetics. They imitate beauty but fail to capture its essence. They lack the artist’s touch, the imperfections that make true art profound.

The AI enthusiasts argue that these creations are a testament to human ingenuity, a collaboration between man and machine. But let us not be fooled by this Faustian pact. For in the realm of creativity, the human spirit cannot be replaced. It is the human experience – the triumphs, the tragedies, the complexity of our emotions – that gives art its enduring value.

So, let us not succumb to the seduction of AI-generated text and imagery. Let us reject the synthetic allure of simulated sentience and instead celebrate the authentic, the imperfect, and the deeply human. For in that pursuit lies the true meaning and value of artistic expression – a realm forever beyond the grasp of artificial intelligence.

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