GoKawiilRecently, a man I was rock climbing with told me about how he’d used AI to make a motivational poster for himself, which he’d hung on his bedroom wall: a bear, walking a slackline over a canyon, holding a sign that said, “Do cool shit.” I made what I hoped was a polite noise. What reaction was this man looking for? He probably hoped someone, maybe me, would say it was cool or inspiring. It seemed I was not the first person he’d told about this poster. “You know, it’s funny,” he said to me. “No one ever says anything about it.”
I have been thinking about this now for several days. There’s a sort of turducken of things that I find off-putting all rolled into this anecdote: hippie shit, motivational posters, AI “art.” Still, the sum total of reactions to this poster appears to be polite noises.
But what is the correct answer to someone showing you their slop? No one made it. Even bad art — for instance, a version of that motivational poster drawn by a person — requires effort on the part of the artist, and expresses the artist’s mind, both in the content and in the motor skills required to draw lines on a page. It requires a person’s time and attention. AI “art” requires typing a prompt into a box, and maybe refining the results a couple times. There’s nothing to react to.
Zuckerberg is trying to be the soothing tech guru
I bring this up because Mark Zuckerberg has posted a manifesto that he — or his communications team, or possibly an AI — wrote. The point of this 6,500-word essay is to define a positive future for AI. It strikes me as an inauspicious sign for AI that a new, supposedly world-changing and value-creating technology should need such a defense, but AI has been getting bad press these days. People hate data centers, and the higher electricity bills that come with them. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said the technology may cause “unusually painful” job losses across multiple industries. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s house was the target of, first, a Molotov cocktail, and then gunfire.
“It is surprising that the discourse from many developing AI is so filled with doom,” the essay says. “I do not understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and much of humanity’s relevance would rush to build that future.”
I find it difficult to believe that Zuckerberg doesn’t have Amodei’s phone number. Or Altman’s. I know he has Elon Musk’s — I’ve seen their texts in court. Perhaps he should have texted them to ask!
Anyway, Zuckerberg is trying to be the soothing tech guru, here to tell us that things are going to be okay. He’s addressing, however belatedly, the rage that many people feel about AI. There are sections on data centers (Meta is building power sources for some data centers in the future, but don’t ask for renewable energy) and “preventing government tyranny.” This essay exists to try to quiet the AI backlash — even if it never quite says that directly.
Love is not just a feeling; it is a way of paying attention
We will leave aside the question of “superintelligence,” which is Zuckerberg’s preferred term for what the rest of the industry calls “artificial general intelligence”; let’s stipulate, for the purposes of this essay, that it is indeed possible to create. I am also going to ignore the risible defense of the pervert glasses contained in this piece; they are indefensible. As for the risks, I think they are best addressed elsewhere. What I am interested in is what Zuckerberg — or whoever is writing for him — believes will improve all our lives.
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