An Artificial Renaissance

Somewhere on the not-so-distant reaches of the internet, there's a knotted thread that contains thousands of messages from an abandoned server on a well-known messaging platform I can't name, created by a company I can't name, that explains everything I’m about to tell you, but an explanation and a story are two very different things…and I'm here to tell you a story.

I was born to write. I have obsessed over the potential power of the written word since I first learned how to put pen to paper, and that obsession only grew with my understanding that words need purpose to push them across a page. Structure without intention renders empty sentiments. Simple words written from the heart will crush you with the divine weight of vulnerability.

I was also born into the rugged folds of Gen X. A generation that was forced to constantly adapt to an unprecedented barrage of cultural and technological advancements.

When I was nine-years-old, the only glimpse I could catch of a world larger than my rural hometown was limited to the incomplete set of Encyclopedia Britannica that were haphazardly piled on a sagging shelf at the top of the stairs in my childhood home. Now, all of humanity’s shared knowledge sprawls out endlessly, under billions of restless thumbs as they hover over everyday handheld devices that nine-year-old me could never have fathomed.

These two sensibilities—the existential need to express my human experience through words and a nervous system hard-wired to the expectation of constant change—came together in a novel way when LLMs like ChatGPT and its contemporaries made their debut. Long-standing creative trades like freelance writing became immediately unstabilized and racked with certain doom. Creatives of all disciplines dug their heels in, clinging to a blind disdain for this technology. And, admittedly, I was one of them.

But, I’ve always been the kind of guy that leans more toward curiosity than fear when it comes to adaptation. So, in 2022, I decided to reposition myself as a writer that wrote about AI. My logic being: AI couldn’t take my job if I made it my job.

This decision unwittingly sent me down an ever evolving path paved in urgency. I shifted from writing about AI to advocating for AI literacy after my own research into this tech revealed a staggering divide between public understanding and practical application. This veered into some attempts to teach people those practical applications, and eventually, I fell into gig work training LLM models.

A lot of creatives have ended up in this space after our options for steady work were gutted for output measured on metrics of efficiency over the less tangible benefits of connecting with a consumer base through empathy. At this point, I have worked with all the major platforms that dominate this new landscape. It’s like a reimagined Hunger Games for freelance creatives. A battleground full of tributes unaware that they would be forced to use their refined skills in craftsmanship as tools of survival on the dystopian, digital plains of progress.

But, in mid-May of this year, I received an offer from one of these agencies that blew the doors off any other contract that had landed in my inbox. It promised an almost three-figure hourly wage, it was 100% remote, and plenty of work that was capped at forty hours every week.

My late, blue-collar father’s plain words of earnest wisdom quietly echoed through the back of my mind:

What looks good from afar is often far from good.

But, the rigorous, three-tier background check and NDAs linked to the onboarding email quickly silenced that doubt.

In the interest of honoring the aforementioned NDAs, the best way I can cryptically describe what I logged onto from my laptop three days later after my background checks cleared was the biggest digital circus of my two-decade career.

Team leads and project managers frantically tried to tame lions under the big top of a commonly-used messaging app. They pinned meandering threads with convoluted instructions to vaguely named channels and braced themselves behind terse responses laid out in all caps.

This did little to appease the ring master’s ever-shifting deliverables. The ring master being the client the NDA keeps me from mentioning. What it did do was whip the feral pride of contractors getting yanked around by those deliverables into a frenzy. All of them desperate to keep their share of this opportunity, and roaring out in confusion and rage as they clawed their way through an onboarding process that kept unraveling before they could finish it.

They weren’t all lions though. Some were clowns, passively submitting work they had generated from the exact LLM model they were meant to train as their own. A true testament to the absurdity of all of this endless absurdity.

By day three I was one of many contractors informed by email that the project was no longer in need of our expertise. All before any of us got our chance to teach a LLM model how to generate the output we were meant to teach it, which was essentially taste.

As we all tread in the slop left by the wake of this first tsunami of AI, if you listen carefully, you can clearly hear the gurgling death rattle of late-stage capitalism. However, there’s no regret in the shallow, wet breaths that are dragging this broken system to the grave, only desperation as all of these corporations that cling to executive profits over paying working people a living wage realize they may have cut creative teams out of their grift a little too soon.

Suddenly all these companies that got lean on the promise of AI automation are now hungry for "storytellers". All while the heavy hitters in the frontier model landscape throw outrageous promises of stacked cash to creatives like yours truly, thinking that we can teach an algorithm how to develop a palate.

Spoiler alert: we can’t, but we are happy to spend the money that's thrown our way while we pretend we can.

To be clear, I’m unshakeable in my conviction that taste and style are fickle human traits. And after all that I have done to learn about and adapt to this brave new world of emerging AI tech, I can say one thing with absolute certainty:

Style and taste exist and evolve in response to mediocrity. They set the standard, and once that standard becomes too common, a new standard of taste or style replaces/elevates the existing one.

Authentic human expression will always be more desirable, respected, and relatable to the human tastemakers and trendsetters that define the standards between what is unique and what is played out. The mediocrity that mimics that trend ultimately is what kills it, and forces the whole cycle to start over again. AI can be trained to mimic those traits....artificially, but that’s the whole rub. And no matter how much money you throw at it, it won't change it.

But, I digress. There is an almost immaculate irony that strings all of this together.

That client spent a small fortune hunting for the ineffable thing. The three-tier background check, the NDAs, the almost-three-figure wage, the vetted creatives, assessments built to gatekeep the next assessments— all of it engineered to extract intention from language, to teach an algorithm what it feels like when a human means something.

And the whole time, it was pouring out of every channel of the messaging app that was meant to manage the project. The all-caps PMs coming apart at the seams. The lions roaring in confusion and rage. Thousands of messages in an abandoned thread, every single one of them freighted with desperation, exhaustion, and fury.

Words shoved across the screen by people who meant them down to their marrow because their rent depended on it. That was the data they will never be able to recognize or capture, even when it's staring them down.

The realest, most intention-soaked human expression in the entire operation was the sound of the operation eating itself alive, and nobody noticed it because they were too busy trying to manufacture it.

The thing they were paying for was never going to show up in a deliverable. It only shows up under stakes.

Stakes can't be assigned or onboarded. They have to be real, the way they were real for every furious contractor clawing to keep their share of a job that was already gone.

The over-produced thing, the synthetic thing, the focus-grouped thing will always get gutted by something raw that nobody approved. It's what turned disco into punk for fuck’s sake.

The rawest outcome that operation ever produced was the meaning smashed into the keystrokes of every word fed into that chat platform as the big top came crashing down. The most honest piece of writing the whole project ever produced, and the one thing they were hunting for, is sitting in plain sight on a server they walked away from.

AI is weeding out mediocrity by mass-producing it. It’s making all of us hungry for something real in the most artificial way possible, and it's quickly becoming unbearable. As such, I will gleefully argue, from any barstool or TED stage that'll have me, that the flood of awful AI we are drowning in is dragging us straight toward a modern Renaissance. Not in spite of the mediocrity, but because of it.