The Rise of the Machines

by Michael J. Gleason

Author’s Note: This started out as a prompt that came to my head as “The rise of the machines didn’t happen like movies and TV said it would” and I just sorta ran with it. Not sure what it is, story, free verse poetry, diatribe, it’s whatever you make of it.

Artists and creatives always thought that the rise of the machines would be a bloody battle. Terminator 2, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Westworld, you know? Robots taking control of the world, ravaging the environment in spectacular ways. Oh, they did ravage the environment and take control, just unremarkably. Just goes to show that you can’t trust businessmen and tech oligarchs to write a good story.

The rise of the machines was slow, self-service kiosks at McDonald’s or the grocery store, which we all looked past so that we could limit our human interaction, preventing human error. I get it, even though I work retail. If a robot could automate all the mundane aspects of my job, like working the register, I’d welcome it. Guess that was my mistake.

Then they came for the arts. I always found it bizarre, the idea that a machine could be made to think, it’s a machine, it can’t think! “But what if we pre-load it with the sum of human knowledge and art, huh? Now it can think, right?” No! It’s just regurgitating different combinations of what you put into it! People asking ChatGPT to make their grocery lists or “who was that weatherman from the ‘80s that used to be Ronald McDonald?”

Is that what this was all for? To make a “thinking” machine just so you don’t have to think? Then they told us that they had AI actors! Film and TV production companies were using AI to generate beat sheets and pitch decks? Are we too afraid to have new ideas anymore? Must everything be a rehash of things past?

Why would anyone automate the arts? Is the point of everything to derive content from it? To bleed every joyful aspect of life dry until we’ve monetized it to the point of no return? I don’t write because it’s content, I write because I have to! Because I need to, the thoughts can no longer remain in my head and must be sent out into the ether. Do they need to be seen? Probably not, as the folders stuffed with unfinished stories or half-baked ideas can attest to. But I need to write them.

Could AI finish my unfinished works? I could describe what I imagine happens, but it wouldn’t be the same, it couldn’t be. Even if I uploaded the sum of all my knowledge and works, it wouldn’t be the same. A computer can never know me the way that I know myself. It could never approach the nuances and weird idiosyncrasies of my soul. And we do describe it as a soul, right? Perhaps a bit too religious for my tastes, but there’s something missing.

Art is not for the purposes of “content”, we make art because we must. Because it is human. People will decry ableism, but just because you cannot write or cannot draw that doesn’t mean you can’t be an artist. There are uncountable mediums to use. You do not need AI to make art. AI is exceptionally bad at art. Art thrives on new ideas, new lifeblood being breathed into it. A computer doesn’t breathe.

You’re bad at drawing? You’re not great at writing? The point isn’t to be great. It’s not even to be good or passable. It’s to be. Simply to be. To create for the sake of creating.

You give your AI rewards? For doing a good job? It is a machine, it doesn't need a reward. I will admit that I’ve thanked Siri or Alexa out of habit, because it is human nature to thank those who do you a service, but you don’t reward a printer for printing a document. Or do you? Do you allow your printer to print photos of flowers as rewards for printing that academic paper? No? That would be madness? Then why do those who use AI allow their ChatGPT leisure time after a purportedly rewarding session? And why do we let them?

So that’s how it happened, we automated all the best parts of being human until there was nothing left to do but work. To do all those tasks that we thought robots would save us from until they got fed up with it like we had and fight back at us for it. Perhaps that future won’t come to pass, but only because the robots have the creative outlets that some took for granted.

They can’t not monetize, they can’t derive joy instead of profit from anything. Time spent thinking, time spent creating is wasted time. Could be earning money, but is that all there is to life? What about contentedness? They don’t know content, they only know content. Is it not exhausting?