pursuing mediocrity

as of late, my dad has consistently brought up AI as a topic of conversation—in relation to something he’s heard from a colleague, an article he’s come across, or a new aspect of its implications he’s considered.

I usually have trouble suppressing a groan when the topic arises.

Not because I wish he wouldn’t ask me about it. in fact, I greatly appreciate his perspective, even where it differs from mine. and that he asks me for mine.

but I have trouble because I literally am unable to comprehend the full implications of what he asks me. when presented with the concept of AI, my brain short circuits.

my personal experience with it dates back to the days of the 2021 crypto/nft bull run, when pairing music with digital collectibles felt like a revolutionary technological innovation. it was and it wasn’t. you could make the things alright and they were pretty cool—it was another issue getting people to buy them.

as an answer to this, many musicians and projects turned to AI to deepen their offerings—adding in a visual component to their audio collectible.

you could program 8,000 different varieties of the same image, assign rarities to certain attributes or versions of it, and then use a random number generator to decide who gets which edition. people made ~millions~ of dollars doing this.

not musicians. we never saw some of the riches of the visual-art based projects (maybe for the better), but many of the projects that set enormous valuation records in 2021 and 2022 are still around, biding their time for the next nft bull cycle. should it ever come.

and this might not even be the most notable type of AI used during this time. some programmers managed to create pieces with immense depth that broke their way into traditional art circles.

on the other end of the spectrum, you could type an appropriate prompt into midjourney and boom, there was your album cover. it took 30 seconds.

so what happened? why did the immense artistic scale offered by these generative platforms fail to elevate the musicians that took advantage of them?

well, it’s really difficult to say, and the arguments are still being carried out in X spaces, 2+ years later.

some folks will argue that artists failed to tie the collectibles to real-world experiences or outcomes, giving them no intrinsic value. (note: that was something my collective wavWRLD was focused on addressing)

I would also add a dramatic lack of understanding of business fundamentals among those employing these technologies led to initial rapid growth that couldn’t be sustained.

but the fact of the matter was that none of this nft art was really that good. it didn’t generate any interest among a public populous that was already skeptical about the idea of internet money, and almost every single project from that time has downsized or completely folded.

and so the impact of AI for this group was both limited by ability to execute and overwhelmed by the prevailing market conditions present at the time.

so now, AI has taken over—with all the potential implications.

I’ll submit to having started to incorporating GPT heavily into my daily work. once you figure out what it can address, you realize it will do so with much greater accuracy and efficiency than you ever could.

but I also don’t subscribe to the idea that this is the transformational technology for mankind. we simply do not evolve that quickly.

for one, access to AI remains dramatically restricted in countries that aren’t as developmentally advanced as the US. in fact, there’s a high likelihood this technological evolution could lead to increases in disparities rather than address them.

of note is that countries such as Venezuela are turning to crypto to avoid economic sanctions placed on them by other nations. that decision is of more immediate geopolitical importance than much of what is happening in the AI space. for now.

and on it will go. the conditions that enable the growth of these technologies—and the human emotional response to them—are the key determining factor in how they are implemented. that includes our ability to educate younger generations about morality surrounding their use.

people are rushing to AI right now precisely because they don’t understand the implications of it, but they don’t want to be left behind in the global rat race.

but that doesn’t seem right to me. it feels impulsive and short-term, like the musicians who thought they could dramatically expand their offerings by tapping into AI tools. the proliferation of their art was its eventual demise.

so my brain short circuits. I don’t know what to do about this AI thing. I definitely don’t think you should ignore it, but at the end of the day it’s just going to carry you faster or slower to the place you were going already.