What’s Left for a Person to be a Person?
I have no fear of AI replacing our humanity, in the same way that I have no fear of a Frankenstein’s monster. It’s pointless to waste energy on an imagined threat, especially when those who are really at risk of replacement are those who built it.
There are many things that AI and technology can take from us; our jobs in technology, mathematics, and to some degree, science. It’s the irony that this will exactly be the way it helps us most. But it can only give an answer if someone asks the question. This is the crutch of AI.
When we think about AI, we have to remember that before it can come to solutions, scouring its own database for answers, it must be fed. Fed writing, fed images, fed answers.
And who is feeding it? If it is to be able to replace our deepest expressions of feeling; poetry, arts, and music (rendering our own creativity useless), it must first learn how to feel. Imagine, having to learn how to feel.
If this is our future actively being molded and shaped, built into the “all-knowing,” then who is telling it what to know? Who is telling it how to feel?
The answer may sound bleak, but the numbers are bleaker. 67% of all AI specialists are white, while a mere 10% are black. Women make up only 9% of all AI specialists while we make up almost half of the world’s population.
So how can I fear this thing that I’m supposed to believe will replace me when it knows nothing of me?
No woman is nurturing it closely, telling it how it feels to have your first period, how it feels to labor a child. No woman is in the room at all. No one is telling it what it feels like to see posters around your city warning others of your race, the fear of persecution that comes with not being decidedly good. The heartache with no outlet but creation.
“I’m a ghost, and I’m in a spaceship, and I’m hurtling through the universe. And I’m a ghost and I’m in a spaceship, and I’m hurtling.”
In 2021, nine years after the crushing loss of her sister, writer Vauhini Vara fed GPT3 what she could muster to describe her sister’s death in an experiment to see if it could write about her grief in a way that she never could. What followed was a call and response of nonsense; Vara gave the machine stories of her sister’s slow decline, her own feelings about it, and GPT3 returned with meaningless statements scavenged from its own database about how grief must feel. To Vara, these verses felt like nothing. And finally, one day, it got stuck. With all the information Vara had given it, it got stuck. It began an endless loop, “I’m a ghost, and I’m in a spaceship, and I’m hurtling through the universe. And I’m a ghost and I’m in a spaceship, and I’m hurtling.” This was the passage that satisfied Vauhini, the relief she needed to begin to feel understood. These words mean nothing. On their own, they are not even interesting, and yet the reason in this moment they are touching, maybe even beautiful, is because of the context in which Vauhini Vara presents them. Because of her own understanding of feeling.
AI has no heartache. There is no threat of replacement.
Whatever its strengths, whatever its talent, AI will never have been a child. It will never have smelt a flower, had its forehead kissed, had a forehead to kiss, and it will never know the boredom that comes with not having plans on a Sunday. The boredom that leads to masterpieces. The missing and the longing that lead to creation.
In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, we meet “the creature,” a humanoid made by a man who has an obsession with creating a life, creating a man. What Frankenstein created in reality, is a being doomed to live in parallel with humanity, never able to grasp it. This creature, however much he learned, however human he wished to be; no matter that he was physically made of human body parts; could never be one. This creature was doomed to be a creature.
I bring this story to mind because it touches on something felt by many and expressed by few. The invisible line. Whether in the knowledge that however immersed you may be, you will always be an immigrant, you will always be from the land that’s in your blood; to the more abstract emptiness that follows looking at a photograph of the sea when you know the indescribable immensity that comes from standing at its will yourself. The reason live music makes you cry, and the reason you feel overcome in the presence of fine art. This is the invisible line that protects me from AI.
If it learns everything I am, the way I draw, the way I write. If it becomes an avatar of the perfect female body, with clear skin and perfect teeth; I will never fear it. Because it can only ever be an answer. It’s doomed to be the manifestation of a command while I have the freedom just to be.
