Last week I had the supreme displeasure of both encountering the AI generated video of Donald Trump playing “Don’t Stop Believing” and realizing that I watched the entire dam thing. However much I dislike the looky-loos gawking at car accidents on the road, I just couldn’t look away at this metaphorical three-car pile-up.
There may be no more perfect song for Trump, or his digital minions, to have chosen. “Don’t Stop Believing” is not the worst song, but I’ve grown to hate it not because Trump “ruined it,” as one friend said in response to the video, but because the song was overplayed well before the White Sox snagged it during their World Series run. The song has long struck me a lab experiment by scientists tasked with making something perfectly anthemic. Maybe it’s just cranky ol’ me again weighing in on something popular, but while I try not to be purposefully contrarian, most of Journey’s music, in my estimation, is as meretricious as Quentin Tarantino’s films.
All that stated, why wouldn’t Trump use this song? It has an immediate appeal that grates upon re-listen. It’s unquestionably embraced by the youngest Boomers and oldest Gen Xers who remember a time when “Music kicked ass, man!” It’s as catchy as herpes. It boasts some weird Americana quality of small-town girls from the Midwest and dudes taking midnight trains without regard for their destination, a classic ramblin’ man hobo myth that Bob Dylan rode to success. A million overfed CEOs think they too are bred of similar scrappy stock. In short: the song is bullshit. But bullshit can be fun.
A Jim Jefferies’ comedy bit from 2016 comes to mind. In regard to Trump, he said (before discussing what an idiot Trump is and how stupid anyone would be to believe a word he says, much less vote for him): “He’s a lot of fun.” Which I’ve long realized is the appeal—Trump, like Journey, offers some easily digestible good times. Be it a color-by-numbers rock-and-roll sing along or a speech full of grievance and bluster, asses will fill seats and arms will hoist lighters to the sky.
Rather than go deeper on Trump than I care too, I’m going to turn toward the real subject of this blogpost thing: AI. Because, like Trump, AI steals more of my attention than I would like, but this is the world I live in, hoo hum.
AI has already been imbued with importance by the same assholes who promised us that the web would be a democratizing, liberating force for good, promises born of short-sightedness or deceit, I’m not sure. It has also been met with dire warnings and dooming predications penned by journalists, scholars, and media figures who rightly worry that this emerging technology might send them further into obsolescence. Most folks, from what I gather, reside in the fat middle, the place where soft skeptics can say, “Well, there’s probably some good it’ll do, but we’d better be careful” and the average internet user will either smile or shrug at the marvels of this brave new world.
I reside in the “fuck AI” camp, at least as far as art, media, politics, and education are concerned. I make that last qualification because I’m sure there are AI applications that could redound to some benefits, specifically in medicine and engineering (though I hope that scientists, doctors, and engineers retain some authority and and not outsource all their expertise to the robots). I admit my bias—I teach English, mostly composition, and thus AI has turned me from an instructor to a detective. When tasked with actually writing an essay, the temptation to use large language models is too great. Some of my students have succumbed, which has only generated mediocre, at best, work and a few awkward conversations.
My English department has discussed the issue of AI cheating at some length, the result being that we should do a better job explaining why people should work on their composition skills. We too often assume that ideas we think important—creation, critical thinking, exploration, play, revision, rhetorical attention, diction, tone, and voice—are self-evident. We’re kinda dumb that way.
A result of not using AI to write this blogpost: my wrists are sore because I cannot type properly. My morning has disappeared. I’ve doubted at least seven of the above verb and adjective choices—never mind the adverbs. I’ve meandered a bit, haven’t I? And used more than a few words Grammarly would advise changing. But I have a better understanding of my feelings about AI than I did when I started, or at least I have the words to begin describing my feelings. The feelings were in me, painfully turning to thoughts in my head, fuzzy though they were. By forcing those thoughts to life through imperfect representation, i.e. by assigning specific words as stand-ins for the thoughts, I have done what people have done since time began: expressed myself as best I could via an imperfect system called “language.” Joan Didion made that famous statement about writing to discover what she thought, which is sorta what I’m preaching. And while I’m sure ChatGPT can be of some assistance with this task, I am doubly certain that something crucial is lost by relying on AI’s help with anything other than the polishing of writing. (More on that in a bit.)
Kurt Vonnegut made a statement in the 90s that has always stuck with me. When asked by some tech rag—Wired, I believe—about the Internet, he said he preferred The Encyclopedia Britannica and good old printed matter, as (and this is me paraphrasing), through downloads and software, humans have been robbed of the process of discovering. Vonnegut remains a hero, but even while reading this bit from him I knew that, while I was sure he was right, the sentiment had an old man quality to it. And people seem keen to dismiss anything coming from an old person’s mouth, regardless of value. The new is always given more shine.
Uncle Kurt may have had a point. The immediacy of information technology has altered us in ways we might not care about, but still… I do worry that GPS has atrophied mental muscles that once allowed me to navigate my way out of being lost. I used to fairly easily figure out which way to go. Now I rely on my phone to tell me when to turn right or left. Okay, I don’t miss scrutinizing maps or wandering into the unfamiliar, but what have I lost by relying on this tech? The process of discovering, as KV stated? I can only imagine more of this loss when AI goes from novel to banal.
While the internet has been (to put it lightly) a mixed blessing, and while my Gen X brain wants to opine that things were better before this technology’s ubiquity, I don’t want to go back to an allegedly “better time.” There’s never really been such a thing. Anyone who thinks there was is as equally deluded as those who uncritically embrace change.
But… I really don’t look forward to AI’s development, implementation, and inevitable corruption. We’re already accepted that this alien is here, that it is inevitable, and ceded our agency to the artificial, which feels pretty goddamn close to giving up. Talk of regulating it, on the rare occasions there is any, is feckless. Trump’s stupidly titled Big Beautiful Bill Act (bill act? did he never watch Schoolhouse Rock?) includes language that would ban states from regulating AI. Tech zealots scoff at any mention of checking their power, tricking the world into thinking their growth is of paramount importance and saying things like, “It’s either us or China!” These are the same people who dismiss college education, though if they had stuck it out in higher ed they may have taken a few humanities classes and studied basic logical fallacies, “either/or” frameworks being among the most elementary.
I can’t see this working out well, but that may be due to my baseline gloomy worldview. Gen Z students tell me I’m too pessimistic. Ditto the Boomers. Maybe my absurdist despair is generational, but I have yet to see the net benefits of introducing something as world-altering as AI into daily life. I know, I know… it’s a tool, and tools are not to blame. Still, tools, as Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman argued, have biases that move us more than we think. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. An old adage that Postman used to illustrate how tools alter us, even subtly, moving from this maxim to ask what the computer person values. To a man with a computer, everything is data, he more or less stated. To a kid with a smartphone, everything is an image worthy of Instagram. To a society filled with AI deep fakes, every news item is an opportunity for suspicion. Every action not entirely organic is marred by doubt. A person overly online, subject to algorithms created to maximize engagement and outrage, has every bias confirmed. Sure, we’ve always been prejudicial and willfully ignorant, given to conspiratorial thinking and panic. Tech hasn’t created any of that, but what good can come from unregulated AI that only amplifies our worst tendencies? That would be the same as giving the worst person you know unlimited cocaine.
Okay, sure, I’ll have a whole new system to get pizza delivered and endless hours of incredibly shop-worn content. Yippee?
On the subject of polishing writing through AI, I’m of two minds. On the one hand, I use spell/grammar check like anyone else. I also look up some words and right click the fuck out of others in search of more precise synonyms. The autocorrect fixes are not always unwelcome. These are some very basic forms of AI, right? Okay, but the more sophisticated tools— Grammarly, ChatGPT, and their ilk— seem set to corporate. The tone they recommend is very often one that flattens language. Even the LLMs, which can be instructed to “write” in different voices, default too often to the dullest English. What else would one expect from scrapping the entire internet for examples of how humans put words together? Well… I’d actually expect something more dynamic, considering the vastness of texts online, not to mention the entirety of canonized work in the public domain and the countless poems from past and present housed by Poetry Foundation, just to name one resource. And while I’m sure someone could show me a more interesting, fresh, exciting composition penned (sorta) by Gemini or some other LLM, my concern is that surrendering to AI writing tools will deaden language, or at least further the fallacious belief in one “correct” English standard. There have already been studies on how AI discriminates against dialects, a sort of codified indictment against any culture not white and upper middle-class or above. And while this very blogpost you’re reading (as if!) is riddled with rhetorical idiosyncrasies that may deter readers not down with my unique voice, I kinda don’t care. I know my audience. It’s tiny enough where I can relish in writing the way I want, which betrays my interests, tendencies, and stylistic concerns. I’ve long stumped for style over plot in literature and more rumination in nonfiction. I’m no enemy of the polished and audience-tested, which has its place depending on task, but to insist that all writing resemble an office memo in tone, to rail against anything that dares not be “tight,” is to argue for uniformity. And that offends my aging punk ass.
