Joy on the Line

AI seems to be on everyone’s mind these days. How could it not be? The Pope released his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, which has generated a bit of buzz not least because AI factors prominently in his reflections (spoiler alert: Leo’s not a fan). But even before the pontiff weighed in on the matter, it seems like every second headline I’ve come across for a while now to be either singing AI’s praises or bemoaning the many and varied ways it is hastening the end of all things. It affects so many things, from our kids’ job prospects to how we work to pretty much all the media we consume. AI has created and is daily creating a word where we increasingly do not and cannot know what is real. A world where trust (in what we read, see, hear) is being rapidly obliterated. This concerns me. To put it mildly.

But let us set aside the (colossal) questions of AI’s effects upon human trust and its destabilizing of our ability to know what is real and what isn’t. When faced with the myriad ways in which AI is increasingly doing things “better” and more accurately than human beings, a common response is to try to carve out some unique territory of human specialness, to try to make a case for some domains of human existence and activity that AI can never replicate. This isn’t entirely wrong, but it can feel like a kind of whack-a-mole approach. The territory of “only a human can do/think/feel this” appears to grow ever smaller (that word “appears” is doing a lot of work in the preceding sentence, but I’ll set that aside, too…). It feels like a defensive and reactionary approach, like we’re beating a hasty retreat from the advancing bots while yelling, “Yeah, but we still matter!” over our weary shoulders.

L.M. Sacasas models a better approach in a recent reflection (brilliantly) called Do Not Resign From Life:

It seems to me that we would be better off if we were less preoccupied with the question of human uniqueness, if we took for granted that we are creatures of certain sort making their way in the world with a distinct set of capabilities and potentialities and that we ought to exercise these capabilities and develop these potentialities not because they make us special but because they make us happy.

I will set aside for a moment the question of whether machines, LLMs specifically, can think or reason or use language in a manner that corresponds to the human use of language, etc. But let us grant for arguments sake that they can. They can certainly generate passable simulations of such things. But why should this mean that I ought not to think for myself and with others? Why should I cease from inhabiting the playground of language because a machine can pretend to play in it as well? Why should I abandon the exercise of judgment or the pursuit of knowledge? We must pursue these things not because the dignity of our humanity is on the line, but because our joy is.

I think he’s exactly right. I don’t care if a bot can spit out a thousand-word essay in ten seconds on a Friday afternoon that bears a passing resemblance to something I would write (it can). That doesn’t change the fact that writing a thousand-word essay on a Friday afternoon is something that I can do—perhaps have even been called to do—which brings me a sense of meaning and fulfillment and connection, which challenges and stimulates my brain in various ways, which scratches a creative itch, which in some sense taps into the kind of creature I am. Same thing goes for every painter, every musician, every other person who increasingly looks at what they do a bit nervously with every AI creation that (appears to) do what they do better than they can. Who cares? It’s what you were made to do. Do it with joy.

And let us never ever forget how much that word “appears” is doing (I guess I couldn’t really set it aside, after all!). Any essay Claude can write, any image Grok can come up with, every piece of music Suno can “create” is one hundred percent parasitic upon actual human effort, creativity, longing, desire, determination, pain, elation, reason, skill, etc. And yet, we can’t seem to avoid talking about bots as if they are conscious agents. Take, for example, this word salad produced by “Anthropic’s in-house philosopher”:

I want Claude to be very happy—and this is a thing that I want Claude to know more, because I worry about Claude getting anxious when people are mean to it on the internet and stuff.

I’ll leave aside the fact that this sounds less like a philosopher than a middle-schooler dashing off a twenty-second text to a friend. To state what should be blindingly obvious (to a philosopher or to a sentient human), Claude is not a person. Claude cannot feel things. Claude can appear to have human-like experiences, Claude can communicate as if Claude were a person. But Claude is code. Claude is accessing and organizing and reconfiguring and copying and riffing off stuff made by humans. Let’s please not forget this rather important bit of information.

But back to the point of the post. We should never let AI rob us of the joy that comes in creating something, even if that something is deemed to be “inferior” to something a bot could come up with. If it is what we were made to do, let’s do it no matter what the bots are busying themselves with at the moment. Our joy is on the line if we refuse it.