Test Obituary no. 3
Don't Tell Me What You Can't Do
The Machine War
The office is flooding. The walls never helped us and the ceiling doesn't matter. Vibrant blue water is rising up, submerging our pens and staplers, threatening to displace our precious air. If you spend any time on YouTube, you’ve seen the ads from a well known grammar check software company. A student or office worker is sitting at a desk, stressing out about a deadline, which is made manifest in the bizarre literalization of being swamped with work or feeling underwater as the clock runs out. Inevitably, a human colleague of the near-drowned human floats into the scene on an inflatable pool toy or in a rowboat. Why are you torturing yourself? ask the dry people. The grammar software company can do the work for you using artificial intelligence. As the liquid rises the stakes are clear: adopt the generative AI tools or die. This is how we lose the machine war.
The grammar software company is far from the most popular generative AI vendor out there, but it seems to be the one heading the propaganda arm of the 21st century conflict with robots prophesied by James Cameron and the Wachowskis. The colourful commercials dividing humans into wet luddites and dry early adopters are a strong push for the business use case of chatbots. As a pitch, it seems like it could be effective. For years the refrain from artificial intelligence early adopters has been that we need to learn how to use AI now or be left behind. The commercials show you what that means in the workplace from the perspective of prioritizing pleasure above all else. Work is hard. School is hard. Offload your work and school to a machine and focus on feeling good.
But consider the water in that commercial. What does it represent? As much as I suspect many in the CEO class would love for non-adopters to literally sink into a killing tide of irrelevance, the strange blue liquid filling the ad campaign's offices will not kill the wet workers. These people are afraid of their own incompetence, that failure to meet an expectation will reveal them as impostors in their own professional community. When the weird water—which seems to be heavier than air but dense enough to prevent human bodies from swimming—covers a person’s nostrils, they’re going to be in trouble. Maybe they’ll lose their job. But they don’t have to. Not if they use a homework machine. Have you seen the basement office that had a leak? Ever since their employees started using generative AI for work, they all float down there. Press the button and you can float, too.
Giving in to the floaties is giving up on humanity. And if your boss or your teacher says otherwise, stick a magnet to their toaster-sympathetic skull—it won’t be long before it’s empty anyway. When you automate your reading and writing, you stop reading and writing, so you forget how to read and write. Skills need practice, even the boring ones, or they atrophy. If you let your computer check your grammar, you stop remembering the learnable rules of syntax and style. If you let your computer do your work, you forget how to do your job. If you let your computer write your wedding vows, you stop remembering why you love your spouse.
A much less vibrant ad from the grammar software company has started showing up before my videos now. It is presented in the format of a webinar—narration over infographics and slides. A man’s voice, using the rhetoric and tone of a teacher, presents educational applications for artificial intelligence. The first proposal is having students use chatbots to generate ideas for assignments. Literally have the machine do the easiest part for you. Thinking is hard. Ideas hurt. Offload your basic cognition to a machine and feel good. When software can give you a perfectly useable topic with the click of a mouse, why spend the energy imagining something with your built-in wetware?
There are many answers to that question—generative AI is tantamount to plagiarism and each query depletes a war crime’s worth of resources—but the best is from French philosopher Descartes: I think, therefore I am. And if I stop thinking because a machine can do it for me, I might as well not exist. But there’s good news. We’re not there yet. This is all just a story we’re being told so that we give up, give in, and let a handful of companies convince us we are incapable of doing anything.
Last week, CBC reported on the use of generative AI in Halifax schools. As an example of how it was being deployed, the article describes a novel activity: producing machine-created images based on poems written by students. I can understand how that might seem engaging, adding a quick visual burst to something a student wrote. But then I read a quote from one of the grade sevens subjected to exercises like this. The kid described the AI tool as “a win” for him because he’s “not very good at drawing.” My heart broke. A thirteen-year-old can become good at anything. But they won’t if you limit them. And if an adult is within earshot of that kind of defeatist self-talk, it is the older human’s moral imperative to correct it. The same goes for us all. We can learn to do beautiful things. All we have to do is put our minds to it, wade into the deep blue of self doubt, and remember we can breathe underwater.
PETER COUNTER is a culture critic writing about television, video games, film, music, and technology. He is the author of Be Scared of Everything: Horror Essays and How to Restore a Timeline: On Violence and Memory.
TEST OBITUARY is a journal where he explores unfinished ideas about culture and shares it with you. If you would like to contact Peter about anything you can follow him on Bluesky or email: contemplatethevoid@gmail.com