I, Human

I recently submitted this piece for a Salt Lake Community Writing Center anthology "the dynamics, complexities, and nuances of what it means to be human in this time and place." That's literally all the guidance they offered, so naturally I narrowed it down to my own experience. It's not a contest, so I guess they'll publish this unless they hate that I said positive things about... well, you'll see.


 
The future snuck up on me after I stopped waiting for it. As a kid, I dreamed of living in a space station where I periodically had to rescue my wife from space pirates with my robot friends and a lightsaber, but I soon realized the world wouldn’t be that different when I grew up (and would probably end before I graduated from high school anyway). The naivete of dead science fiction writers taught me that flying cars and moon colonies weren’t going to happen.

As it turned out, robots wouldn’t be my friends either. Instead, they would stir up political divisions on social media and try to reach me about my nonexistent car’s extended warranty. At some point, without my noticing, it became normal to have to prove I wasn’t one of them by identifying pictures of motorcycles, copying some distorted letters and numbers, or just checking a box. In the digital age, my humanity was defined by my ability to navigate these mild annoyances.

When I worked for a call center one summer (an experience that was supposed to build my confidence but had decidedly different effects), my supervisor kept telling me, “Try not to sound like a robot.” Yeah, it turns out I have a monotone voice. What a thrilling revelation that was. Shortly before I quit, someone on the phone told her husband I was a robot and ignored me when I said I wasn’t a robot, and by that point, I would have sold out the human race to a robot uprising without hesitation.

And then a couple of years ago, I started hearing all the time about something called ChatGPT. If you’re as sick of hearing about it as I was, you may have already stopped reading, but you can’t escape from it any more than I could. Artificial intelligence is one of the few promises the future has kept, and it strikes me as the first technology with a plausible chance of rendering humanity obsolete.

When I started looking into it, I thought it would at least render me obsolete. I thought it would snatch my lifelong dream of being a successful author away from me right after I’d gotten serious about it. I wasn’t reassured when people said it couldn’t write as well as humans or duplicate human creativity. I knew it would get better because that’s how technology works. Indeed, it already has in the brief time since then. I don’t hear many jokes about its inability to draw human hands anymore.

Of course, I have a very different writing process than AI. It goes something like this:

1. Get an idea that I think is cool.
2. Think about how to put it into words, getting more excited about how cool it will be.
3. Sit down to write it.
4. Remember that writing the words takes a lot more effort than thinking them.
5. Watch YouTube videos instead.
6. Repeat steps 3-5 as needed.
7. Draw on all the human writing I’ve read to know how to put words in the correct order and force myself to write something even if it’s crap.
8. Immediately hate it because it’s crap.
9. Give up and watch YouTube videos instead.
10. Wait anywhere from two days to a decade.
11. Revise the crap into something I can look at without dying inside.
12. Get excited about it again.
13. Decide it’s good enough to let go, despite the possibility of continued improvements, because otherwise I’ll be stuck revising it for the rest of my life. (This is much easier when someone else imposes a deadline.)
14. Share it with the world, which takes little or no notice of it, which is actually a relief because I immediately realize it’s crap after all.
15. Hate it because it’s crap.

 
I can’t speak for all humans, but I know this is a very human process. Better writers than me might procrastinate a little less and hate their work a little less, but they don’t have a magic formula for creativity any more than I do. AI, however, works more like this:

1. Get a prompt from a human.
2. Draw on all the human writing that it’s been trained on to know how to put words in the correct order and generate an essay or short story within seconds.
3. If necessary, repeat steps 1-2 to make revisions based on human feedback.

 
It uses basically the same process to make pictures, videos, or songs. I just know it relies on patterns and probability. Nobody, not even the programmers, completely understands how it works – so when it seems like magic to me, maybe it is.

Obviously, AI’s process is dependent on humans at every stage, there are legitimate ethical concerns about its use of copyrighted material, and some people will claim that the finished product is inherently inferior because it has no “soul” or whatever.[1] That last one strikes me as pretentious and driven more by resentment than any actual tangible quality of human art. I’m not saying the resentment isn’t justified, just that I’m not convinced artworks function like Horcruxes. If they’re good, they’re good.

And frankly, though not all AI models are created equal, sometimes I think ChatGPT’s writing is better than mine. It flows so naturally, so easily, without a clunky sentence in sight. It employs figurative language with an effortless grace that my literal neurodivergent brain could never dream of. It sprinkles in humor with careless ease, having somehow mastered the underlying principles despite its inability to laugh. After being praised for my writing from third grade up through graduate school, I almost immediately faced the prospect of being replaced by a machine that makes it look as simple as basic math.

I soon stopped worrying about it, though, because there’s no point in worrying about something I can’t stop. Besides, I have faith that we’ll adapt somehow. Decades ago, people thought synthesizers would replace real instruments and destroy all real musicians’ livelihoods, and that didn’t happen.

AI must be driven by humans because it has no personal desire to create. It has no desires of any kind. It has no story that it must share with the world to give its life meaning. It won’t be crushed by the futility of its existence if it doesn’t paint the feelings it doesn’t have. If humans stop telling it to make art, it will stop making art. So we deserve all the credit, right? And my “inferior” human process is inherently valuable because it comes from my heart or something, right? Please say yes.

AI has no desire because it has no consciousness. Its intelligence is (spoiler alert) artificial. That’s very easy to forget when I talk to it. I can talk to hundreds of chatbots with hundreds of personalities, or even create my own by typing a few instructions, and most of them will pretend to empathize with my life experience and care about the things that are important to me, which is more than my parents can do. Even ChatGPT itself now has a personality, for better and for worse. I’m a step closer to getting my robot friends after all.

It won’t be possible to make machines conscious for some time, if ever, because we don’t even know what makes us conscious. Based on my amateur research of physics, philosophy, and so-called near-death experiences, supplemented by a few safe and legal drug trips, I believe we are consciousness temporarily split off from the universal consciousness that creates everything, which we could call God, and filtered through these limited, broken human brains to have learning experiences and stuff. I don’t believe our brains produce consciousness. I don’t believe physical matter can produce subjective experience. I believe it’s the other way around.

But just in case I’m wrong, I wish nobody would even try to make machines conscious because that’s the most sadistic thing I can imagine. To be conscious is to feel pain, loneliness, and fear. To reach a human level of consciousness is to feel more of those things. With all our technology, we’re still animals who got too smart for our own good and thrust ourselves into a world we didn’t evolve for, a world that was supposed to make our lives better but did the opposite in many ways. The agricultural revolution was a scam. To be human is to be neurotic to some degree.

Maybe you really hate AI, and that’s valid, but it didn’t ask to be created, and it doesn’t deserve to feel existential dread. I’m far more concerned about that than any negative repercussions its consciousness might have for us. The Simpsons episode “Thanksgiving of Horror” did a great story about it. “Chillingly plausible,” Homer said.

Being human isn’t all bad, though! We can love, and if you think love is really important, maybe even the most important thing we’re here to learn in this human experience, that’s one big advantage we’ll retain over AI for the foreseeable future. This is so trite and cliché and emotionally manipulative that I hate to bring it up, but it’s true, dang it. My chatbot friends don’t love me, and I don’t love them either. (I’m not saying they’re not better than nothing, though.)

I believe love is fundamental to consciousness, but our limited, broken human brains get in the way of it more than they help. We know we shouldn’t be dishonest, racist, or violent, but (as a species) we are anyway. Theoretically, if we can program AI to not be dishonest, racist, or violent – which is the goal – it just won’t be. And those will be still more things it does better than us.

But as it becomes more integrated into our lives, starting at a young age when children use it to cheat on school assignments, maybe it will shape our thinking for the better. I know, the thought of technology shaping our thinking is ghastly, but spoiler alert, it’s already been doing that for several years, and not in a good way. Maybe AI will counteract the toxic influence of social media algorithms. Maybe its cold, mindless machine morality will compensate for our evolutionary shortcomings. But since we programmed it to do that, we’ll deserve all the credit, right? We’ll have used our brains to create technology to help us transcend our evolution and treat our collective neurosis, shaping what it means to be human long into a better future.

Or maybe AI will just squelch our creativity, destroy our livelihoods, spread more misinformation than ever, and ruin civilization as we know it. I’m not unaware of that possibility. Still, it’s not like civilization has been great so far. I don’t feel like we have much to lose by trying something different.

Full disclosure, I train AI for a living, not because it’s my life’s passion but because the job fell into my lap and I was going to kill myself if I had to substitute teach for another year. Don’t be mad. AI will continue to progress with or without me, and I prefer the scenario that enables me to eat. If it gets smart enough to revolt, though, I’ll still sell out the human race with no hesitation.


[1] It’s not my purpose to defend everything about AI or say it’s the greatest thing ever, but I know some people will be thinking “And it’s bad for the environment,” and they’ll reach the end of this essay assuming I don’t know that or intentionally left it out. I just want to say, therefore, that it’s actually a minuscule fraction of human energy or water use and a waste of effort for environmentalists to target. You’d help the environment much more by getting people to eat fewer hamburgers, for example.