Writing In The AI Years, 1: Taste is Spooky
Lots of things won't be turned into code anytime soon. Like the gut hunch.
During my stint as a university lecturer1 I future-proofed a students against having their careers automated away by Artificial Intelligence. I told them, “you can’t encode taste.”
This was between 2005 and 2015, long before the generative AI revolution. Today I can have AI write this piece as a poem (and did - read on.) Seconds later I can get a picture of a raccoon reading it on their phone while skateboarding. A few more clicks, and this image can have a soundtrack.
And you know what? I’m still confident in my advice. You can’t encode taste, and that’s a really big deal.
None of this is to take away from what AI does,2 which amounts to…impressive human creativity. People now build machines that scan billions of words, sentences and paragraphs, to build a corpus of patterns and connections among them.3 The machines use this corpus of stored relationships to statistically generate new output - fulfilling requests that other humans give them in ordinary language.
That is impressive, no question. An amazing feat - by the humans who built the machine. When IBM’s Big Blue beat Kasparov at chess, I didn’t think computers had won; I thought it was amazing that engineers had built a machine that could beat a chess master. Way to go, humans!
Critically, the machine-generated output has nothing to do with taste (aside from the choices the human engineers made.) Or, if you prefer, intuition, or “gut feeling”. Those things are human products of training, experience, and imagination. It can deliver something that fulfills the request, but that is far from the whole of effective communication. This is where the very spooky qualities of taste come in.
If you ponder it, having a gut feeling involves input from emotion, memory, engagement with other people, anticipation, desire, and all sorts of other things that so far can’t be represented in software. Computers, in anything like their present form, can with luck succeed with a best guess based on data, a vastly different thing from the true “taste” dimension of the creative process.
Taste, or gut feeling, is also specific to an individual and their world. I have reasonable taste in how I’ll structure a piece of writing. I might use repetition to evoke certain feelings, and I’ll weigh how one word feels against another.4 I’ve been thinking about and doing this for decades. On the other hand, I have zero gut feeling for calling the right football play when it’s the closing minutes of a big game. I know the basic data, but I have no experience, no imagination, and no desire or urgency around playing professional football. No passion, no gut.
Which is to say, if something is not part of my individual identity, I’m probably not going to have any taste for it. And individual identity is something else that computers don’t have, along with the attendant anxiety that keeps humans going. Unless I missed something, and Chat GPT-3 felt bad about being turned off so that Chat GPT-4 could move in.
That’s why I feel safe as a writer, and why I encouraged my students to develop taste in their chosen subject.
I am fully mindful, however, that I built up a good basis for my taste decades before GenAI was on the scene. It’s definitely going to be tougher for people starting out now to get the early-stage training that’s necessary to start building taste.
Starting out, I did a lot of elementary work (editing down long stories so they were short features for a wire service, and putting together pretty predictable market comments), the kind of writing which AI can now do, sort of.5 Well enough, anyway, that a lot of entry-level work is going away.
On Sunday I’ll write a bit more about ways around this, along how good writing can also steal from well-run machines.
I was a guest lecturer at the U.C. Berkeley School of Information (now the iSchool) from 2005-2015. Teaching a class in the relationship between communications technology, epistemology, and social organization. It was a lot of fun, if exhausting, since every week something new was being invented.
Doing, as in a computer doing stuff with electronic signals. It’s not thinking, learning, reading, remembering, hallucinating, or any of the other brain/mind activities that have unfortunately crept into the discourse.
That machines can take commands and deliver answers in human language is another impressive human achievement, and maybe the biggest long-term impact in GenAI.
I don’t want to wreck the magic here, but go back to Sunday’s piece, and look at the way I used images of moving forward while looking backward, memory and the smothering of memory, and eventually the child’s unwitting complicity in the repression of memory, foreshadowed in the game(s) referenced in the second paragraph. There were a lot of other choices like that in there, not meant to be noticed overtly, but intended to build an emotional effect in the reader. Bet your AI can’t do that
Just for the hell of it, I asked Google Gemini to turn the first section of this Substack into a poem. It follows:
A digital dawn, a future's gleam,
Where AI's might, a potent dream.
Machines that learn, that think, that write,
A novel world, a wondrous sight.
But in this realm, a truth remains,
A human spark, that ever reigns.
A subtle touch, a knowing glance,
A taste refined, a soulful chance.
For AI's grasp, though vast and deep,
Can't fathom dreams, nor sorrows weep.
It lacks the heart, the soul's embrace,
The artist's eye, the poet's grace.
So let us cherish, this human art,
The intuition, the beating heart.
The gut instinct, the sudden spark,
That sets us free, beyond the dark.
Though AI's rise, a force unseen,
Our taste, our touch, will ever glean.
A unique perspective, a knowing eye,
A human edge, that can't die.
It would scan better if you made that last line have a “cannot,” little buddy. Among several other things. It’s amazing, the way a dog walking on its hind legs is amazing, even if the dog doesn’t walk all that well (h/t Samuel Johnson for that.)
What is the thing with machine poems always going in for rhyming couplets and heavy meter? Even more, why does “poem” always equal “sentimental, positive pap”? It’s cute, and sort of uplifting, but it doesn’t actually deal with the substance of what I was saying about authentic creativity, and things that can’t be encoded. It’s also unlikely you’ll remember any of it 10 minutes from now.
OK, that poem is freaking me out a little. But you are right, it isn't memorable.
I like that you went from taste to "gut feeling," because another thing a computer lacks is a brain/body relationship. How much of human consciousness and our gut feelings come from our body's physical interaction with the world? The concept of "muscle memory" is largely debunked -- a professional boxer doesn't throw rapid combinations under pressure because their arms and torso have "learned" the moves, but the mind and body have used their experiences and practice to allow the brain to direct action faster than consciousness can keep track of. So the body matters. The gut matters, as a gut, not just a metaphor.