If you could bottle tech-centric hyperbole and market it as a fragrance, the past two months would be a boom time at the parfumerie. (Bad metaphors remain an analog strength, apparently). The age of AI – long heralded and overhyped – is finally upon us, with its quirky chatbots and shockingly competent artists. And with that comes the gleeful certainty that THIS WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING.
I’ve already been warned by a few people that I should worry for my livelihood as a writer. The chatbots are competent and persuasive, and they haven’t even finished kindergarten, in terms of their development. When when I look at the crop of AI generated essays and art posted online, I can’t help thinking of the glut of sexy robot AI stock images.
A few years ago I became somewhat obsessed with stock art depicting AI. Artificial Intelligence, after all, is a non-visual entity: a glut of 1s and 0s housed in distant servers. It can take any shape in the imagination, yet invariably, all the images depicting AI were some variation of sexy robot. You know the type. Gleaming chrome tendons, shiny white cladding, WASP waist, and perky breasts. Each one resembles the love child of Jessica Rabbit and an Imperial Storm Trooper.
And yet, despite the fact that the complicated code of machine learning needs no pinup physique, the trope persists, in awful images of sexy robots holding flowers, driving cars, or touching some virtual spreadsheet in the sky.
I don’t want to get into the deeper reasons for this, which delve into the inherent sexism of tech utopians, and of fantasties that stretch back to Fritz Lang’s “Metropolis” for robo-love objects. What gets me, every time I see another robo fleshbot image is just how lazy it all is. Limittless potential for creativity and the best we have is another tight tush on an android. It’s kind of like images of GOD as a bearded old man. Basic.
So now the robot sex objects are generated by robots (because that’s what they’ve been trained on). This is progress, until the day a young artist draws AI as a middle aged mother of six, overworked and under-appreciated, with the expectation of the world thrust upon her back.
Until then, it’s a fancy version of copy and paste of our worst tropes. Human imagination thrives where it delivers the unexpected, not where it brings us another version of a stock image to post on LinkedIn.
I think it helps us identify what is most important to us. SEO focused articles really don’t inspire us in many ways beyond finding an answer.
I had been feeling a similar way about the triteness of using canva to communicate online, but it’s inescapable since it’s far easier than making post images in photoshop so I just found ways to make it my own.
Midjourney will also be more useful when people learn how to not use it only for fantasy images but more something that they would draw or illustrate themselves. In the meantime yes it’s all a bit much to handle and I tune it out while secretly inputting my own prompts behind the scenes.
Ah! Thanks for this. It’s my hope that “unexpected” will always win out over “random.”