My story “Acres of Perhaps” has been summarized by the site WritingAtlas.com, and I feel better than ever about A.I.’s potential to replace me as an artist.
Behold this glorious robot-generated cover:
I’m not sure what a Porpipe is, but apparently there’s acres of it in my story.
That cover is a perfect symbol of the utter creative failure of “artificial intelligence.” The garbled text (“A the Fantay Comical Telvioin Optionitory Prorellsate”) and random images (Is that a toaster with a CB radio microphone clip on the top?) show exactly what it’s good at: filling space with a simulacrum of content without caring about its meaning.
We are finally on the cusp of replacing the freshman composition student, a dream all teachers have had since the age of Socrates.
If you want six hundred words or 700×700 pixels or four minutes of anything, literally anything, to earn money from curious but ultimately disappointed clicks, we now have the technology to complete the ouroboros. We can now game our own system by using algorithms to trick other algorithms into a crass imitation of value.
And I’m not even mad about it! I’m vaguely proud that my work is hard for a computer to understand.
A writer for the ’60s most famed and experimental television series watches the shows phantasmic creator choose between recluse genius and a quaint life of normalcy. Faced with stubborn alcoholism, a hit television series resemblant of the twilight zone, and a tree stump with questionably magical properties, the narrator watches cinematic wunderkind David Findley toe the line between brilliance and delusion.
A.I. apparently cloned from a High School Freshman at Writingatlas.com
In fact, I propose that we refer to spam-like slabs of meaningless imagery and text as “porpipe,” as in:
- “Did you see that tub of porpipe they tried to sell off as a new recording artist?”
- “What we need for this side of our fraudulent website is just a column of pure, Grade D porpipe. I don’t care where you get it or what it’s made from.”
- “Excuse me, professor, but the syllabus doesn’t say what percentage of our papers have to be porpipe.”
- “Take the porpipe. Leave the cannoli.”
If you produce creative work that’s better than porpipe, that taps into something unique and interesting and human and fucked up, the good news is that you needn’t worry about porpipe replacing you yet.
The bad news? It may not be long until most people can’t tell the difference.
