there's a short story I read ages ago by Kurd Lasswitz, "The Universal Library" (https://libraryofbabel.info/Borges/KurdLasswitz-TheUniversalLibrary.pdf), which thrashes out the following idea: couldn't you easily make a library of all human knowledge by filling a set of volumes with all possible permutations of an alphabet? Lasswitz assumes each volume of the "Universal Library" contains a million characters from an alphabet of a hundred letters, and works out that the known Universe isn't big enough to hold more than the teensiest tiniest fraction of the whole Library. yes, the lost works of every lost poet and playwright (suitably translated) would be in the Universe Library, along with corrupt texts of all the same poets and playwrights, and how could you easily sort them apart? it's a clever little story; Willy Ley wrote an appendix exploring the idea further and showing that even if you tried drastically reducing the size of the volumes in the Library, you still arrive at impossibly large quantities of text and impossibly long spans of time needed to print the Library—in comparison, that is, to our best estimates of the dimensions and lifespan of the physical Universe.
but I suspect that a "Universal Library"-ish sentiment still pervades the world of capitalist technology, in which the physical limitations of the Universe get waved away with a flourish of "techno-optimism". it's like we're invited to believe that Moore's Law will somehow crash through the limitations of physical matter—now I have to admit, this isn't entirely impossible, if the near future brings an unexpected overhaul of our "laws of physics", but that's the most speculative of all gambles—and keep rising upwards and upwards, always; there'll always be faster computers, denser storage media, ad infinitum, and therefore it's possible to imagine a machine that outputs all possible literature through a simple algorithm. at last creativity can be disposed of; everything now exists, so there's no more need for creators. I guess that goes hand in hand with a common sentiment in geek culture that there's only a few possible "good stories" (or maybe only ONE possible story, the Hero's Journey) and all "creativity" is therefore merely shuffling different elements through the same formulae. and if the story doesn't follow the formula, it's "objectively bad".
what worries me the most is it seems like the grey goo diet is addictive; it's like the creative equivalent of drinking Soylent instead of eating meals. somehow you think it's "complete" and has everything you need. why pay for writers or artists when grey goo is so much easier to produce in quantity, and it has the same reliably average flavor, and you can tell yourself that it's capable of anything?
you know...we ourselves would like to work on AI-assisted creativity in some fashion; we're no experts at that sort of thing, but we don't dislike the core idea. but in the hands of its current masters we're not getting creativity, we're getting a kipple generator.
maybe there's the teeniest tiniest smidge of creative energy involved (much of it stolen and unacknowledged, from all the creative works of others that are greedily hoovered up for "training") but overall, the current "AI" tools seem designed to produce the kind of "writing" and "art" that's meant to be effectively used only once and and then thrown away. it's like the sort of creative work you'd put on a box of corn flakes or paste onto a cake of soap, knowing that most people will glance at it briefly, maybe smile if they like it, and then drop it in the trash. it's stuff you put into a tweet or a blog post and then forget about next day, because you can always make more.
it feels malevolent...but it also feels pathetic. I find myself thinking that one of the childhood dreams that must get crushed the most often and the most painfully is the dream of being a creative person. it's practically a joke among abusive parents: oh gawd my kid wants to be a musician, now I'm gonna have to slap some sense into them. it's a plot element of that terrifyingly cynical D&D scare movie, Mazes and Monsters: the creativity of the gamers in the movie is portrayed as something close to delusional, getting lost in fantasy rather than deal squarely with The Real World™. one of the kids wants to make games when he grows up; at the end, he's beaming and happy because now he wants to get a normie software executive job and make not games but money. it happened to us. we're almost fifty, and not yet recovered from getting our artistic and creative ambitions stamped on early—and somehow it was worse because a lot of the damage was done by a mother who said she valued art and literature and music. for a while we may have been as cynical about creativity as Sam Altman, though then Life™ happened and we got kicked away from the STEM-lord milieu.
and then there's the effect of the computer, which has sucked all creativity into itself—even the manufacture of physical objects. why do scrollsaw work by hand when you can control the same cuts from a computer model? why carve or sculpt when you can 3D print? it's the inevitable march of technology, but I feel like it's gotten...out of balance. practical arts haven't died; people still have woodshops, they still work clay and stone, and so forth. but all the money and attention go to the latest computer-generated thingummies. community college classes drop their practical-arts programs so they can teach more people how to make web pages. it feels like doing things by hand is out of fashion.
I don't know where I'm going with this, I'm just...unhappy with things. ~Chara