Playtime

 One of the various sources of the renewed wave of AI panic sweeping the ranks of pundits this week is the fact that the very thing we thought was most human and least likely to ever be automated—namely, artistic creation—is turning out to be one of the first casualties of generative AI. Screenplays, poems, novels, and illustrations turn out to be some of the things that are easiest to replicate with machines. Which is terrifying. 

But before we succumb to the general anxiety, let us ask exactly what it is we find so appalling about this fact. Are we feeling some threat of existential hollowness or erasure at the fact that something else can now do what we thought we alone could do? This hardly seems warranted. At any rate, the fact that AI chatbots can write blogs too is not all that intrinsically different from the fact that other human beings can write them. 

Another person could write a blog post. But they wouldn't write this one. Because this one is what I alone feel like writing right now. 

The same is true of AI. I could ask a chatbot to write a blog post about the current wave of AI existential dread and its impact on creative professionals. And it might be a perfectly fine post. It might even be excellent. It might, in fact, be better and more readable than this one. But it wouldn't be exactly the same as this one. Because this is the one that I, with my unique brain, felt like writing. 

Our uniqueness and individuality as creators is therefore not threatened by the mere existence of AI—any more than it is by the presence of any number of rival human creators who have always been out there. 

The fear that creative professionals are undergoing right now, then, can't be merely the threat of existential erasure from the presence of other creative minds. It must have something to do with money. 

We fear that AI—even if it can't take away our uniqueness—nevertheless can take away our livelihoods. I may comfort myself with the thought that "No AI would have written exactly this post." But an employer might say: "I don't care if it's exactly what you would have written. If the AI can do it better, or more cheaply, then I'm going with the AI version!" After all, you can't dine on uniqueness and individuality. 

But let me fill you in on a little secret: it's not exactly like I'm being paid to write this blog to begin with. 

This has all along been a labor of love. And the same has been true for most artists and writers and creators throughout history. "In this trade," as the God Apollo tells the poet in a piece by Basil Bunting, "we pay no wages"—no matter how well we sing. 

The era of AI, then, may simply be one in which we have to learn to divorce the urge to create from any expectation of monetary reward. But artists throughout most prior generations have already had to learn this lesson—with no help needed from generative AI. 

As Thomas Carlyle once imagined a "sarcastic man" exclaiming in response to a reasonable demand for pay: Fair day's-wages for fair-day's-work! [...] alas, in what corner of this Planet, since Adam first awoke on it, was that ever realised?  The day's-wages of John Milton's day's-work, named Paradise Lost and Milton's Works, were Ten Pounds paid by instalments, and a rather close escape from death on the gallows. Consider that[!]

In his book on the ABC of Economics, Ezra Pound writes that artists took their wageless condition for granted. "We took it as our punishment for being artists, we expected nothing else." 

He proposes that, under a rational system of economic distribution and abundance, human beings would be permitted to work no longer than four hours a day, in order to prevent the evil of mass unemployment. And if people complain that they are bored, then Pound writes that they should do as the artists have always had to do: create anyway—just don't expect to be paid for it. Bunting again: "in this trade we pay no wages." 

A friend of mine—Seanan—was saying to me the other day that the answer to the problem of creative displacement from AI is that we're going to have to learn to embrace creation in a spirit of "play," rather than of work. Homo faber is going to have to make way for Homo ludens—as Johan Huizinga called him. 

We are going to have to stop talking so much about the dignity of work—my friend said—and start reflecting on the "dignity of play." 

As D.H. Lawrence once wrote, if you want to make a "sane revolution"—don't do it for "international labour"—because "labour is the one thing a man has had too much of." He goes on: "Let's abolish labour, let's have done with labouring! / Work can be fun, and men can enjoy it; then it's not labour." 

We're going to have to endorse on a society-wide scale, in short, what the artists have always known. Work is not the only and true end of humankind. Indeed, as Bertrand Russell puts it, in In Praise of Idleness, it is "emphatically not one of the ends of human life" at all! At best, it is a means. And if we could make it no longer a necessary means, by rationally distributing the gains of abundance, then I am at one with D.H. Lawrence: "let's have done with" it entirely!

From the days of the first artists on, after all, humanity's true heights have always been realized in play. Ecce homo ludens!