Context #
After publishing Digitally Manufacturing an Infinite Amount of Soapboxes, I had a few discussions with people in actual life. By actual I mean people’s biological counterpart of their digital one(s). You know, the one that cannot be as easily and entirely faked as the ones online. And to be perfectly honest, I’m fortunate to be surrounded by those folks. They are kind and, above everything else, patient. Especially with me — even though (or probably because) we don’t see each other that often anymore. Everyone’s busy with their own life. And some are tired of dealing with people all day long. They are simply looking forward to some quiet time. Something I currently have in abundance.
You see, in the past five years, I was given the opportunity to focus more and more on my own (research) interests. Without interference from other people. No bosses, no superiors. And, of course, no money. In other words, in a not so distant future, I’m going to be broke. But before meeting whatever fate awaits, I’ll keep working on my projects. The reason: finding purpose.
My interests are manifold. A deeply rooted desire to explore language in its expressive vastness has enabled me to dabble in different linguistic communities and cultures. Something that has proven to be invaluable over time. A passion for technology has gifted me with a kind of autonomy that most people I know couldn’t care less about: “Why go through the effort of painstakingly learning so much if you can just create an account and be done with it?”, they ask. A few days later, they end up calling: “Please, fix my tech stuff!”, and I laugh — on my way to the bank.
In all seriousness though, I do study a lot. As an autodidact, I’ve never needed external stimuli to learn new things. I primarily do so because I’m pretty good at converting my knowledge into free time for myself. “Why not into money?”, you ask. Well, because free time is worth more to me. But let me give you a tangible example.
TV Days #
One of the many different roles during my professional life had to do with post-production at a local TV station. I was responsible for the translation of two TV programs, one on culture and society; the other one on architecture. Essentially, I was hired to fill a position left vacant by someone who had moved on to retirement.
Before my arrival, my predecessor had still been using pen and paper to get his translation work done. Actual pen and paper! Not digital, not metaphorical. And, as I was told later, he still had a heavy-weight book of a dictionary in his arsenal. In short: he probably spent an eternity looking up those words instead of actually, you know, translating.
So once I finally started at my new part-time1 position, I was perfectly positioned to be taken advantage of. Same workload as my other colleague working on two different TV programs in a full-time capacity, but earning half the salary.
Since I wasn’t in a position to negotiate anything at the time, I had to come up with a different plan to make that new job work. Luckily, the position came with an unbelievable amount of inefficiencies (especially regarding the workflow). Put differently, there was a tremendous opportunity to improve things and to take full advantage of the situation — rather than being taken advantage of.
So for the first two months, the strategy was to forego my life as a student in favor of my new job. I would work full-time (plus some extra-time) in my professional role. Indeed, my ingenious plan was to work double the time for half the salary. Which leads me to a fundamental question: what even is a job?
Besides being a title used to position ourselves when we’re playing status games at social occasions or to (lazily) frame our otherwise empty lives with some kind of purpose, a job is simply an umbrella term for a group of tasks or activities (excluding the conceptual aspects for reasons not worth mentioning here). You know, stuff that has to be taken care of. Which is actually great because there are many, many (different) ways to approach such tasks, both directly (actually completing the task) and indirectly (managing and allocating time and resources to the task, learning appropriate tools to help us complete the tasks and so on). And the latter was precisely where I had found my opportunity to turn the tables.
You see, my job in post-production for the translated version of those two TV programs came with a lot of different tasks — and a reliance on quite a few different people: tech personnel for the video and audio editing; IT personnel to set up the workstations and install the required software; voice actors for the narration of the episodes; and probably one or two other people I forgot about. Not to mention the tasks that should’ve been mine — such as subtitle integration —, but were still taken care of by the tech folks. And because there were so many people involved (who themselves had many other projects going at the time), it took forever to finish a fully translated 20-minute episode.
Now, as I’ve said: there was a tremendous opportunity to make my unfortunate salaried situation a little more acceptable. So within those first two months, I managed to learn the ropes to take care of every single task myself, completely cutting out everyone else involved in a process that should’ve been entirely mine from the get-go. And most of the people involved were actually quite happy to help and provide me with what I needed. After all, it made their already busy lives a little less so. Except for two types of participants in the chain: IT and voice-over.
IT was less than happy to simply give me control over my own workstation. That was a problem because the amount of crap installed on those computers and the move to an unbelievably inefficient and fragile software solution was unacceptable to me. Fortunately, there was room for negotiation. So I was given a license for the previously used and still perfectly working software as well as some smaller equipment (e.g. a mic for recording the voice-over) to set up my own workstation at home. Which I did, leading us to the other type of participant in the chain. After taking some voice-over lessons and setting up my own little “studio”, the voice-over actor wasn’t needed anymore on my translation “team”. All I needed was the original episodes and I could take care of the fully translated versions by myself — no external help required.
So after a little over two months, I managed to convert my job in translation and post-production to a fully remote position and to reduce five half-days at work per week (mostly wasting time) to two full-days per month at home (actually working). In other words, that initially ridiculously low-paid job became one of the best-paid jobs I ever had — without getting a raise in the process.
This leads me back to the beginning of the piece: while I wasn’t actually automating anything at my TV-job (just eliminating redundancies), over the next couple of years, the translator job increasingly became the subject of actual automation. Including other tasks I had to familiarize myself with at my various different other jobs. And no, I’m not reading about these things in the news or on personal websites of people who demonize what’s currently happening with the progress in artificial intelligence. Rather, I decided to invest my time into learning how to build a local inference box that is powerful enough to help me work on my things with an even greater efficiency and autonomy than I had managed to obtain after those first two months at the local TV station — and to prioritize my free time and to spend a good chunk of it in nature; listen to music; read; and play the occasional video game. Oh, and of course, write a lot. Because that’s what I enjoy.
Back during my TV days, however, I still had to take on a second part-time job because being a member of society doesn’t come cheap. Luckily, that second job came with its own inefficiencies…
AI and Change #
Here’s what I already mentioned over a year ago in Finding Purpose:
Something that seems undeniably more difficult than beating the camera in Sekiro is to determine the authenticity of whatever we see on a screen, hear through speakers, etc. As a matter of fact, at the time of writing I feel quite comfortable to use the term impossible.
Back then, I already had a computer for local inference to explore AI’s capabilities in different modalities such as text, images, and audio. And the amusing thing was that the people who had neither the time to learn nor the conceptual understanding required — let alone the technical ability to explore the recent advances in AI — were still telling me what’s possible and what’s not. And that I’m probably a little crazy. So while I am not exactly proud of it, that experience had led to the more cynical parts in Coexisting with Artificial Intelligence. A piece I had enjoyed writing for all the wrong reasons. Still, no regrets as it was an incredibly valuable learning experience overall.
Anyway, the problem isn’t that we can use current advances in artificial intelligence to turbo-charge the creation of so-called fake material (online) — as those people full of hate (probably a very vocal minority) seem to misunderstand. It’s that we live in a human reality where we are incentivized to take shortcuts to avoid drowing in the challenges thrown at us by life itself.
Of course, picking the next boogeyman and metaphorically torching everything perceived as the new threat is way easier than questioning the foundation of something like an entire society or culture that ends up being affected by what I’d rather call change.
Over the past couple of years, that change has made it pretty much impossible to verify the authenticity of anything that we’re exposed to online. But let’s stay a little closer…
Is this very text AI written? How would you know? Looking for clues already? Well, putting on my linguist’s hat, I can tell you that whatever clues you might be looking for, I am very likely aware of as well. And that means I know how to prompt my AI companion to make sure you won’t find them present in my writing. Then again, maybe I even deliberately use some of those AI flagged words, phrases and structures in my own writing. That would be a false flag. Or, really, I could just produce a certain amount of original writing and then use it as a blueprint for AI to generate text in my own style. That simple.
So what next? Since you cannot tell, are you simply supposed to assume that this is AI written and let everybody know that you won’t waste your precious time on a website that might have something that’s generated by AI? Perhaps. No one’s gonna stop you. And rest assured: my original writing serves a different purpose than to argue with angry people about pointless things. Besides, that would be a perfect use case for an LLM.
With all that in mind, if you want the internet, the digital space, to finally become something that we can be proud of, you — nay, we! — gotta do better than to share our opinions and feelings! Because when it comes to expressing them in a digital format, those opinions and feelings can be automated. In fact, everything that serves as an incentive to make money; to increase our status; or to gain power over others, will be automated to achieve those goals ahead of the competition. And really, a lot can already be automated. Maybe not fully, but definitely significantly.
This is probably where it’s time to ask ourselves: if digital content can be that easily automated, then why don’t we start by tackling things that actually help us in some way or another? Not to make money or become Mr. and Ms. Popular, but you know…to become more autonomous and fulfilled human beings.
The sad thing is that I still have a lot of unpublished material and I start to wonder whether I should actually publish it. Not because of AI, but because of humans. Essentially, I’ve been working on some of my material for a couple of years. Yes, years. So why would I want to make such a monumental effort only to end up publishing it on a small island in the middle of an ocean of hostility?
Unlike the loud voices producing words full of derision for AI, I find the progress in recent years actually liberating and exciting. As I wrote in Finding Purpose:
we humans can still participate in deciding how authentic we want our own contributions to be.
As long as we don’t work on things in a competitive manner, there’s no reason to work with AI to cheat and deceive. We can play a different game. One where we are allowed to take our time. One where we work with technological advances to help ourselves and others. Just a simple example: all those people who lack the ability to express themselves can now be aided by the progress in AI to finally do so. Sure they won’t need you anymore — or me for that matter (my last translation gig was this year: pretty much paid nothing compared to the “good” old times). And I, for one, am truly excited for them as well as for myself.
Personally, I am now able to take on projects alone and in an unbelievably efficient manner. Because as I wrote about my previous job at the local TV station: to advance my own work, I don’t have to deal with different people, their schedules and moods. Most of the time, eliminating inefficiencies means reducing the human factor to a minimum. Until we’re ready to share and combine our efforts, of course. I’m not arguing for modern hermits, dear reader. Relax. I enjoy hanging out with people in actual life — in small doses.
In my case, for example, I can now work on things like translating this entire website to multiple languages in a few afternoons rather than a couple of months full-time; I can create my own visual or audio material if I think it contributes to my writing. And I could just automate the writing too, couldn’t I? But this is my own website! Why would I do that? Writing is my passion. I don’t have any bosses or superiors who could fire or remove me from that process. Because on this website, I am the final and only boss!
By contrast, what others are doing with the new advances is their business. I’m not here to judge. Deception and lack of authenticity are going to thrive for a while, that much should be crystal clear at this point. But AI isn’t the cause. Most of the internet I’ve seen has been a cesspool for way longer and the only culprit is the human — simply using the fruit of progress (or change if you prefer a more neutral term) to amplify the same shit into infinity. Playing status games in order to become special in the eyes of others; trying to maximize the amount of money in their bank account so they can buy themselves what they think is freedom; become powerful and tell others what to do instead of being told how to live. Meanwhile, I try to build my own little sandcastle because I simply don’t care for a society and culture that want me to be nothing but a simple cog in a wheel. Some folks, yours truly included, would be better off dead in that case. That’s something I’ve come to terms with a long time ago.
So the way things are right now, I wouldn’t even be surprised if the one potential reader I might end up getting on this website (besides my parents2) will probably want some kind of proof that my writing isn’t AI generated. The only thing I can reply to that is: I don’t compete with anyone for anything on this website. Writing is the main objective. And, besides, whatever I publish has almost always been read by and/or discussed with at least one person3. In other words, all of my publications have already served some kind of purpose. Whether they can serve one more is entirely up to you.