If AI wins and we lose

As much as there's no point in arguing with the language of a bully, you hear the same things over and over again and none of it makes sense and you occasionally have to engage and ask "What are you even trying to say?"

One bit we've seen repeatedly for the past decade is "[x] lives rent-free in your head." You have Trump Derangement Syndrome, Trump's living rent-free in your head. Apparently the rent-free phrase originated with Ann Landers, but it's now all over the more 4chan-y corners of the internet, which is to say "the internet." And it's like, yes, that is what thoughts are. That is core to the concept of thinking. Everything lives rent-free in my head. The horn intro of "I Second That Emotion" runs through my mind five times a day but I'm not charging it rent. When I idly think about parts of a movie I once saw, it's not as if somebody at Paramount gets an alert that they need to deposit $5 into my bank account. Similarly, I have yet to monetize the alphabet, my various computer passwords, the birth dates of my immediate family and the nervous system synapses that keep me from swallowing my own tongue, so they're also living rent-free in my head. If only Cormac McCarthy's estate would respond to the invoices I've been posting for 20 years, the final pages of No Country For Old Men wouldn't live rent-free in my head.

Even then, it's not as if something being in your head is an indication it's conquered you. I think a lot about the TV personality who stomped grapes at a vineyard and wiped out yelling "ooooooh aaaaaaah uuuuuuugh I can't breathe." I don't know why I'm even bothering to drop a link here, you know what I'm talking about. That person lives rent-free in my head. I guess she totally owns my ass. In 10th grade English, a girl next to me sneezed and farted at the same time and I suppressed laughter for the next 40 minutes and I couldn't tell you any of the books we read in that class but I remember her full name and I both feel terrible for her and chuckle when I get a flashback of the snart and I don't think anybody would argue she's The Champion Of Life because that moment's spent 20 years bed rotting in a fully subsidized room in my head.

Is the Conservative Quip Braintrust operating under the belief that to think of something is to be tortured by it?

The new bully maxim: AI isn't going anywhere.

Did you know that? AI isn't going anywhere. The data centers are built, "movie studios" are investing in the tech, Google's never making their search functionality useful again. The game is over. Get with the times or get left behind. Drop to your knees and thank a large language model every time you're blessed to catch sight of an AI flyer on a telephone pole or an AI mascot on the side of a local company's truck.

And there are the attendant arguments, i.e. you’ll see a famous person go on Instagram and share an article about AI usage burning through natural resources and Grok data center smog turning South Memphis’ skies piss yellow and giving a bunch of impoverished people permanent breathing problems and the first comment on this shared article will be about how social media sites use AI and phones have their own carbon footprint so the famous person who used their phone to share an article to social media is actually part of the problem. That balogna.

I'm not going to argue against these and other top shelf pro-AI points. I don’t care. It’s boring and, more pertinently, it's a religion for these people. Nobody’s conceding any points here because it isn’t an argument, it’s AI fans lying about how horrible their toy is and how it isn’t a plagiarism machine that helps sweat the world’s last glaciers. You can't cite any research outlining why this stuff is bad, unless you can, in which case that research isn't valid.

So sure, it's here and there's no stopping it and AI companies' business plans are sustainable and nobody in history's ever changed anything as established as ChatGPT is today. Oceans are self-replenishing and kids using AI to do their middle school homework will become more literate with every essay they don't write.

What I’d like to do, even though I don't think AI’s dominance is guaranteed, is talk about what those of us who hate that shit will have to face if the whole world really does buy Sam Altman's line. I don't mean what that reality will look like, I mean how it will feel to have lost.

For the past decade or so, there's been a lot of discussion about the words we use to describe different kinds of suffering, and that's good, we should always do our best to use accurate and sensitive language. I personally disagree with one of the rules people have generally settled on, but not to the degree I've mentioned it anywhere or used the language I'm about to describe over the language others have argued for. I get their point completely. I'm not like some stubborn asshole insisting on not using people's preferred pronouns or anything like that.

But when people have cancer, we're not supposed to say they "beat cancer" or they "lost their battle with cancer." There have been many long, well-written and considered arguments made against that language. You can read one here. It's worth taking in that whole thing, but a summary by way of a two-sentence quote from writers Lee M. Ellis, MD, Charles D. Blanke, MD and Nancy Roach: "Using the battle metaphor implies that if a patient fights hard enough, smart enough, and/or long enough, he or she will be able to win the war... Patients with "curable" disease are cured because treatment eradicates every last cell, not because the patient did or did not somehow fight valiantly."

Again, I buy that and adhere to its conclusions. I don't think there's any shame in losing, though. I don't think losing always or even usually means putting forth a substandard effort and I definitely don't associate losing with giving up. You can work your ass off and fight harder than anybody's ever fought and it's still possible to lose. Losing doesn't have to be synonymous with the shame of failure when we live in a world with so many ways for things to fall apart. We all lose and it isn't fair and it almost never has anything to do with what we brought to the experience. Everything isn't a meritocracy or a foot race you just needed to do the proper preparation for.

The big AI companies are as well-funded as they are stupid. Here's a story from just a few hours ago about how Anthropic's October filing with the SEC disclosed $895.4 billion in committed spending. All the people picketing and trying to get their elected officials to push back on the construction of new data centers, I'm glad for it, but it doesn't stack up well against a trillion dollars. Again, I don't think AI's place at the center of culture is ensured. That doesn't mean I'm optimistic.

But if I spend the rest of my life engaging with impressive visual art the way I've engaged with it for the past few years, by which I mean "wondering with low-level dread whether the thing I'm looking at was made with AI, ready to sigh and move on if it is," that won't change how embarrassing it is that Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly used Anthropic's Claude to make a 9/11 memorial sticker. It won't change how empty I think people like Sam Altman and Marissa Mayer are when they proudly admit they couldn't imagine parenting their kids without their own companies' AI chatbots.

If the end result is a loss, I don't think that means the people who played data center Merzbow at their city council meetings shouldn't have bothered. It doesn't mean I was wrong to never engage with AI slop and it doesn't mean I'll ever need to engage with it going forward.

For one, OpenAI and Anthropic and xAI and Google DeepMind, these things aren't living in my head rent-free. Anthropic paid $895.4 billion to get there. That's capitalism. If regular people lose the fight to the children of Peter Thiel, it's because Peter Thiel's a cancer. There's no shame in losing that fight.

I've been thinking about losing more broadly recently because my son is 4-years-old and more and more he's going to be engaging with the world in a manner that allows losing. It's hard to communicate all of this to a child and get across the idea that "I lost" isn't a betrayal of "I tried."

I'm not talking about AI or disease with my son. I'm talking about karate tournaments where everybody goes home with a medal but before that happens, all the kids get lined up in order from worst to best. Broadening the definition of losing, I'm talking about when he spends weeks proud of his axolotl Halloween costume and then when he comes home from school on Friday, the only comment he can remember is one of his classmates telling him his costume is bad because he's a boy and boys don't wear pink.

And part of me wants to flip the table. Karate is something you should do for fun because adults who take karate really seriously (aside from the ones who teach it to kids) are dorks. If you feel bad about your costume, it's because the other 4-year-old in your preschool class has dumb ideas about gender norms and the world will prove her wrong. These things don't fucking matter.

I am completely sure your karate aptitude is meaningless to your value as a person. I am completely sure your classmate is just a 4-year-old saying something she'll grow out of and regret in a couple years. Not that her rejection doesn't hurt right now.

This is what I'm trying to remind myself. I'm not giving anybody advice here. This is all a pep talk to me. If AI further cheapens art, writing, all of this, and the only conclusion you can draw is we've definitively lost, the trying will still have been worth something. I need to try a lot more, concretely and demonstrably, even if AI becomes as inevitable as the dumbest motherfucker says it is. There's no shame in losing. You can try and fail and the sliver of the world that thinks your failure denotes a lack of fight can eat dog shit. I've been losing my whole life, it would be weird to stop now. I just have to be able to sincerely say I tried.