Reach out and touch somebody

On the cusp of changing the world, what can AI show us about being human?

Ai-da, the world’s first ultra-realistic robot artist. Photo courtesy Ai-da.

Prompts popped up in my Word document when I sat down to write this essay: Did I want to create a short math quiz for a fifth grader? A newsletter on successful camping during rainy seasons? A bedtime story for an eight-year-old about dinosaurs?

No, for crying out loud! The blank page is my studio: Get the hell out of it.

I had disabled Artificial Intelligence in Microsoft Office months ago (on a Mac, go to Preferences, then Manage Connected Experiences, and turn the damn things off). I had to activate it yesterday to make a PDF and forgot to shut it down again.

After the prompts, a blank space asked, “What do you want to write?” I was still huffing, but for the sake of research I typed in, “an essay about the impact of AI on human consciousness and creativity.”

A vague feeling of horror burbled through me as I watched the words appear in less than a minute on the screen. I read it: it was at once reasonable an empty. Then I trashed it. To save something that was not my voice, not my research, not my reporting, among my original documents felt like sacrilege. I’m a writer. I love crafting sentences, and I love how writing helps me formulate and express whatever is going on inside of me. My writing is a channel from me to you. I don’t want to mediate it with slop.

Ai-da, a robotic artist created by U.K.-based art dealer, gallery owner Aiden Miller, has been painting, sculpting, and doing performance art for six years. Ai-da’s portrait of Alan Turing sold at Sotheby’s for $1.1 million – almost ten times what it was estimated to bring in. Here it is – do you think it’s any good?