The AI Imagination Invasion

The best place to advertise a relaxing holiday resort is in the arrivals lounge of an airport. In a perfect marketing world, this would occur right after the grumpy passport control officers, and there would be a follow-up advert in the baggage collection area. I say this with full confidence because nothing puts people in the mood for a holiday more than the stress of having just travelled back from one. Travel has become dismal.

I can't think of a single thing in the age of budget airlines that makes travelling remotely enjoyable. From waiting at departures to arriving with bum cramp and a belly full of crappy tea, travel starts bad and gets worse, and it's not as if "budget" even means "cheap" these days. My advice is to avoid it altogether and holiday closer to home. Pick somewhere you can get back from within a few hours' drive or a short train journey and go there for a week with a clutch of good books. Make sure they're the kind of books that seamlessly allow images of scenes and characters to form in your imagination - easy reads.

Wouldn't it be awful if technology told you your imagination is wrong? Told you what a book's scenes and characters ought to look like based on its training data and the aggregated opinions of people who are not you?

It's happened, of course. The internet is being peppered with AI-generated images of what popular book characters "look like" (Harry Potter is the obvious victim-zero) in what I presume is an effort to take one of the last remaining examples of magic - the bond between a written story and its reader's mind - and shred it into rodent bedding.

Can we please leave AI out of something? I appreciate the hypocrisy of the question. I'm a technologist. I spent a decade as a data scientist. I've used a whole bunch of AI techniques to explore, maintain and leverage hundreds of thousands of people's most sensitive personal data (legitimately!). I'm an insider. I also think AI is a good thing with enormous potential to improve the human experience for a lot more humans than currently get to enjoy it. But it comes with huge risks, and the doomers have unfairly hijacked the narrative around those risks with their overblown "end of the world" fear-mongering (by which I mean social media clickbait).

The real menace of AI isn't that it might kill us all, but that it might keep us living in a kind of bland sameness where your subjective experience is crushed beneath the AI's idea of objective - or, at least, democratised - truth. And the AI will be right, from a certain philosophical perspective, because in its purest (still hypothetical) form it generates its ideas by looking at the totality of human expression and aggregating it into a distilled answer. Think of it like guessing the weight of a cow at a fair - almost everyone gets it wrong, but if you take the average of everyone's answers it turns out to be highly accurate. AI is that average.

That will make AI fantastic at tasks where the average of many people's knowledge is gold dust - such as cancer detection, drug development and fuel efficiency (and thus carbon minimisation) - but really awful at anything where individual experience is the thing that counts. Consider that you probably find aircraft seats uncomfortable because they're designed for an average passenger, and you're not him (he is almost always male). The same reason explains why you probably find your phone awkward to use one-handed and why your desk and chair never seem to meet each other at the right heights - they're designed for average and you're unique.

But far more interestingly than us all being physically non-average, we are all intellectually and emotionally distinct. How you feel when Christine Daaé sings with the Phantom is your business, not something to be measured against the aggregated feelings of everyone else. So is how you imagine characters like Dorian Gray, Billy Pilgrim and Daisy Buchanan. And so, it pains me to say, is your opinion of budget airline tea - I'm told that some weirdos like it.

Thanks for reading. If you know anyone who might like the article, please feel free to forward it and let them know that I can be found at benjclarke.me.