The first time I watched a room boo AI, I was at an Our Lady Peace show at the Roseland Theater in Portland, back in June.
Raine Maida, the lead singer, was telling the crowd about Ray Kurzweil’s book The Age of Spiritual Machines, which gave the band’s album Spiritual Machines its inspiration and name. He said that what they sang about back then, people and machines blurring together, was starting to feel real with the advent of AI. Some people in the audience booed. He answered that he hopes AI will help with real things, like cancer.
The band read Kurzweil’s book on tour, and he recorded spoken interludes for the record, which came out in December 2000. In one of them he says “the year is 2029. The machines will convince us they’re conscious… They’ll claim to be human, and we’ll believe them”. That’s three years from now.
Our Lady Peace is my favorite band, and Spiritual Machines is my favorite of their albums. The futurism is what got me: the idea that technology was going to change everything. I had no idea my adult life would turn out to be a place where so much of it came true. It’s strange to love something that saw this coming and then hear a room turn on the subject.
I knew, and I still wasn’t ready
I knew a lot of people dislike AI. I’d read it and heard it secondhand. I had never stood in a crowd while it happened.
My days are full of people who use it, build with it, and argue about which model is better. Those arguments are about tools. Nobody in my world boos, so I’d been treating the opinion of my own bubble as the opinion of everyone.
Standing in that crowd, I felt like someone who had been living abroad and had just heard the local news for the first time.
What a magnet school thinks writing is
Not long ago I heard a talk from a tech magnet school. Even the humanities track there was framed as technical writing. I wasn’t surprised, and it stuck with me.
That’s what it looks like when the bubble designs the school. If your idea of writing is documentation, then of course AI is the future of writing. Poetry doesn’t have a spec.
Where I want the line
I use AI every day, and I use it for the tedious parts. I want it to take that work so I have more room to make things. I don’t want it to make the things. Writing, poems and songs are what people do when they have something to say, and handing that to a machine misses the point of doing it.
I can’t know what each person in that crowd was booing. My guess is that the boos were for the part of AI that writes the song, and less for the part that reads the medical scan. Maida’s answer about cancer was a good one, and it answered a question that crowd wasn’t asking.
If my side of the bubble can’t hear the difference between the tool that finds cancer earlier and the tool that writes the next album, the rest of the room will keep booing.
And they’ll have a point.
