Mulling over some of my ongoing conversations about AI and its place, and, more broadly, 'digital' and other technologies and their places, I think it boils down to a fairly simple thing: in general, these should be tools for helping people rather than replacing people. 1/2

What is sad about some - not all, by any means - of the current growing uses of 'AI' (I think of it as II (intelligence imitation) is the extent to which these are breaking the promise of technology: rather than removing the tasks that are grindingly damaging, freeing people to less constraining labour, to greater personal creativity and growth, one of the uses is to replace that creativity with something economically cheaper and artistically less human. 2/3

Which is not to say that none of the creative uses of AI are valid - I would argue, quite strongly, that there are highly creative users of digital and AI tools who are adapting them and doing truly fascinating things with them. The concern arises at imitative nonsense, pale shadows of deep artistry being peddled as an acceptable replacement. It reduces not only artistic integrity, but the quality of appreciation. 3/4]

It risks a downward cycle, a spiral into the quite literally average - into the statistical reduction of what we have already created into what we believe we want to see and hear because we have heard and or seen something like it before, and of course we have: it is the unfocussed average of something else. 4/4 (I think?)