AEL♥VES: "The Who Cares Era" by Dan Sinker
AI is, of course, at the center of this moment.
It's a mediocrity machine by default, attempting to bend everything it touches toward a mathematical average. Using extraordinary amounts of resources, it has the ability to create something good enough, a squint-and-it-looks-right simulacrum of normality. If you don't care, it's miraculous. If you do, the illusion falls apart pretty quickly. The fact that the userbase for AI chatbots has exploded exponentially demonstrates that good enough is, in fact, good enough for most people. Because most people don't care.
This has been in my mind for months and I couldn't find the worst to say. Dan said it perfectly. I'm baffled every day by people using AI as if everything it spews is absolutely and irrevocably truth, perfect, or worst, human-like.
I've seen coworkers use it to make their scribble of an email into something that no one ever would write and that someone with a single brain cell can distinguish as artificial intelligence in use. Dude, if you can't even write a formal email, how can you judge that whatever the machine wrote for you is actually appropriate to use? It drove me crazy and I simply couldn't make it make sense.
That's why Dan's words are so mind bending to me. It's so fucking simple: people don't care. I always, always, always forget that people actually don't care about tech, or most stuff for that matter, as long as it works for them. It breaks my heart whenever I'm reminded of it.
There's some intrinsic hope in his piece, too. The fact that this has been written means there's at least one more person who notices, who sees it, too, and therefore I'm not alone.
I'll also close with some words from Dan:
In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care.
In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it.
Until the next one!