DRMacIver's Notebook
Particularity
Particularity
I wrote a post about cleaning my kitchen yesterday. You might have seen it.
I posted it on discord saying “this is probably really boring”. I shouldn’t have done that, it was just random self-deprecation for the fact that I’d written about such a “mundane” subject, but really I knew it was a pretty good piece, and people liked it as expected. More importantly, this is the sort of thing I think we need more of rather than less, so I shouldn’t put it down.
One of the things I’ve been worrying about recently is… deskilling I guess. One of the concerns I have about AI in its current and near future form is that there are a lot of things where people feel it’s just no longe rworth doing things pretty well. If you’re bad at art, AI is probably better at art than you. If you’re bad at writing, an LLM is probably better at writing than you. Even if you’re pretty good at these, a lot of the time they can do a good enough job much faster than you.
This isn’t a new problem. A lot of progress has been devaluing old skills because they’ve been replaced with something cheaper. e.g. many things are no longer worth repairing (or can’t be repaired) and you just replace them when they break.
The big problem with this is that being bad at things is how you get good at things, so this creates a real difficulty where you’re sortof discouraged from getting good at things because all the initial steps are taken away from you.
The thing is… I think this problem is economically real, in that a lot of demand for this sort of thing is sortof fungible and replacing an expensive human with a machine that can cheaply produce good enough work is a win for many use cases, but the problem is also sortof fake in that a lot of people experience it as “what’s the point of producing things if you’re not already a genius?” and that’s really not how it works.
The “How I clean my kitchen” essay is, in a real sense, not possible for an AI to have written. I don’t mean it couldn’t literally put words like that on a page. An AI can totally write an essay about how it cleans its kitchen. Here’s one. I got Claude to write it for me in a couple of minutes of prompting. It’s sortof overwrote and mawkish and you don’t learn much about cleaning from it, but it is certainly an essay that one could write about how to clean a kitchen. Here’s another one where I told it to be a bit more useful. It will create as many essays about cleaning kitchens for you as you like! If you ask nicely it might even do one by someone who isn’t a woman named Chen with a charmingly rustic kitchen.Claude has a major mode collapse problem where it’s not very creative when comig up with characters.
A sufficiently advanced version of Claude might even do this in a psychologically realistic and practically useful way. We can definitely imagine a world in which Claude is much better at writing essays about cleaning its kitchen than I am.
But there is one very important difference between Claude’s version of the essay and mine: Claude doesn’t have a kitchen, and didn’t get any better at cleaning it as a result of writing about it.
Additionally, Claude doesn’t have friends or people who are interested in its specific ways of relating to the world that can learn about it and how it is similar and different to them by reading about its relationship with the kitchen. Claude could have created any personality you want. Here’s one by a ballerina biker named Magnus “Sledge” Thornton.
None of these people are real, you can’t have real relationships with them. As fictional artefacts, they can be interesting,Although honestly all of these have the flavour of slop to me, and I sortof cringe and my eyes slide off them as I try to read them, so I’ve only skimmed any of them. but they don’t have a particular human at their center.
Creation is relational, and it is particular. When you put yourself in a situation where the value of what you do is interchangeable with anyone else doing it, of course you end up being devalued by machines. Economics can force you to be in that position, but that doesn’t mean that what you do lacks value in and of itself. The fact that you produced something gives it a value in how it related you to the world - it changes you to create it, and in being particular it also matters more to those who are relationship to you, above the artefact itself.