Human-made versus AI cultural junk
Panic in the streets of Tinseltown, now that AI is coming for the scriptwriting jobs. Solidarity with strikers, always, but I swear I couldn't care less if the next Marvel film is written by humans or R2-D2. Don’t get me wrong, I do worry about more and more workers being driven out of work by the extreme automatisation that AI allows and how these changes might impact already fragile societies1. But I also feel that arguing for a human/divine right to produce spectacular junk is self-defeating.
By the way, if my labelling of some cultural products as junk or “spam” comes across as elitist I couldn’t care less either: drawing red lines is central to criticism. And it’s impossible to write about the Spectacle without acknowledging the tons of mind-numbing ideological junk it produces — and not just blockbusters, since there is enough literary junk going around like to fill up Borges’ Landfill of Babel, despite attempts to persuade you that all books are inherently commendable, and that all forms of culture deserve praise.
The automatisation of culture is possible because most culture is already automatic
As I have written before, we lost the fight against the automatisation of culture long before the arrival of AI. The formulaic nature of the Spectacle has for long been sustained by humans but now the time has come for machines to do this on our behalf, on the cheap.