It’s easy to ignore and laugh at the most unscrupulous/low IQ content creators when they make predictions that are clearly based on sci-fi fantasies rather than anything based in reality.

CLEARLY an internet-scraping technology isn’t going to magically turn into an I Have No Mouth and Must Scream-style emotional artificial life form that decides to commit mass murder against its creators for funsies.

At some level the people who go down the extreme hysteria route with their commentary are playing into the incentives of the Content Creation Industrial Complex: the most outlandish statements get the most views and - most importantly - the most ad impressions.

It takes someone with extreme integrity hold the line against the financial incentives that are contantly tugging internet discourse in the other direction.

Few are able or willing to do that.

So this is what we’re stuck with.

The anti-humans

“What the pathetic commonplace heads with which the world is crammed really lack are two closely related faculties: that of forming judgments and that of producing ideas of their own.

- Arthur Schopenhaeur

But the slightly less cheeseball POV is that - even if it’s not going to somehow develop the capacity for anger and the desire for speciecide - at a minimum AI is going to make humans ‘obsolete’.

The claims extend to all white collar professions, but the most rabid, foaming at the mouth, full on excitement is reserved for it’s potential impact on one group in particular: Creatives.

Any time a new AI video clip gets released (set aside for a moment the obvious fact that most of these clips have been heavily edited by humans) the comment sections are full of excited and gleeful statements like “RIP Hollywood” and “lol humans are fucked bro”.

First of all: ‘AI video’ is just a rebrand for CGI (computer-generated imagery), which has existed since the 90’s. CGI hasn’t put any humans out of their jobs. In fact it hasn’t done much of anything at all other than make movies shittier and less aesthetically pleasing.

So the best the anti-human mob can come up with is rebooting a decades-old technology. Really? That’s going to put an end to human creativity? Come on.

But one thing AI has done is raise the lowest common denominator.

The average adult in America maxes out at a 7th-grade reading and writing level. Now those same 7-graders-in-adult-bodies can click a button and generate slop text that’s (slightly) higher-level than their abysmal natural abilities.

The same goes for art. People with zero talent have moved on from thousands of years of drawing stick figures and smiley faces to generating slop imagery just by typing in a MidJourney prompt (the irony of the ‘mid’ in MidJourney is hard to ignore) that’s much better than anything they’d be able to create on their own even given a thousand lifetimes.

The sole reason AI has such a deathgrip on genpop’s psyche is: It gives mediocre people the ability to LARP as being slightly less mediocre than they actually are.

It might not be a huge leap forward for mankind as a whole, but it’s a huge deal for the resentful non-creative underclass.

AI as a manifestation of ressentiment

“…everything that raises an individual above the herd and makes his neighbor quail is henceforth called evil…”

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

Nietzsche warned about the dangers of resentment (aka ressentiment).

Most people think of ressentiment as being based in materialism: Poor people demand that rich people be chopped down to their level, which if implemented destroys the incentive to produce and brings human civilization to a standstill.

This classic view of ressentiment is something that definitely exists. It’s not hard to find examples.

But it also applies to something most people don’t think of.

Natural talent.

Nobody is more resentful than the talentless.

The feeling of hostility that people who were born with no talent feel towards those who were born with all of it is at the root of all dysfunction in the modern world.

And the ephemeral nature of creative talent in particular makes it a ripe target for resentment.

Creativity/nobility

And only the fools who cannot hear the song ask that the rules be posted. Hear the music. And enjoy. But do not cry. Not everyone was intended to reach A above high C.

- Harlan Ellison, Eidolons

What is creativity?

Simply put, the ability to create something from nothing. When a creative person creates it looks/feels like they’re pulling ideas out of thin air.

One person can sit in front of their computer, open up a Word document, and gradually type up a bestseller. Millions of others can look at the same blinking mouse curser on the same blank Word document and can’t even come up with a single coherent sentence.

Some people have The Gift.

Most don’t.

It feels (and to be honest, is) unfair.

People with small amounts of creativity struggle and suffer, this is true. Hence the starving artist archetype.

But people who are born with extreme amounts of creative ability are the closest thing to royalty that exists in the 21st century. This is especially true in the U.S. of A. where we don’t have a formal noble class and thus invented our own in the form of the cult of the celebrity.

This cult rewards people at the extreme high end of the creative pyramid in ways that ordinary mortals can’t even fathom.

Not just financially. In many ways extremely creative people are treated as true First Class Citizens and can get away with things that normal people can’t.

They can be degenerate, they can be lazy, they can be psychologically unstable. It doesn’t matter. As long as people like what they create, they can do whatever they want. Normal rules don’t apply.

And to a certain variety of resentful 9-5 working stiff, this is an outrage that must be rectified.

“Why do these actors and musicians get to make millions and party and get all the hot chicks while I work my ass to the bone for nothing?”

Into this toxic maelstrom of envy and self-loathing by proxy enters AI.

AI is the ultimate defense mechanism for those who feel insecure and resentful about their lack of creative talent and the station in life it condemns them to.

“I might not be able to paint a painting or write a novel but FUCK YOU I can generate a MidJourney image that looks exactly the same as every other MidJourney image or click a button and get 70k words of slop from ChatGPT. And one day all those Hollywood assholes are going to have to get real jobs because real people just like me will be able to create a movie on our laptops with no effort. FUCK YOU.”

The great leveling

“The ressentiment which is establishing itself is the process of leveling, and while a passionate age storms ahead setting up new things and tearing down old, raising and demolishing as it goes, a reflective and passionless age does exactly the contrary; it hinders and stifles all action; it levels…

Each individual within his own little circle can co-operate in the leveling, but it is an abstract power, and the leveling process is the victory of abstraction over the individual. The leveling process in modern times, corresponds, in reflection, to fate in antiquity. ... It must be obvious to everyone that the profound significance of the leveling process lies in the fact that it means the predominance of the category ‘generation’ over the category ‘individuality’."

Soren Kierkegaard, The Present Age

The core message that AI-lovers are shouting from the rooftops is: “Your talent doesn’t matter. We’re all the same now.”

Whenever a large segment of society demands a Great Leveling it acts as a crushing force that destroys the human spirit and any scraps of individuality it encounters.

That’s why the infamous Apple ad struck such a chord. On some level everyone can sense that it was an honest visualization of what AI proponents truly think and feel.

The irony is that they’re wrong. If anything, extremely talented people are going to stand out even more than they already do.

When the world is full of inhuman slop, the non-slop becomes that much more appealing.

Finding someone talented and original on the internet is such a breath of fresh air that you can’t help but feel a sense of awe and admiration.

The way to prosper in the Industrial Age was by neutering your personality and turning yourself into just another cog in the machine (brick in the wall?). The more robotic and machinelike you were, the easier it was for you to find a slot to fit into in the corporatized job market. Being human was a death sentence.

The way to prosper in the current Information Age is by being as much of a personality as humanly possible. The less robotic and AI-like you are, the more likely you are to benefit from algorithms that reward engagement and eyeballs. You’ll be left behind if you’re bland and indistinguishable from everyone else.

So while the current state of affairs is that mediocre, talentless people love AI for it’s supposed leveling effect, the reality is that the ecosystem it creates will drive an even more disproportionate share of resources to the creatively talented people they so despise.

Talent, humanity, and individual striving for greatness always win in the end.

The more artificially bland someone is, the more likely they are to be accepted by quote-unquote polite society.

I think that’s part of what makes suicide so shocking. In death a person suddenly seems like more of a Real Person than they did while they were still an actual living, breathing biological organism with a pulse and functioning heartbeat who you could have chosen to talk to but didn’t.

Suicide makes you realize that the part of a person you see publicly is nothing more than a tiny slice of the total human being behind the persona, and that the guy you thought so little of had emotions so vast and deep that you wish you would have been able to talk to him before he was gone just so you could feel what it feels like to talk to someone real.

When your mild-mannered coworker who’s perfectly polite and inoffensive and is described by everyone as “he’s such a good guy” puts on his old army uniform and shoots himself in the head on his parents’ front lawn at midnight on a random Tuesday, you suddenly realize that he was a full person with depths to his soul that you couldn’t even begin to fathom and that his presentation as a kind of blah guy who just showed up to work punctiliously and did his assigned tasks in a non-attention seeking manner wasn’t even close to the whole him but rather just a pleasant inoffensive island poking out of a deep ocean that just barely concealed the volcanic core beneath until it couldn’t.

If you’re wondering why people commit suicide, now you know. It’s not that they want to cease existing, it’s that they want people to realize that they ever existed to begin with. That’s why they leave notes, and that’s why they often fantasize about being there to see people’s reactions after they’re gone.

Make no mistake about it. If a suicidal person could choose to continue existing just long enough to be able to float above their own funeral, they definitely would.

Suicide isn’t a cry for help. It’s a cry for recognition.

People shouldn’t be shocked when someone who seemingly has it all decides to die.

The core of the driving ambition that leads someone become massively successful is the hope that one day they’ll reach a level where they can finally leave the persona behind and Become Who They Are.

The problem is that they eventually realize that no matter how much fame and success they achieve they’ll always be viewed as a Human Doing and never as a Human Being.

The fake version of themselves becomes all they are and all they ever will be, to everyone but themselves.

That’s the point where they decide that ending their existence is the only way to let the world know that they ever existed to begin with.

The core of depression is the desire to stop being perceived as an NPC.

The depressed person will do anything to get people to see behind the persona. Anything.

What the really great artists do is they're entirely themselves. They're entirely themselves, they've got their own vision, they have their own way of fracturing reality, and if it's authentic and true, you will feel it in your nerve endings.

- David Foster Wallace

All great art - be it writing, painting, music, whatever - requires isolation to create.

Physical isolation in a Unabomberesque Writer-In-The-Cabin-In-The-Woods sense can definitely be a part of it, but that’s not exactly what I’m referring to here.

I’m thinking of something much more profound.

When I read Slaughterhouse-Five I don’t just feel like I’m reading a great novel on a mere technical level. I’m not thinking “this book has a well-constructed plot [check], effective dialogue [check] and a great blend of tension and release [check check]; FIVE STARS FUCK YEAH”.

Greatness doesn’t automatically emerge when you check off enough boxes on a literal/metaphorical checklist.

The reason I know Slaughterhouse-Five is great is because, while reading it, I get the strong sense that I know exactly who Kurt Vonnegut is as a person. His worldview, his emotions, everything. It all comes through.

He may have died physically in 2007 but he lives on through his words. People who haven’t even been born yet and people whose parents haven’t even been born yet will one day read the same book and get the exact same sense that they know Kurt Vonnegut on a deep human-to-human level. Not just “wow some dead guy wrote a cool story” but “god damn, I actually know this guy".

A great book can make a dead writer feel more alive and real to you than the ambulatory corpses with functioning pulses and heartbeats that you live with on a day-to-day basis.

So how can you say the author is dead?

In all the ways that truly matter - his impact on the world, his philosophy, his very essence - he’s still with us.

Aliveness can’t be measured through the rote checking of vital signs (there’s that dreaded checklist again). Pulse, breathing, who cares. Does this person project who they are, not just in the present moment but in all moments (across time/space)? That’s what truly makes someone alive in the most meaningful sense of the word.

There’s a lot of debate about what a soul is and whether it even exists to begin with.

From the quote-unquote rational POV (a worldview that’s completely consumed our current era to the point where most can’t even conceive of a different way of thinking), if a soul exists at all it’s completely contained within the physical structure of the human body. It’s nothing more than brain chemistry and the random firing of neurons. It can all be explained by The Science™.

But when you say “I” (Latin: ego) are you talking about your physical body?

No.

I don’t care how consumed by the zeitgeist you are, you definitely don’t think of yourself as a random collection of organs/muscle/fat/bones wrapped in skin.

You have a strong sense that although ‘I’ might be currently inside your physical body, it isn’t defined or limited by it.

Great works of art are the proof.

A painter may have died hundreds of years ago, but it sure doesn’t feel that way when you stand in front of his creations.

You pay an admission fee to the museum of your choice, walk through the different exhibits, think “oh wow that one’s kinda cool” a bunch of times and keep moving. Then, inexplicably, something grabs you. You can’t look away. You stand and contemplate, just like someone stood and contemplated a hundred years ago and just like someone will stand and contemplate a hundred (five hundred, a thousand, ten thousand) years from now.

You contemplate, leave, go back to your life, and eventually die. Just like all the people who admired the same work of art in the past. Just like all the people who will come to admire it in the future. Every new group of humans admires, contemplates, and dies. Only the artist lives on.

Great artists do what all the anti-aging health-optimizing “I’m 55 chronologically but 37 biologically” tech gurus/influencers wish they could do but can’t: defy death.

So how do you create a great work of art?

By being completely yourself.

You can’t create anything profound or meaningful if you’re thinking of what the critics (official or otherwise) are going to say.

Some people claim you should write as if you’re writing to one specific person. I disagree. You should write as if no one in the world is going to read it at all.

Project yourself into the world with your words. Whether anyone sees them or not is irrelevant.

They say that you’re the average of the people you surround yourself with.

That may have been true pre-internet, but now a better way to think of it is: you are what you consume.

The internet is a despair engine that brings out the worst in people and crushes anything profound and meaningful under the monumental weight of utter averageness.

If you consume content from everyone then you become the average of everyone aka the dreaded and much-maligned Lowest Common Denominator.

The only way to find your unique voice is by limiting what you pay attention to.

Be like the old generation and tune out to tune in. But definitely don’t drop out. The world needs more people creating meaningful art and less people creating LCD slop.

Nietzsche says: “Become who you are”.

Easier said than done. But definitely worth striving for.

People have complimented me on my writing ability my whole life.

Yet, every time I start to write, I think: “This is it. This is the one that’s going to expose me as a fraud. Everyone’s going to think/know that I suck.”

It’s something much deeper than Imposter Syndrome.

I almost referred to the negative pre-writing thought loop as an inner voice. But it’s not. There’s no disembodied Voice of God-style monologue lecturing me about my alleged/possibly real lack of talent. Even the word ‘feeling’ doesn’t fully capture it.

Writerly self-loathing is more like a Force of the Universe. Think gravity, sexual attraction, the unavoidable death/taxes combo, etc. You can’t fight it even if you try (which I definitely have).

Resistance is futile, even when the thing you’re resisting is resistance itself.

Forcing myself to stand here (I have a standing desk, highly recommended, it’s great for your posture) and write feels like pushing the positive ends of two magnets together. The will is there, but every fiber in my being is trying to force me to do something else.

OK I’m back. After writing the above paragraph I decided to pace around my house to quote-unquote gather my thoughts and holy shit what a coincidence all of a sudden I noticed that I had to clean my kitchen sink and of course doing it some other time was out of the question. What am I some kind of slob who would allow my kitchen sink to remain unclean a single milllisecond longer than necessary?

So I stood there and sprayed cleaning spray on the sink and wiped it down, all while simultaneously being fully aware of the fact that I was doing it as a distraction/procrastination method and wondering if everyone who writes also has an immaculate kitchen sink due to the aforementioned dual procrastination/distraction impulse that I assume lives within us all while also thinking about the fact that I was going to have to write about this neurotic ruminating/cleaning combo if/when I did manage to drag myself back to my (standing) desk.

And they say you can’t multitask.

I did come back and start writing again. I always do.

I’ve taken long breaks. There have been stretches of time (months, years) where I thought that I for sure was never going to write a single word ever again.

And yet here I am, putting words on the screen.

You don’t write because you want to. Who the hell would want to do something so preposterously uncool. You write because you literally have to.

It doesn’t matter if there are literal or metaphorical Forces of the Universe working against the writing process.

Writers find a way to write.

The End.

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