On Artificial Intelligence
I completed my university studies through a very unique time. I had the “traditional” experience until 2020 hit (so, about six months), then spent some time online, and concluded with the rise of artificial intelligence. It went from a class presentation on how to wash your hands properly—days before the university suspended gatherings—to having a fifty minute lecture stating the importance of actually doing your coursework (and that the prof(s) could tell the shallow-ass ones were AI). Sure, Grammarly was around for most of it, but those first few moments playing around with ChatGPT were something else. I tried it in my fourth year as a supplement to my studies, not replacing my studies (“studies” in quotations if you must; I was depicting literary architecture by building a Minecraft house:). Soon enough, I realized the info it was developing was nonsense—citations that weren’t actually there, making up its own quotations from the book etc. and that it would be no help at all. But as people kept in the internet loop know, artificial intelligence has been expanding rapidly.
Starting this project on Squarespace, I noticed that AI is integrated into the editor, and went to see if it has improved in any way by asking the program to develop book blurbs. To my surprise, it was somewhat accurate! Here, I want to discuss this project’s stance on AI and offer some transparency on its usage. The book blurbs featured beside each title is generated by AI, then edited by me to ensure accuracy. Other materials on this website such as the data collection, the masterpost, updates—is all human generated (by me!). engl is made to celebrate the many, MANY hours authors put into their creative literature and the blurb is just a chance to see if you’ll like the content while you’re here. I’ve noticed the general format the blurbs take is rather repetitive, and have been working on adding more sparkle to them. The potential environmental impacts, the dead internet theory, and the growing use of automatic & unwanted AI generation is taken into consideration. Like many others, I miss the feeling of the early internet age and hope that this website brings a modernized twist to the less-cluttered website pages of the 2000s—it sucks to be basically assaulted by ads nowadays trying to grab a cookie recipe (be careful, it might be AI-generated).
Artificial Intelligence has truly exploded in the past few months. Everything from Google to TikTok livestreams are plagued with automatic AI-generated summaries, and I was even gaslit to think elephants can paint with their trunks—which made me simultaneously terrified and really disappointed in myself. (Turns out elephant painting is real but also kinda unethical, and still provokes the discussion of humans being unsure of real or generated content) Growing concerns surrounding AI include elders falling for AI slop as well as the environmental impact these millions of prompts have when running through data centres; this project wants to use AI minimally, and avoids heavy use such as never generating photo and video content,
Books are really special—they are protected from AI, in a way (besides those sloppy AI produced books, which are trash compared to the real deal). I feel the separation between digital (e.g. websites, digital art, uploaded images, etc.) and physical (e.g. published books, CDs/DVDs, physical art) media is going to grow in the next decade due to the uncertainty artificial intelligence brings to the digital world.
We’ve seen vinyl and physical books rise in popularity over the past fifteen or so years, and with conflict, censorship, and (AI) clutter being in the way when we consume content—our southern neighbours and their US TikTok ban being a prime example, we might need to buckle up for more turbulence in the creative world.