If everyone’s super, no one will be

How I learned to stop worrying and love the ROM

“If everyone’s super, no one will be.” said by the late, great (okay not so great) Syndrome in objectively the best Pixar film: The Incredibles

A prescient statement to make as we find ourselves deep in the A.I. era. I’ll be honest with you, I do not love devoting so much of my writing to A.I. The initials have lost any semblance of meaning.

However, that’s the world we exist in today. As much as I would prefer to ignore it and just make stuff, it’s easy to see a world where everyone will be considered “super” eventually.

It pains me to admit it, but I see the path we are headed down: the ability for individuals to create whatever they can imagine with the type of a few key strokes; a chatbot-enabled service where you “create” your own programming in lieu of logging onto a streaming service.

I thought part of the promise of A.I. was to create efficiencies where humans struggle, like making X-rays easier to read or smart contracts that eliminate red-lining. It feels as if that future is a dream of yesteryear, while the future in front of us is an A.I. world of entertaining slop.

Maybe you think things are headed in a different direction. I hope you’re right, but this direction is something I have to take seriously because (if it’s true) it will directly affect my livelihood.

I have built a career out of making things. I’m grateful that I get to sit in my spare bedroom and just… make stuff that people enjoy. It’s the dream job for a kid who just wanted to make movies for a living.

I’ve struggled, and I continue to struggle, to tell meaningful stories. There’s a big part of me that believes that the struggle is necessary. If I want to say something that has an impact, I feel like I need to test the narrative with others, write and rewrite until I end up with something that feels rock solid. I feel certain that rough drafts are a universal occurrence, unless you don’t care about what gets out there.

We’ve all written out a text and corrected a typo or smudged some writing on a sticky note that we have to write again. Don’t we all make mistakes and correct them to preserve the image of ourselves we project into the world?

I’ve grown this audience to just over 50 people. One of those people is Kara Lindstrom, my aunt who desperately wants a shoutout and is someone I speak to regularly about my writing. An accomplished writer herself, she helps me figure out what I’m trying to say. As we talked about last weekend, this is something I also do with a chatbot.

The first draft of most of the work I do here involves me word vomiting into a microphone, creating a transcript in Adobe Premiere, and then uploading that transcript into ChatGPT where I ask, “What the fuck am I trying to say?”

As you can tell, while there’s a distaste for A.I., I still find it useful.

But Kara GPT differs from Chat GPT in ways that are invaluable. Behind Kara is lived experience, an immense power that strengthens what I write because it comes from a real place.

I can hear the opposing argument here already: “Well, ChatGPT is trained on a lot of lived experiences, and you can set up the parameters to make it tell you what you want”.

While I find ChatGPT a useful tool to figure out what I am saying, it’s still going to do exactly what I want it to do. The difference in speaking to a human is the restraint a person has to share everything, and as much as I might persuade, that person isn’t obligated to share anything.

Kara is only going to share what she wants to share. It’s meaningful because it improves my writing by challenging what I have written, not agreeing with every word I put on the paper (which ChatGPT does profusely).

While Kara is an audience of one, I think this is applicable to the masses as well. Due to the commodification of the critics, as I spoke about last week, everyone’s sharing their opinion all the time.

Does everyone want to be super? Should we only allow the elites to be super? This isn’t a veiled attempt at getting you to believe in the works of a hack like Ayn Rand. We don’t need to gatekeep being smart or creative. I just want to know if there are others like myself.

I don’t want to consume stories of my own design. I don’t need entertainment to fit my every thought, conscious or subconscious. I want to consume media that reveals things I may not know or challenges the beliefs I hold dearly. I don’t think you get there if you have the ability to make a machine give you the exact stories you want.

Does anyone really want to just type something out into a prompt bar and get that thing? What does instant gratification do to us?

It’s perpetuating what we see online already, the idea that social media is designed to be instant gratification. The barrier to entry to publish one’s work is in the fucking basement. Perhaps there should be some constraints on that?

If everything went the way I wanted it to, it wouldn’t be interesting. I like watching things and consuming things that I’m familiar with (Lord knows how many times I’ve watched and re-watched The West Wing). But if I never consume anything new, I’m just rehashing the same thing over and over again until I rot away and die.

I think about my existence a lot and what that says about individualism. I was born in 1994, only so many humans can say that. I was born in 1994 in Los Angeles, the bubble gets smaller. I was born in 1994 in Los Angeles as the second and final child of my parents. The bubble continues to shrink (you see where I’m going). While I have experiences that are similar to those in my various bubbles, when you get down to the individual, there are experiences that can not and will never be replicated.

It’s the thing that honestly gives me hope in A.I. dystopia. If we create machines that experience everything a human experiences, you’d think that’s the end of it all. But it’s not. You can’t speed up the growing process that gives us our souls. The moments that make me “me” include the banal time sucks on top of the exciting experiences. It’s the good, it’s the bad, it’s the whole enchilada.

You can’t replace Kara - the value she brings with her lived experience and restraint in sharing every facet or detail. The things that make Kara a “super” resource cannot be distilled into a replicable machine. There’s no equation in the world that, if followed perfectly, equals love.

If everyone’s super, no one will be Kara.

I’m glad you’re here. I’ll see ya next time.