Imitative AI and the Replacement of Life

My time on this Earth is coming to an end.

No, I am not dying immediately — the caner has not returned and no one is pointing a gun at my head that I am aware of. But statistically speaking, I have fewer years left on the planet than I have already spent upon it. I will not do everything I ever dreamed of doing. I will not experience everything I wanted to experience. I will not get to travel everywhere I planned to travel. And I am fine with that. I made my choices, and the benefits of the life I have chosen far outweigh the drawbacks. For normal people, that is how it goes. To a certain extent, the limits of life help us appreciate the choices we have made, the people we have befriended, the experiences we have been lucky enough to participate in.

Certain imitative AI hucksters don’t appear to be normal people, however. Some of them think that you can overcome the limitations of time and space with imitative AI. A leader of Meta’s imitative AI program has “invented” a program that will create fake vacation photos of you using imitative AI. Don’t have the time or money to visit Paris? Can’t get away form work and family obligations to visit Jakarta? Well, have they got a solution for you — they can create vacation pictures starring you! See, you don’t need a life, you just need imitative AI so you can pretend you have a life!

This is the almost inevitable endpoint of the imitative AI mindset. The insistence that a probability calculator is the same thing as real effort leads inevitably to this. Instead of art created by real human beings making real choices and showing us a piece of their real struggles, decisions, and personalities, we should be happy with a probabilistically determined work pieced together from the mean of all the training data imitative AI posses. Instead of a job that pays you enough to take vacations and allows you enough of a work-life balance, here is a fake picture of you in a place you’d like to visit. Instead of real human connection, here is a chatbot designed to lie to you to keep you coming back for more and, oh, by the way, might make you insane or suicidal.

Imitative AI, putting aside cost and environmental factors, like all tools, could have some uses. It will always type faster than you, for example, or parse data faster than you, so there may be times when checking the output is faster than generating it yourself. But the masters of the domain keep leaning into these horrible, dystopian uses. They keep wanting to substitute their simulacrums for your real life.

Part of this desire, I think, is that they believe it gives them more excuses to cut back o worker’s rights and freedoms. Who needs vacation time or therapy or time for friends and family when imitative AI can provide those for you? But part of it is just a simple, sad disdain for actual humans. No one who values human connection would think a chatbot is a substitute for it. No one who value mental health thinks a chatbot can do therapy. No one who values human well being thinks a fake picture is a real substitute for a vacation. No one who values human connection thinks probabilistically generated art has emotional value. And yet, these people keep pushing these solutions on us, fervently pretending they are the actual things instead of the mere pale copies that are in reality.

In many ways, this is the worst outcome of the imitative AI bubble. The environmental damage is horrific, the economic damage is potentially devastating, the loss of jobs can be immensely destructive. But this pathetically horrifying substitution of probability for life, of weighted calculations for humanity, of training data for your soul? That is perhaps the most depressing and rage inducing element of the whole bubble.

We are all of us human beings. We all of us deserve real, human lives. None of us deserve the pale, probabilistic shadows our imitative AI overlords are forcing on us.