(2023-03-01) Valente The Great Replacementnot That One The Real One

Cat Valente: The Great Replacement (Not That One, the Real One). It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a civilization in possession of a good fortune, must replace all organic workers with AI as soon as possible, which will definitely never ever cause any problems whatsoever.

someone messaged me to tell me you can ask it to write something in the style of Catherynne M. Valente (but why would you want to? rimshot) and Google Alerts started pinging me about a whole raft of articles citing me as someone with influence who built an early reputation in part through Clarkesworld, and I feel like I started going through the stages of grief for my fucking life as it is, a life in which I have been a freelance working writer, with all the good and horrific that entails

yes, definitely, choices are going to be made none of us have any control over and corporations will definitely replace as many people who work with documents of any kind with a chatbot as soon as they can and ignore any reason that might not be the best idea of all time. They gave robot dogcops guns, I don’t know what to tell you, whatever is the worst plan, that is the plan.

This is not the optimistic part of the essay. Sorry. This the god dammit we spent literally all of science fiction telling you not to do this can you actually not for once part of the essay. Oh you’re definitely doing it anyway? And shoving me in my locker afterward? Perfect.

And don’t say the revolution will bring them down and restore balance. Seriously, please shut up about the revolution. Revolution should be nightmare fuel, not visions of post-scarcity sugar-plums. There won’t be a revolution in the west any time soon, and if there was it wouldn’t restore shit except polio and feudalism.

one of the canned responses to other industries falling to automation was: writing code is always safe because someone has to make the robots go. Or that art would be safe because human creativity can’t be automated. But now we’re all seeing that it’s entirely possible that it can, and no one is safe at all.

as far as online content, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’ve been talking and listening to bots like they’re people for a good bit now, and a whole lot of us seem to be happy to actually physically vote the way those bots tell us to.

So mostly, the idea is this replaces thinking, communicating regular humans with a text box and that’s it. Get fucked. That’s kind of the sales pitch.

ChatGPT isn’t being sold to us directly at all, but to our potential employers in lieu of us.

Of course, we may not. Full Self-Driving turned out to be a lot further off than advertised, ebooks didn’t end publishing as we know it, 3D printing didn’t make mass manufacturing obsolete, self checkout sucks

But it cannot even begin to replace our need to talk shit and make stuff.

Do you really think for a second the existence of BookGort is going to stop even one person from writing stories if that’s what they like to do?

Take away the cashier position and no one is going to ring up groceries to fulfill their own needs and longings. It’s not a thing. Take away art and we’re going to art harder just to spite you.

Leave people to their own devices with no other demands on their time, and most of us will start making things

We all have to compete with this thing, yes. They will pay us less or nothing if they can, absolutely. But…they do that now. Make this for the exposure. For love of the craft. For a cause.

We could decline to purchase anything written by ChatGPT. Consume any automated performances.

Nothing in the last seven years has instilled me with great faith in people to do the right thing in their own interests even when it’s super obvious, but it’s theoretically possible.

Yes, Virginia, this sucks. From top to bottom, it’s going to be a bad scene for awhile.