2023 - The Year of Articulate Intelligence

A Goodbye to All That - Because we have to

Last year truly brought the spectre of Artificial Intelligence onto the Art Scene, making it the realm of any Tom, Dick & Harry capable of writing a bit of descriptive text and pushing a button - Voilà! An entirely respectable unique image is spat out, sole ownership of the humanoid who passed the button, compliments of AI.

For shure, there will always be very talented article illustrators who will still be heralded for their unique style of creativity, although many of them are likely to train an AI kernel, making it possible for them to generate versions of images based on their prior artwork.
Like audio cassettes, VHS tapes, celluloid film and vinyl records, there will always be niche realms in which these mediums will thrive, but for the bulk of run-of-the-mill graphic illustrators that used to furnish magazine editors with illustrations (as I mentioned in an earlier article), it’s gonna be rough times.
Appearing in 2022, but hitting the big scene this year, AI ChatGPT will write you semi-competent lyrics to a song, just by giving the AI a few text prompts. It will also write your bio, your resume and with a little description, write entire code structures in various digital languages.
AI is here, and it’s not going away.
So you’re thinking of becoming a doctor? AI will already do a better diagnosis than you, and if you’re thinking of becoming a surgeon, AI is coming to your town as well.
The same is true for architects, product designers, city planners and many, many professions that I don’t have time to mention here.
So here you are, a bright-eyed bushy-tailed youth getting ready to choose a profession. That so? Take note that you better be really, really circumspect about which direction you’re going, before you (or your parents) lay out all that ready cash, ‘cause there might just be an AI in the job interview room telling you to get lost. And that is who the boss will be hiring - that is, until AI comes to get that job as well.

Seems to me, some fields of human endeavor would would likely remain intact; entertainment for instance. The live performance is likely to remain a human profession for some time; after all, who the hell wants to watch a damned robot perform Shakespeare’s Macbeth, or do a live musical performance?

But let’s be practical here. For the vast bulk of the planet’s hairless ape population ‘I should’a learned to play them drums’ simply isn’t a realistic option.
This paradigm is some serious shit for mankind, and we’re going to have to don some very heavy-duty thinking caps as to where we are gonna go forth from here.
I’m reminded of a recent comment by a friend on Facebook, bemoaning the need for more jobs, and on an instinctive, thoughtless spur of the moment I tapped out, “Truth to tell, I never really wanted a job. Just the money.”
And when you think about it, with billions of people that are going to be unemployed and unemployable, somethin’s gotta be done on a global social level - or not at all, if you’re not interested in the continuance of civilization.
If you are interested in being able to find toilet paper on the supermarket shelves, we’re going to have to have to think hard about who we are (“a superstar? Well how right you are!”), and WHERE we are going.

Stephen Goodfellow, January, 2023