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In automation theory, a “centaur” is a person who is assisted by a machine. Driving a car makes you a centaur, and so does using autocomplete. A reverse centaur is a machine head on a human body, a person who is serving as a squishy meat appendage for an uncaring machine.
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Obviously, it’s nice to be a centaur, and it’s horrible to be a reverse centaur. There are lots of AI tools that are potentially very centaurlike, but my thesis is that these tools are created and funded for the express purpose of creating reverse centaurs, which none of us want to be.
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This is a reverse centaur, and it is a specific kind of reverse centaur: it is what Dan Davies calls an “accountability sink”. The radiologist’s job is not really to oversee the AI’s work, it is to take the blame for the AI’s mistakes.
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Think of AI software generation: there are plenty of coders who love using AI. Using AI for simple tasks can genuinely make them more efficient and give them more time to do the fun part of coding, namely, solving really gnarly, abstract puzzles. But when you listen to business leaders talk about their AI plans for coders, it’s clear they are not hoping to make some centaurs. They want to fire a lot of tech workers – 500,000 over the past three years – and make the rest pick up their work with coding, which is only possible if you let the AI do all the gnarly, creative problem solving, and then you do the most boring, soul-crushing part of the job: reviewing the AI’s code. And because AI is just a word-guessing program, because all it does is calculate the most probable word to go next, the errors it makes are especially subtle and hard to spot, because these bugs are nearly indistinguishable from working code.
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But can AI do an illustrator’s job? Or any artist’s job? Let’s think about that for a second. I have been a working artist since I was 17 years old, when I sold my first short story. Here’s what I think art is: it starts with an artist, who has some vast, complex, numinous, irreducible feeling in their mind. And the artist infuses that feeling into some artistic medium. They make a song, a poem, a painting, a drawing, a dance, a book or a photograph. And the idea is, when you experience this work, a facsimile of the big, numinous, irreducible feeling will materialize in your mind. But the image-generation program does not know anything about your big, numinous, irreducible feeling. The only thing it knows is whatever you put into your prompt, and those few sentences are diluted across a million pixels or a hundred-thousand words, so that the average communicative density of the resulting work is indistinguishable from zero.
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It’s bad art in the sense of being “eerie”, the word that cultural theorist Mark Fisher used to describe “when there is something present where there should be nothing, or there is nothing present when there should be something”. AI art is eerie because it seems like there is an intender and an intention behind every word and every pixel, because we have a lifetime of experience that tells us that paintings have painters, and writing has writers. But it is missing something. It has nothing to say, or whatever it has to say is so diluted that it is undetectable.