Call me Neil. Some years ago — all right, about 40 — having little or no money in my pocket, and nothing particular to interest me in business, I thought I would write for newspapers a little and see the inky part of the world. It is a way I have of driving off the ...
OK, enough of that. If riffing on “Moby Dick” is an odd way to begin my first column of 2023, stick with me. We’ll circle back.
No sooner had I polished my blog post for Tuesday when Facebook tossed up an ad for Jasper. “Write blog posts 10x faster using AI, without sacrificing quality,” it promised. “Create high quality articles in seconds.”
“In seconds”?! And just as good? Well, sign me up! I clicked on the link, and came to the page for “an app that uses AI to create any kind of content you need” according to the explanatory video, where a jumpy woman — older, tired, — despairs at saying something fresh about socks until Jasper, personified into a little robot friend, offers up this line: “The perfect pair of socks is like a hug for your feet.”
“Hot damn, that’s good!” she marvels.
Is it? Hold that thought while I make sure those readers who still carry cash are following along.
“AI” stands for “artificial intelligence.” It’s the same collection of circuits that makes a calculator work, but complicated enough to mimic human thought, supposedly.
If you assume AI is a long way from affecting daily professional journalism, you weren’t looking closely at Friday’s column, about medical decisions. A full-service columnist, I write my headlines — unaided by tools like Sassbook AI Headline Generator — and try to pick my own art, to perhaps delay the day when I’m ushered out into the pasture of the tragically defunct.
I searched Merlin, our Sun-Times photo database, looking for some retro black-and-white image of a doctor in a white jacket. Finding nothing close, I looked at my own photos of hospitals. Busy and grim. I tried the Library of Congress and the Metropolitan Museum of Art banks of public domain images. Nothing. Twenty minutes of fruitless searching. Then I sighed, jumped onto Dall-E, the graphic AI provider, and created a free, useable image in about 10 seconds.
Did I have qualms? Sure. Primarily that our excellent human staff photographers would notice and hate me quietly in their hearts. But my primary directive is to do what is necessary to improve the final product. Nobody seemed to notice.
Would I someday use Jasper to craft a more felicitous phrase? Why not? I use a thesaurus if I can’t immediately put my finger on the right term. I use a dictionary. For the top of my column today, I cribbed from my 1930 copy of “Moby Dick,” which is basically what AI does.
A lot of creativity is judicious borrowing. The lady in the Jasper video might find “The perfect pair of socks is like a hug for your feet” an epiphany, but a skeptical real live journalist who plugs that phrase into Google discovers plenty of footwear companies —Crocks, Bombas, UGG slippers — have used that exact phrase for years. What Jasper does is take what you’re looking for, scour the internet, hoover up a bunch of old work, mash it together, then spit it back at you.
A person could do that (and does — “tragically defunct” is used by Nicholson Baker in his novel “The Mezzanine”). Graphic artists complain that while Dall-E doesn’t rip off any particular work, it forms a pastiche by processing millions of images and patching together variations on a theme. That also is not new: There was a guy at the Tribune who read a lot of Mike Royko columns, then spent the rest of his career regurgitating a pale facsimile of Royko’s style. Can we really fault technology for being as derivative as people are? (Not to mention as racist. The three doctors that Dall-E served up were all white; a problem with AI generators. At first, the criminals Dall-E served up were usually Black).
Is this important? Maybe caring whether something is original or not is very 20th century of me. Why not use AI to wipe the fingerprints off your plagiarism? Heck, why read anything at all when you can slide onto Instagram and spend 15 minutes or an hour or two watching snippets of “The Big Bang Theory” intercut with astounding car crashes and Jenna Ortega dancing to “Goo Goo Muck”?
The answer, I think, is that being a human is difficult, or at least challenging, and takes effort, imagination and integrity. Or should. Given how bad humans are at being human, often, despite 100,000 years of beta testing, we shouldn’t expect machines to come close anytime soon.
Until then, times change, and we change with them. I tried to sign up for Jasper, but they want $82 a month for “Everything in Starter plan + powerful tools for writing full length content (like blog posts) with added control & flexibility.” I bet Jasper wrote that one. Maybe later. For now, Sassbook AI Headline Generator, like Dall-E, or your corner drug dealer, gives away free samples. I plugged the beginning of this column into Sassbook and it offered me the headline: “Moby Dick: ‘Jasper’ is a robot that makes blog posts 10x faster.” Completely wrong.
I bet I can come up with something far better, and as long as that’s true, I have at least a fraying thread of job security to hang from. As for “Moby Dick,” it’s quite a good book, despite a fixation on whaling and nothing about Jasper. I recommend reading it while people, you know, still read stuff.
