AI Junkification

 When I was a child, I eagerly anticipated receiving the mail from the USPS. Even though most of the letters were for my parents, it was the excitement of a personal connection fostered by a crafted message. Around my teenage years, there was this explosion in junk mail. We would come home to stuffed mailboxes filled with ads, donation requests, brochures, and pleas. Bulk rate mail. The general level of excitement in our house for mail plummeted. USPS was no longer delivering something for us. Instead, they had sold our home address to make us a target for aggressive, flavorless, impersonal faux attempts at human connections. We learned that if it was urgent, we had emails; if it was a package, there was UPS. USPS was a cheap pimp: a purveyor of literary spam. Last year, when the USPS proposed cutting back daily mail to 5 or even 4 times a week, there was not the level of outrage of a bygone era. There was almost a relief...whew, less junk to throw out. Junk destroyed a form of communication. When I look at my text messages over the last few years, I feel that same dread of 'more junk.' The harsher term was coined: enshittification. To degrade online communication and platforms.

If there's any hope against autonomously-derived AI art, it is humanity's natural rebellion against junkification. We become numb to enshittifed art. There's a misconception that people want cheaper, easier things, such as Chardonnay in a box. And yet boxed wine still sits as a crude, cheap outlier rejected by most ppl.

The danger in AI-art is that it will be so thoroughly implemented that it will decimate all the joy derived from human connections. If that happens, then the film will start receiving the junk mail reaction from audience members: yawn, ignore, throw away.

They say progress is inevitable, but you have to ask 'What type of progress?' At the start of the Industrial Revolution, Western European societies took poor and working-class kids and shoved them into coal mines, chimneys, and textile plants. Entire cities were covered in the soot of a new era. Kids lost limbs and were crippled for life trying to do what they were told. Upton Sinclair reported on the poisoning of our factory-based food. Capitalists told us 'this was an inevitable result of progress. No turning back.' And yet ppl did not accept that as their definition of progress. Their physical bodies rebelled to survive. In some ways, I think our spiritual bodies will rebel with the same survival instinct against soulless, bulk-rate art. We will either drown in the junk or swim to the shores of humanity.