How I Would AI Myself

A Journey to the Center of the Me

There is nothing, and I mean nothing, that I can add to the AI discourse besides for a yikes! I don’t know how all this will end, but just like when I eat six chocolate chip cookies in a row, I hope the good will outweigh the bad.

Plus, I’m not saying I’m prescient, or even particularly smart, but I did draw this New Yorker cartoon in 2015. You know, 2015 - the sweet spot on the timeline of inventions between toasters and AI. Yes, that 2015.

Still, I can’t help feel like it’s coming for me. For all of us.

Neal Stephenson, one of my favorite writers, explores AI in its many potential variations. From coining the term “metaverse,” in Snowcrash, to exploring a churning deluge of AI created “content,” in Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, he advances possible futures - a few of which are quickly becoming our quite-likely present. In Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, he writes:

“I would say that the ability of people to agree on matters of fact not immediately visible—states of affairs removed from them in space and time—ramped up from a baseline of approximately zero to a pretty high level around the time of the scientific revolution and all that, and stayed there and became more globally distributed up through the Cronkite era, and then dropped to zero incredibly quickly when the Internet came along.”

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If we thought we had to sift through information to find the truth before, we’re about to have to do a lot more sifting. In In Fall; or, Dodge in Hell, they even use AI to filter AI. At some point, will the AI even need us, or can we simply sit back and let all the AI generated content wash over us, smoothing our unique edges into nothing, like pebbles on a beach, each in our own shiny world.

Like I said, I have no new insights or perspectives to add that the greatest minds haven’t already newslettered about. But-

That’s not why I’m here. I’m here to win! You heard me right. If humans are using AI to scrape the internet’s content in order to reproduce it sans original human creators (I feel like that’s stealing?), I’ll simply beat them to it and wring myself inside out.

With a large trusty cold brew by my side, helping to raise my intelligence to the level of “artificial,” I am collecting, compiling, and synthesizing every cartoon I’ve ever drawn. (Or the ones I remember drawing. And not like the bad ones, obviously. The AI can have those.) Then, I will spit them back out as AI generated cartoons, all on my own.

Here we go.

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And there you have it. Like condensed milk, I have AIed myself. I have crossed the rubicon in a race that has no end. I am a star glowing in the night sky, hurtling through space in one direction while spouting my light off in the opposite.

So no need to reproduce my cartoons, AI. In fact, stay away from all the cartoons. From all the art. (And if one day AI itself actually does read this, I do need help with investing. I hear you are good with that. So like, we can still be friends?)

Thanks for reading, all you humans!

-Avi

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