Addictive Predictive

I have one fundamental objection to AI.

I object to my neurons being fired on my behalf by an automated programme. What amazes me when I read or listen to the lyrics of a song or view an artwork or attend a theatrical performance is the spontaneity and the synchronicity of what I think and feel. Sparks flying from the clash of unexpected confrontations within the mind of another human being, encountering mine through an artistic medium.

Lateral thinking is a superpower. And it is wholly original, in the way it operates. What Dr. Samuel Johnson called ‘Conceits’ (‘the most heterogeneous ideas, yoked by violence together’) is to me one of the great ‘Pleasures Of The Text’. My mind, making patterns, solving problems not mechanically, but through the magic infusions of second nature: practice, making perfect; ecstatic alignment; the aesthetic pleasure of innate intellect and creativity in play. It is discovery of the intrinsic self, interacting with the world, in alignment and in counterpoint, each transforming the other. Dr. Johnson called this ‘violent’ - but what is the alternative? Blandsville?

Now that everyday life has become so surreal, it feels important to create things that are authentic, unique and sourced from the core of oneself. New territory is being discovered within. I don’t know if others feel this alongside me.

I got the feeling that the world was getting too generic, some time ago.

And I know all this mass production around us is because there are so many people all alive at the same time. So advertisers and marketers divide us all into categories, based on what data analysts call the algorithms of our preferences. Every time we like, comment or heart something on FB or Insta, we are being tracked. But it is not because they want to know us, or connect in any real way. Their messages are individualized, and we are hailed by our actual names. But it is more like surveillance. It is our profile they want, not who we really are.

It’s an Orwellian horror scenario, for any creative individualist, where ‘Nothing is your own but the thirteen cubic centimetres inside your skull.’ Even as I quote this brilliant observation from George Orwell’s novel 1984, the quote is being autocorrected to American spelling. My irreparable fertile ecosystem is being leached. Is AI part of a system which is painting for us a ‘picture of the future … a boot stamping on a human face forever’? I recall Aldous Huxley in Brave New World, written a century ago, showing the ‘Principles of mass production, at last applied to biology.’

It’s very unnerving, the way we embrace the predictive mechanisms of AI, and put our brains and phrase making skills on autopilot and in default mode. It becomes addictive, giving our power away. Slouching on the couch, instead of journeying in the wild lands outside our door. Picking the low hanging fruit, instead of the ones closest to the sun, at the Tree Of Life’s crown.

And so I want to start making my own specific emojis. I am getting training, from digital art experts, but in the meantime I have started using the ones which are already available, arranging them in varied sequences that no one has seen before.

It is only recently that there are different coloured ones, and a range of skin tones to choose from. We have come late to inclusivity. Like a self-referential supermarket. Pick the one that best matches you. Or three tones lighter, if you think that is the version that you think is closer to the real you. But you think of yourself framed by what you are offered, and the image of yourself as a recipient of the mass production methods which flatten our responses.

But everything on offer feels flattened out, and pre-designed. Smooth, you know. Pre-fitted. And not by you, and not for you. So you are outside it all, the structures which were made by other people. A spectator of the world you live in: a passive observer of bill boards and news presenters and MCs and important people in government and on the media who do not look like you. Fit in or be shut out. Replication and iteration of pre-decided normatives. Messages passing through you without any additions or enrichments from you.

When you are just a kid, it doesn't matter at first, because the world is just the people at home and at school, and on television. It's when you start to leave home, get a holiday job, meet other people, that you see and feel the differences. People might say you are a real outlier - someone who is not on the Bell Curve. It’s a compliment.

It felt like there was too much inside, growing up. A whole lot of raw, unprocessed stuff. And very little of it was acceptable, to discuss in public. It had to be put through a process. Like a machine, made digestible and comprehensible with sharp blades. But what comes through that is not unique or special.

All these processes make us compliant.

So I grew up, observing. All the smooth operators, all created from Styrofoam, with no personal stake in anything. Nothing sharp or edgy at all. Just a sort of dimly glimmering trail, to show their progression.

This is what being invisible is like. And it happens, when you grow up in a country where hardly anyone looks like you. Yet, if one was part of the majority, would that not be only another form of invisibility?

That is why I observe a lot of outsiders, and members of ethnic minority groups, becoming such colourful personalities. Just to protest against their own co-operation with invisibility. All the bright-coloured clothes and accessories. All the assertive statements. Operating in a category pre-marked 'controversy'. And of course it is a matter of time before values clash. If you are encouraged to speak up, be careful what you say. It may offend those who represent and uphold the majority opinion. You only know what an outlier you are when the wagons circle to shut you out.

You are called 'exotic', because of the big dark eyes and the long dark hair. But. What happens if you don't actually want to be predictably controversial? Or assertive? Or colourful? Is there an emoji for normalcy, that is not made for you, by someone who does not really know you?

People make assumptions. And they do that because everything is designed with stereotypes in mind. And we all react according to how people fit into those prefabricated patterns. So it's a sort of mid-air collision of things we assume about each other, as we do so many things in a hurry these days. Easier to buy things ready-made.

Knowing that, feeling all these choices out there, not representing what I discern within, swirling around, ubiquitously off the mark, is what caused me to decide to create my own emojis. Create my own persona, piece by real piece. A work in progress, resonant, synthesised.

Fact check, you know. Be careful, with every word and picture you put out there: everything you say should be you. And every unique utterance changes the whole world a little, and makes it more and more real. Our creative expression is being diminished by the answers of AI. We need to resist this, and expand the range of feelings we experience, and give our readers access to this more intense and variegated experience, in our work.



Basing these ideas on my teaching practice over twenty years, I tested the idea of non-artificial intelligence through teaching analysis and interpretation of literary texts. Because our responses to what we read should be unique and not programmed by how well we comply with external prompts and cues. Standardised testing is crowd control and anathema.

I have never understood why people complain that they lose their grasp of the value of a text by analysing it! Analysis done creatively constructs meaning, rather than demolishes or diminishes it. Interpretation is essentially a creative activity, the reader’s analytical perception collaborating in the creation of meaning with the creator.

‘Constructive Criticism’ is what I call this approach. Critical thinking is a powerful form of creative expression. Ideally, it should encompass three Quotients: IQ, EQ and MQ. Interpretation of language and literary texts is a fusion of thought and feeling. We read or view a piece of writing or a visual text and it impacts our mind and imagination via our senses. And it asks us to think about how we and others live and move in the world. When asked, what does this text mean to us? What impact does it have on us? Does it make me change my view of other human beings? - this is working outwards from our interior grasp of the way the text makes land on us, like a breeze or like a storm. Measuring our intelligence, our emotion, and our moral capacity.

Analysis asks: why does this text impact me this way? What is the creator’s intention? What methods and techniques does s/he use to achieve his/her aim? Is the correlation between aim and method strong? We can measure the effectiveness of the text by the strength of that correlation.


Credit: healthline.com

Left and right brain work together. Logic and rhetoric work together. Clenched fist and open hand. Assertion and persuasion. Hard and soft. The best critical analysis is creative. The best interpretation is a collaboration between the creator and the responder: a living interaction, and always in the present.

It is organic. The process can be systematic, sequential and strategic. But it spontaneously evolves into something more than its constituent parts - there is always an element of emergence, of astonishment and surprise. Something is found, something is discovered - something unexpected. Something is created which did not previously exist! It is the opposite of the predictablity of AI.

This is because each reader/viewer brings a unique experiential perspective to the artwork. And even in one person’s lifetime, they see and think and evaluate differently according to their own evolution.

If we make an equation out of it, we could say: Meaning = Objective Content of Text x Reader’s Consciousness

In this equation, ‘Meaning’ is Variable (V) and ‘Objective Content of Text’ is Constant (C). The Meaning changes because the ‘Reader’s Consciousness’ is Variable (V) [N.B. This equation is copyright to my original teaching materials (c) Devika Brendon]

So the act of criticism is essentially creative. Its outcome changes with greater understanding and awareness on the part of the responder. They see more in the same text, and the text is no longer what it was before. And the process of creativecritical engagement makes them more than they were before. It increases their capacity. They bring more to the next reading - not only of this text but to all other texts. And thereby they gain more. It’s a never-ending cycle of creativecritical engagement which enhances our lives!

Some students are frustrated by this, with its inevitable, inbuilt growth trajectory. Those most frustrated are those who succeed best at standardized tests.

Automation, while it removes unnecessary drudgery of the ‘reinventing the wheel’ variety, takes away the excitement and the risk of making things work, with one’s bare hands. As Toril Moi once pointed out in an unpredictable Q and A session in Australia in the early 1990s, there is intense pleasure in exercising our intellect, creatively, making connections that were not mapped out for us.

The world is being curated for us, in a quest to privilege convenience over experience. First contact with anything is messy, but real. We shape it with our assumptions and biases, and try to control it, but some part of the encounter escapes our preferences. We cannot be wholly auto corrected, and we should rejoice in the ways we cannot be accurately predicted.

Predictives restrict us, and make us lazy. We choose the neural pathways of least resistance, the roads most travelled, worn down, overused; and the empty, efficient superhighways, especially when we are overwhelmed with too much choice or infotainment. We choose only from what is available: shallow choices and threadbare phrases. We starve ourselves of essential nutrition for our imagination, through these bad choices. And that deficit impoverishes us, and depletes the energy of our writing.

We are not marionettes or mass-produced blow-up dolls. One size should not fit us. Think of musicians, interpreting well known music, or doing cover versions of famous songs. Masterpieces are not painted by numbers. Without the unique infusion of the artist’s sensibility, the rubato, the expressive freedom, the interpretation lacks transformative capacity, and fails to add value or spark joy. As Robert Lowell tells us in his poem Epilogue ‘The painter’s vision is not a lens, it trembles to caress the light’. [Source: Day by Day (1977)]

I want unpredictive text. And real feeling. Both in me and in my response to the real expression of other’s true feelings. I will save convenience mechanisms for mundane tasks. But even they can be made meaningful, with the level of consciousness we bring to them.

A friend of mine recently moved into a Smart Home. She stands in her kitchen and utters commands to the mechanisms which are programmed to synthesise the functions of the home to her specifications. But her commands have to be pitched at the correct volume and expressed in a pattern the digital responder understands. And she still has to work out how to use the temperature regulation commands to attune her environment to her needs.

No blanket response will cover what is needed, here. It is the powerful feeling that is needed, and the spontaneous overflow, which can neither be measured nor predicted: energy created should not ever be dumbed down, diminished or destroyed.

We need to cure ourselves of our addiction to predictives. The remedy is to shear away what is threadbare in our own thinking. It takes practice. And conscious re-evaluation. But you gradually get back on the creative path that is specific to you: offline but centred, and increasingly on track, in a reclaimed and vibrantly imaginative landscape.