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Help, My Friend Got Me a Dumb AI-Generated Present
WIRED’s advice columnist on the true purpose of gift giving.
While the writers and artists who have sung its praises (Margaret Atwood, Zadie Smith, and David Foster Wallace among them) tend to regard the book as something akin to a volume of metaphysics, it bills itself, somewhat dryly, as a work of economic anthropology. Although it is drawing from “pools we cannot fathom,” to borrow Hyde’s formulation (an apt description of the vast reservoir of training data that constitutes the model’s unconscious), and although its stochastic logic is as opaque and mysterious as human creativity, its output still bears the stain of art that was created by committee and calculated to hit certain market objectives. In the meantime, I think your feeling of being “cheated” is entirely rational—not because your friend necessarily owes you something, but because the gift, in its failure to inspire you in the manner of true art, has remained starkly within the realm of commodities, bringing to mind the crude economic logic of fairness and debt.
Or read this on Wired
