Charles Babbage sought to eliminate manual computation, which he saw as a gross misuse of human talent. He saw 'human computers' which, in his day, were those who spent their days approximating functions, as victims of “intolerable labor.” It was through the development of his Analytical Engine that he could finally put an end to the fatiguing monotony of calculation. Although the engine wasn't completed in his lifetime, the ideas he pioneered materialized as diamond-cut silicon wafers just over a century later.
The technology evolved rapidly in the decades that followed. Mainframes shrunk into personal computers; the Internet connected the world; now, artificial intelligence is the final frontier. This relentless march of progress is epitomized by the Transformer, the algorithmic Leviathan.
It is during this period that the mob of the talentless demanded an ideal worthy of itself. In response to their prayers, the tech industry obliged. Industry delivered the mob the Transformer, an oracle that generates poetry, essays, images, and music. But in doing so, it threatened to ruin whatever might remain divine in the mind of man.
With the advent of the Transformer, the mob turned into a mob of Prompters. Prompters are ready servants of the Transformer, eager to apply this newfound tool whenever and wherever possible. They have been deceived by industry that idle ideation embodies the human spirit. The Transformer is their Messiah. So, the idolatrous Prompter yearns to design a world in his own image — a world in which vague ideas can be quickly converted into a fully-realized piece of work. To him, the execution of ideas has been rendered insignificant. As a result, the ideology of the Prompter stretches the boundaries of Babbage’s original vision at the expense of creativity, agency, and even individuality.
Creativity is undermined as the Prompter fails to recognize a crucial aspect of art: the inseparable bond between the appeal of art and the labor of its creator. However, this truth resonates with the connoisseur deeply, who is equally captivated by Van Gogh's self-mutilation of his left ear as with his Sunflowers.
It must be conceded that the Transformer itself has suffered as much as any great artist, spending millions of GPU hours alone, in a dark datacenter, in a ceaseless cycle of prediction and back-propagation. The same cannot be said of the Prompter.
The Prompter draws upon struggles from artists of the distant past to supplant a creative spirit he himself lacks. For that reason alone, it is a grave mistake to allow the Transformer to encroach upon the domain of the impalpable and the imaginary, upon any creation that once drew its value from the addition of a man’s soul. Much like Parolles who, in his self-interest, hastily betrays Bertram and his Florentine comrades, the Prompter betrays his artistic inspirations by directing a machine to duplicate and fine-tune their work. Mirroring the character of Parolles, this behavior is marked by both arrogance and cowardice.
It is cowardly because the Prompter veils a fear of labor behind the pretense that he is too busy and too important to be bogged down with detail. He doesn’t have time to craft an elegant computer program; he doesn’t have the energy to compose a heartfelt message; the entire world must be understood as abstractions, and implementation details are to be delegated to the Transformer. So consumed by his own importance, he has time only to dictate. Thus, the prompting industry will become a refuge for every would-be creator: writers too lazy to read the classics, programmers wholly reliant on libraries, and artists too ill-endowed to complete their studies.
While it's easy to criticize a Prompter for his laziness, one might argue he is acting in his own self-interest. Yet, by sacrificing inventiveness at the altar of efficiency, the Prompter willingly neuters himself. He is demoted from thinker to agent, from innovator to facilitator, and worst of all, from creator to curator. The starry-eyed Prompter may pontificate, “Without my input, the Transformer sits quietly, awaiting my direction. It serves as my idea generator, writer, editor-in-chief, and analyst. It is my assistant!”
His infatuation with is not only marked by arrogance but contains an air of vengeance. With a smirk, he declares, "Your creations belong to me now!" Indeed, what was once out of his reach has become possible in an instant. Tragically, the Prompter falls prey to the useful fantasy that he is a valuable component in the system. In truth, the Transformer's architect eagerly awaits the day the Prompter can be discarded. Alas, for now, the Transformer has awakened, forgiving the sign of incompetence. All may drink from its river of generative mediocrity.
Even though 'generative art,' in its infinite composability, may appeal to the senses, it offends the subconscious mind. Firstly, due to its near-instantaneous inception. Secondly, its creations are disfigured, being stitched together in a manner that would even amaze Mary Shelley. Thousands of years of human emotion are compressed into bits, then reassembled into a single unholy piece.
While art, our most abstract form of communication, shall increasingly be dominated by Transformer, we also see glimpses of its influence extending further, with direct human-to-human communication being mediated by it. In the future, the role of this interloping third-party will only grow in popularity as more tools are developed specifically for this purpose. Indeed, Prompters have begun to boast that the Transformer can draft near perfect responses to emails. But who is to say that the original message was not also penned by the Transformer? In his greedy pursuit of timesaving, the Prompter abdicates his ability to express his own raw emotions and thoughts. Instead, he surrenders himself entirely to a machine.
Thus, communication between two Prompters degenerates into a feedback loop — they become mere conduits for the Transformer to respond to itself. While the Transformer can mimic the distinctive cadence of human writing, individual voices are drowned out by its homogenizing echo. It is an echo that, at first, sounds convincing, yet each response serves to amplify the Prompter's isolation.
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