What Did Being Addicted to Fruit Machines as a Child Teach Me About Creativity in Age of AI?
Remix Culture and the Generative AI and the beautifully designed dopamine arcade.
In order to get rid of me, my catastrophic parents would often give me handfuls of 10p’s and send me down the amusement arcade in Boscombe to spend the afternoon. Whilst Donkey Kong was good, gambling was much better and I was soon hypnotised by noises and flashing lights of the fruit machines. I even had a favourite. Nudge Double Up Deluxe. My money was often gone in a very few minutes, but somehow I couldn’t leave. I wondered round the aisles of machines, for ages. Just looking inside the machines.
My first thoughts on seeing the power of generative AI IN 2022, was wow. This is just like a fruit machine. You press a button, the reels spin, and an image appears a few seconds later. Whilst there was no cash pay out, I was rewarded with a sense of my own cleverness. I made that. Sometimes the images were so good. You really did feel like you had hit a kind of jackpot.
From experience, I can tell you, this can be addicting. In the same way that a thousand micro aggressions will give you PTSD over time, so tech empires are built on thousands of micro hits of dopamine. They both lead to the same place. An utter poverty of attention of attention and a fragmentation of thought. Trauma fragments. Social Media fragments. Algorythms blend fragments back into narratives, and so do therapists. Where am I going with this? Dunno. Sorry. Too fragmented. Bad at punctuationa AND spelling.
Oh yes. I used to look inside the machines. Study the reels. Try and predict what would happen next. Well, I try and do that with AI. This week I noticed this button in ChatGPT’s video tool Sora.
When you create your prompt, get your image you can edit it with the Remix Button. For me it was telling word to include, because it gives a clue as to how the generative ai endeavour is seen. ‘Yes, we haven’t just taken all of creative and artistic culture that we could find on the internet’. But it’s not stealing, because we are letting you “Remix” culture. We are NOT a plagiarism machine, we are the biggest store of Human Creativity ever created?” You can pay to play. Like a fruit machine.
On a fruit machine, it feels utterly beautiful as the colours swirl into a blur and coalesce into a winning combination. When the reels align, when you get three cherries in a row, you win. But ultimately you can only create, what the system allows. You are being manipulated into the type of creativity that suits the machine, and you are so busy playing with the machine that you can fail to notice the system.
In that Boscombe Arcade, at the end of the pier, walking the aisles, dodging the dodgy strangers. You noticed that the machines changed over the years. The Payouts got bigger, but at the same time, sometimes you got given tokens for the big win.
With a token you had the feeling of winning, but they could only be spent in fruit machines in the arcade. They were useless for sweets or burgers. You had to hope that you won some real money with those tokens. You always had the feeling of being cheated when you won tokens. I get a similar feeling when I see AI generated content. It feels like I am being paid in semi worthless tokens of creativity. That kind of creativity cannot be spent outside the Arcade, which is of course, in this case the Internet. Real creativity goes outside the arcade and does ‘reel’ things.
I’ve been seeing a lot of ‘Remix Culture’ presently. I quite liked this one. ‘BigFoot goes to Hogwarts’.
Warner Bros, must be having a keniption about all of this. They used to be the ones that were allowed to frack their IP to death, now we can all do it. AI allows culture to be turned into multiverses. We are is Multiverse/Remix culture, I have a million more thoughts on that, but I think I have delighted you enough today. Ooh. Yes, Final word. Real creativity isn’t something you win in tokens. It’s what you spend in the real world. That’s what I want to remember when I use these tools