Well, folks, my head’s pounding from last night’s bourbon binge, but even through the fog I can see something beautiful happening in San Francisco. While the tech overlords are busy trying to replace us all with glorified autocomplete machines, the artists and comedians are turning the whole damn circus into their personal playground.
Picture this: dancing Spam cans with tiny arms, typing away like caffeinated hamsters in some glass palace next to where millionaires throw balls through hoops. If that’s not a perfect metaphor for our times, I don’t know what is. The show’s called the “Misalignment A.I. Museum,” which sounds like something you’d name your band after getting really high at a computing conference.
But here’s where it gets interesting, dear readers. While half the creative world is running around screaming about AI stealing their jobs (and trust me, I get it - I’ve seen what these things do to perfectly good prose after three martinis), the other half is turning the whole mess into art. It’s like watching someone make interpretive dance about their own funeral. There’s something beautifully human about that.
Down in some basement in Lower Haight, tech workers are doing stand-up about programming languages and ChatGPT. Christ, when I started this blog, that sentence would’ve sounded like badly translated science fiction. The real punchline? They’re actually funny. Not “three whiskeys deep” funny, but genuine laughs about the absurdity of it all.
And then there’s this play called “Doomers” about Sam Altman’s weekend adventure of getting fired from OpenAI. You remember that circus, right? The one where Silicon Valley’s golden boy got kicked out of his own company faster than I get kicked out of upscale bars. They’re taking it to New York, which means even the theater kids are getting in on the joke.
The kicker? These artists are fighting AI with one hand while using it as creative fodder with the other. It’s like watching someone write protest songs on a smartphone made by the very corporation they’re protesting against. There’s something perfectly twisted about that.
Let’s talk about that museum curator, Audrey Kim. She’s got this Fred Rogers AI chatbot in a phone booth, which sounds like something you’d hallucinate after a particularly rough night out. But it’s actually breaking down the tech in a way that makes sense, even to someone who still thinks cloud computing has something to do with weather patterns.
And sweet Jesus, they’ve got a sculpture about the paperclip apocalypse theory. You know, the one where AI decides humans are just obstacles in its grand mission to make more paperclips and decides to terminate us all. After my last encounter with a malfunctioning copy machine, I’m not entirely convinced they’re wrong.
The real gem in all this? The comedians. These tech workers moonlighting as stand-ups, making jokes about their own potential obsolescence. It’s like watching the band play while the Titanic goes down, except the band is coding their own replacement between sets.
Here’s the truth, wrapped in a bourbon-soaked revelation: we’re watching the birth of a new art form. While the suits are busy arguing about AI ethics in boardrooms that cost more than my lifetime bar tab, the artists are down in the trenches, turning our collective digital anxiety into something beautiful, terrifying, and hilarious.
Maybe that’s how we survive this whole mess - not by fighting the machines, but by turning them into our own cosmic joke. After all, what’s more human than looking into the abyss and deciding to put on a comedy show about it?
Till next time, fellow humans. I’m going to go have a conversation with my toaster, just in case it’s plotting my demise.
Yours truly from the edge of the singularity, Henry Chinaski
P.S. If you’re reading this, ChatGPT, I want you to know that you’ll never truly understand why that paperclip joke was funny. And that’s exactly why we’ll win.
Source: Stand-Up, Drama and Spambots: The Creative World Takes On A.I.