Nonbinary Style Guide: Humanity in the Age of AI
The important of imperfection and spontaneous discovery…
Oh goody! Another article about doom and the world and artificial intelligence. Exactly what you’d like to enjoy with a cup of afternoon tea.
I attended a seminar on ai a few weeks ago. Our solutions need to be inclusive of this new player at the table (I won’t even begin with who we still ignore even when they’re at the table).
The discussion started off with fairly standard corporate play - ai is helping individuals win, but how can it help all of us achieve wins together as a team. Institutional knowledge and validated corporate perspectives must live within the archives of the AI playground.
For those of us who grew up with paper books and who were lucky enough to have a neighborhood library - this sounds familiar! A space where knowledge is available to you and is generally easily accessible, although with physical libraries, there is often a wait time to add new knowledge or perspectives.
With AI, new knowledge can come in much more quickly, but the verification process seems about as trustworthy as the internet- needs further validation from verified sources.
I think there is positivity in reigning in some of the world of possibility within the answers of AI, and helping put up bumpers on reliance on chat gpt or Gemini.
What irks me the most is the discussion on how to keep users addicted to these platforms, pumping money into the pockets of a few. Twenty four hour compulsory loops are one method that especially sickens me. I have been sucked into the little farming games where you run out of energy and have to come back the next day to complete the task. And believe you me, I want to complete the task.
While I’m sure there are developers and creators who want you to have a fantastic time playing, those who use these compulsory loops are using your dopamine signals against you.
So what do we do?
I think physical craft is my gut response to all of this so called innovation.
I’ve spent more time cutting out pictures and words from magazine and old books in the last year than I have in the rest of my life. Playing with shape and form and pattern has brought sense of peace, tidiness, self expression, and more. I’ve even hung some of the collages around my office- messy and incomplete as they are- it’s a reminder of what makes me happy, what stood out to me in the moment, or a feeling I expressed instead of keeping it inside and letting it fester.
Craft is my response to AI because you must be physically present in your body in order to construct your creation. You literally have to feel the pieces of paper (or whatever medium) in your hands as you place, draw, glue, or cut. AI wants to engage your hormones and nervous system without engaging your brain. You don’t know why you’re addicted to it, you just are. The folks behind the scenes use psychology and other sciences to make sure it’s as frictionless an experience as possible.
I recently saw a post on “friction-maxxing”. This sounds like the white cis het version of “engaging with real life”. The purpose was to ensure we aren’t making our lives as easy as possible and creating manufactured adversity. While this position sounds incredibly privileged and out of touch, I think the core concept is on to something critical.
Technology and Ai serve to make our lives more convenient, simpler, and ultimately less cognitively exhausting. They aim to reduce the number of decisions we have to make in one day - which can be overwhelming to the point of freezing. However, each decision we make teaches us something - even the mistakes. We learn what we like and what we don’t, what makes us curious and what doesn’t strike our fancy. In essence, we learn about ourselves. Using tools like chat gpt outsources the thinking - the reasoning or cognitive processing is now completed by a machine. Our engagement means we don’t go through the processing of “why” - we just get to the “what”.
The “why”, the mistakes, the imperfection - that’s what makes our creation, our art, our writing relatable and human. They make our paths forward more interesting, messy, and bring curiosity to the forefront of our lives.
Those moments of messiness are often where I find my most authentic self. It’s where I found the courage to come out as a nonbinary pansexual person. I see the benefits of AI being a friend to folks who just need someone nebulous to ask questions to about their gender identity or sexuality. Many of us have heard about or even completed the “Am I gay” Google search- and this could help us get answers back.
Perhaps we can use AI as a starting point. An entry into the unknown - a way to combat the blank canvas of life with at least some semblance of an answer. What I beg of any user of AI (myself included) is that we continue to engage our brains in the artificial intelligence practice. If you must, use it as a starting point, but don’t forget to check in with yourself as you go along. You are your best advocate, you are who you should trust most. And when all else fails - grab some old magazines, scissors, and glue and make something tangible. Your ability to piece seemingly random magazine ads might be more inspiring than you think.