The Yellow Ochre Newsletter
Turn your art from a hobby into a purposeful blessing for your community and culture.
Why You Might Be Both OK and Not OK With A.I.
At what point did we start using “A.I.?” Was it 20-something years ago when I was taught how to manipulate pixels with a digital paintbrush? Or the 1980s when Microsoft introduced the spell check feature? At some point, we began this road allocating our agency to something not human, yet made by humans. But with the rise of A.I. use recently, the sense in the air is that we’ve crossed (or are about to cross) some kind of line.
What follows will be a brief musing about A.I.
As with most cases, I ruminate in the nuances of things. And so it goes for using A.I. What I’m interested in exploring here is merely four ways we might approach using A.I. Why is it some of its uses feel ok? Why not others?
Four Types of A.I. Uses
What follows are four types of uses for A.I. measured on two poles:
Agency (horizontal axis): the capacity to choose and act. On the left is the deterministic version of A.I. It is passive and requires a human to operate. To right is a more autonomous agent, independent and self-directing.
Initiating (vertical axis): the act of starting. On top, a self-directing automated agent and on the bottom, an agent dependent on human for initiating.
© Made by Matt.
Function
In the top left, we have the Functional A.I. This is the kind of A.I. that depends on human triggers to get rolling. You play the role of Tony Stark when using A.I. like this. I call this “Function” because it plays a more utilitarian role in our lives. When Microsoft added the auto-correct feature, our lives became easier. Thought it depends on man to set off a trigger, once triggered, this version of A.I. gets working all on its own for us.
2. Craft
Unlike the triggered Function quadrant, the Craft version of A.I. use depends entirely on humans for working. It’s completely passive. This is the world of something like digital painting, Mickey’s magic broom, calculators, or spreadsheet equations. It will only go as far as humans push it. It is not designed to go further than that. In the Craft category, a case could be made that this isn’t even A.I.
3. Play
While reliant upon man for its initial operating, once triggered, the Play A.I.s are totally autonomous. They call this the “generative sandbox” for it’s capacity for playing with A.I. I find many creatives live and have fun in this quadrant. It’s the space where Baymax, Tars, and R2D2 live. When the culture reacts to A.I.’s infringement upon artists (with the fair arguments against “A.I. slop”), little do we realize many are merely enjoying this category of using A.I. Some people I know play with Suno songwriting just for the simply pleasure of it.
4. Agency
Last we come to the total A.I. agent. The Terminator or Wall-E. I think these A.I. uses are the ones which strike the most fear. They are not reliant on humanity for either their work or starting their work. Once built, they are fully functioning all by themselves. This category is why you might have gotten rid of your Alexa because you thought “she” existed in the Function category but then wondered if she was listening to your conversations.
I think its fair to be both suspicion and in awe of A.I. Seth Godin likens A.I. to a talking dog. If you see a talking dog, you don’t write it off just because it can’t add 2 + 2. It’s a stinkin’ talking dog! On the other hand, we ought not depend on the talking dog as the arbiter of truth.
At the very least, we should at recognize that when we’re talking about A.I. with one another, we could be talking about totally different things.
We’re ALL Artists
Saying, “everyone’s an artist” is kind of like saying, “Everyone’s an evangelist.”
Some are especially gifted for it.
But all should do it.
Story & Imagination
Stories are fast-passes to the imagination.
Cognitive teaching sometimes takes 2-hour in the waiting line.
When Art Builds Trust
“The arts can provide significant starting points for transformative practices that enable a deepened understanding of otherness and other points of view as concrete interconnections with other human beings…Art has the ability to touch us not only as rational being but also as complex, experiencing subjects with feelings, attitudes, memories, and hopes for the future.”
Ruth Illman
Case in point…
Don’t Sacrifice Genre for Directness
The heavens declare the glory of God, and
the sky proclaims the work of his hands.
Psalm 19:1
How do the heavens declare God’s glory?
With literal words? What explicit reference to Jesus? He, of course, is the radiance of God’s glory (Hebrews 1:3).
No.
Their proclamation is one of functionality.
They declared by fulfilling their purpose.
Skies exist to provide shelter from the sun. They soak up water, then nourish the earth again. Perhaps this caused the Psalmist to marvel. Their very existence indicated they were created by their Maker.
They need no preacher to declare that they are clouds. They simply need to do that which God designed them for.
So it is with genres. Brian Schrag defines genre as, “A community’s category of communication characterized by a unique set of formal characteristics, performance practices, and social meanings.”
Church leaders can pressure new believers to evangelize, and rightly so. But often the heroes who are portrayed as “faithful” evangelists are those who are merely direct about Jesus in all their interactions.
The result: this preaches to our imaginations that directness = faithfulness. The more one knows how to mic drop the non-believer, the more admirable.
The downside is that the everyday genres we use in interactions get dumbed down for the sake of “faithful” heralding.
We sacrifice genre for directness.
Imagination Killer
“Abuse killed my imagination.”
Jennifer had an imagination problem. Her horrific upbringing led to this lamentable paradigm. The woes of the world mangle both our beliefs and our internal world-building capacities.
Cognitive engagement alone cannot mend our vision-wounds. We need Beauty back. We need God’s Story heralded forth through all the senses: tasting, hearing, singing, touching, and smelling. We need God’s new creation image bearing creatives to restore what’s been broken.
The Gutenberg Parenthesis
Until Gutenberg invented the printing press in the mid 1400s, the world’s people functioned as oral-preference communicators and learners.
This means values and beliefs were communicated via dance, music, riddles, proverbs, poetry, and visuals more than monologue. Interactions occurred face to face. Then something happened.
Literacy took over the world.
Due to the digital age we find ourselves in, many say we are heading back to an oral world.
Tom Pettitt called the 500 year gap “The Gutenberg Parenthesis.”
This is not to say we throw print out with the literary bathwater. The Old Testament always had its scribes, for sure. But before the Torah was read for morning devos, it was vocalized to the people of God.
Artists, 100% of the world are oral learners.
We need your gifts.
The Subsidiarity Principle
I used to think, “Man, if Eminem got saved, then he could evangelize the world and have an insane impact! So many people would come to Christ!”
There’s, of course, some truth to this. The word of God has the power to change people. So, the math would go: the greater platform one has, the more people can hear God’s word.
Fair enough.
But what about the rest of us non-Eminems? What about the regular Joe, socially awkward, artist who've never left the small town they grew up in?
The subsidiarity principle encourages us here. At the root of this principle is how governments solve problems.
Should major problems be handled by the highest level of government? Some think so, especially after the past century of growing government control, notably under socialism.
The higher up one depends on for solving problems, the lower the local incentives become to address localized issues.
Eminem’s conversion could speak to mass issues of domestic abuse, drugs, anger, sex, etc.
But the greater the audience, the flatter and more generic the answers.
Keeping things solved at a local level ensures that the complexities and nuances of our problems get worked on.
When Jesus died on the cross, the guy living in the mountains of Papua New Guinea was still going about his day tending his pineapple garden. Large platforms don’t always equal ministry success. God calls us to be faithful with the lot he’s given us.