TLDR answer: No. Setting aside the moral and ethical considerations (of which there are many), so-called “AI” is a collection of very expensive and obscure niche technologies, which (in most cases) only appear to be economically viable because they are being temporarily subsidized by naive investors. Additionally, delegating work to these systems is like equipping a sword that multiplies your damage output by a factor of a thousand - while also reducing your XP gain by a factor of a million (and for extra fun, it also drains your gold, intelligence, and stamina). And, quite frankly, I find the entire concept of statistical media generation incredibly boring, except as an occasional source of surreal amusement.
Somewhere, deep in the disheveled bowels of a disused filing cabinet, resides a fancy piece of paper, bearing my ancient credentials as an Avid 135 and 235 Certified Pro Tools operator. At one time, this served as proof-of-competence to operate a piece of software which maintained a stranglehold on the music industry.
Back when I got this certification, Pro Tools had just introduced 5.1 surround sound mixing capabilities, and this was a big deal because everybody in the industry knew that 5.1 surround sound was the future of music production. Recording studio owners were told that they needed to reconfigure or rebuild their control rooms, and audio engineers were told that they needed to become proficient in building in 5.1 mixes, or else they wouldn’t be able to compete and they’d get left behind.
And yet, try as I might, I never could quite get excited about this alleged technological revolution. I wasn’t opposed to it, per se, but I didn’t feel that it was particularly interesting, useful, or innovative. And so I ignored it.
Over time, market realities gradually aligned with my assessment. Today, you could probably walk into any big-box retailer and pick up a 5.1 surround sound system, but most people probably wouldn’t know (or care) why they would ever want to. It’s a niche technology, which eventually found its modest role in the market, despite an entire industry’s attempts to artificially inflate it into something bigger. (I watched something similar happen with blockchain.)
The odd hodge-podge of synthetic media generators which are now being collectively (and disingenuously) promoted as “AI” have always filled me with this same sense of abstract boredom. Setting aside the vast environmental, social, economic, and psychological damage which the “AI” companies are causing, and ignoring (for the moment) the moral and ethical ramifications of how their data sets are produced, at the end of the day I find them fundamentally uninteresting as technologies, or even as tools. They are little more than extremely expensive party tricks, and I suspect that future economists will compare them to the Tulip bulbs of a certain brief and infamous era of Dutch history.
As you might expect from somebody who has been working within the intersections of art and technology for more than a quarter century, I have many more thoughts about this subject, but until recently I felt that it might be presumptuous and egotistical to add my own small voice to the cacophony of discussions and debates. Now that my game is starting to get some attention, however, I’ve already begun fielding questions about the usage of “AI” within the project, and so it seemed prudent to have a public post that I could refer people to, if they were interested in more than a mere single-word answer.
There is, for example, a lot that I’d like to say about nomenclature, regressive business models, the industrialization of the arts, and the value and necessity of architectural friction in software engineering, but I’m a painfully slow writer, and I probably shouldn’t make time for any of that unless there seems to be an interest. Let me know if you’d like to hear more. Regardless, thanks for reading!
(Archived blog post from 2026-08-03)
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