My Favorite Current Use of AI

One of the biggest wellness indicators for people is the ability to do metacognition. One of the biggest indicators for metacognition is to be able to take a pause.

Social media is pretty great at training people who might have been pretty good at taking pauses, into not taking pauses. Instead of taking a pause and being able to stay with it, social media trains people to distract themselves with something interesting. This can be convenient in some ways. If you are all by yourself, it can be a useful way to digest hardship. In other ways, often when you are talking to somebody, or something is happening under stress such that looking at your phone would not be appropriate — that is the time when taking the pause could be the most useful.

I wouldn’t be surprised if sometime in the next 15 years (the timeline of clinical psychology interventions going public is slow) that trainings in slowing down and taking a pause exactly when it feels the most stressful and the most impossible is the exact kind of mental training that people undergo.

I don’t know if the military does this already. I can imagine a universe in which universities start to test for this. In some ways the SAT did test for this in that going fast and not freaking out, and doing micropauses to check your work was the entire game.

I am already finding myself going off of social media. Not for these reasons of self-betterment, but because of the AI slop that is already on Facebook that I don’t want to be in my brain. Youtube shorts are another matter. The algorithm there sends me real people. There I am looking at real people. But on Facebook, so many things I can’t help but stop and begin reading — mostly biographies of interesting people — are written by AI and have the same really annoying tone that if I read too much of, I will start writing badly.

So, kicking me off Facebook is one good use of AI. But it is not my favorite.

My favorite use of AI, so far, that I have seen, apart from optimizing certain banal work, and having it run python scripts, is my friends making incredibly silly songs that would not be worth the time of any serious musician to make and would not be sellable because the jokes are so niche, but give us endless amounts of fun.

This fits into the category for me of unleashing human potential for creativity, without “taking away creativity” from anybody else and without “tarnishing the craft” of crafts people. It does not feel like “lowering standards” because the format is itself jokes. There is a self-knowledge that what is being made are cartoons that are not actually worth the time for any real singer or any real guitar player to actually puts the craftsmanship into, or for a recording engineer to take seriously. However it is worth the time for me to write a bunch of silly words into a machine and then make something like a song, so that I can share with my friends the fucking lollipop glitter bullshit that is in my head today. The entire point is that it’s not high quality and I know it’s not high quality, but that there is an audience of three people that might find it hilarious today because it is coming out of my head. And this is the sort of creative sharing that before AI would have been sufficiently difficult as to be impossible.