This Cat is Not a Cat, and this Man is Not Falling Off A Cliff: Across And Over The Uncanny Valley With AI

This year, like last year, will see an explosion of artificial intelligence applications and tools, and generative AI penetrates ever further into the mainstream. The implications of these tools are hardly clear, as they rarely are when new and transformative technologies spring up, seemingly out of nowhere, to change how humans live and work.

One thing I have always tried to do as an educator, is to be very open about how the world is changing; lately this means talking a lot about artificial intelligence, and what it might mean for the world. I am 46, and grew up without the Internet. My students, 11 years old, will have to reckon with artificial intelligence, and perhaps particularly generative AI, as it transforms living, learning, and working.

It was less than 100 years ago when Walter Benjamin, in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Production”, talked about what might be lost as art came to be experienced primarily through reproductions, as mass reproductions became possible. Even then, in 1935, Benjamin was concerned that something had already been lost.

Going back 500 years, perhaps monks put out of their work copying out manuscripts had occasion to, very unmonastically, curse the printing press, as technology rapidly changed, seemingly overnight, as it often does.