AI's biggest triumphs are not AI | This Week in Business

05.04.2024 - 15:01 / gamesindustry.biz / Ai

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This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check every Friday for a new entry.

When I was in grade school, one of my teachers had a poster on the wall with a quote on it from an author.

Sadly, the name of the writer and the exact wording have faded from my memory, but the sentiment itself is still there, its impression only getting deeper and more clear with each passing year.

QUOTE | "If it makes you cry to read my work, know that I first had to cry to write it."

That quote shaped the way I think about reading and writing. It's more than a way to communicate information; it's a way to take the hodge-podge of thoughts, ideas, and feelings in one person and give them to another. It's a way to understand others, and be understood in turn.

I may never know what it's like to walk a mile in someone else's shoes, to experience their dreams, or to suffer their heartbreaks, but through their writing, I can begin to imagine it, and relate to the panoply of human experiences outside my own. And through my writing, I can begin to make myself understood to them. Not the way I am most commonly understood today – as a collection of data points and demographic categories that can be tracked and cross-referenced to determine which ads would be most likely to push me into a purchase – but as an actual individual with my own unique qualities and faults, my own particular sources for the emotions everyone feels to some degree.

My writing is a way for people to know me better, to create some form of shared understanding in a world that is far too often lonely and alienating. It is the sum of all that I am and have been over more than four decades now. It is me submitting to the mortifying ideal of being known.

There is a person behind these words, and you can learn something about me from them, from the literal meaning of the words, the way they are strung together, the way they cry out for an editor to pinch the bridge of their nose and grumble, "4,000 words? Again? Really?"

Even if I were to use these words insincerely, to lie, or to mistakenly say something that wasn't true, that too would tell you about the person I am. Because there is a person writing these words, and there is a fundamental truth in the process of putting them together that I cannot evade. There is something – someone – behind these words for the reader to engage with.

And this is why I am utterly uninterested in generative AI, at least when it comes to audience-facing elements of creative work. How am I supposed to