Are we missing the point on AI?

 Artificial Intelligence -- whether it be chatGPT or Midjourney "art" or what-have-you -- is THE topic these days. It seems like half the blogs on my reading list have weighed in on it both generally and as it relates to tabletop roleplaying games specifically. Is it a useful tool or a threat to human creativity? Can it, or will it, supplant human game designers/artists/content creators? Is what it currently does (scouring some volume of human-generated creative output and remixing it) essentially analogous to human creative processes, if significantly less advanced at this point, or something lesser or inferior simply by virtue of being artificial? Can it, or will it, ever surpass the quality of human creativity as judged by human minds themselves?

These are all interesting questions to one degree or another, but I would submit to you that ultimately, the question of whether it's worthwhile to persist in our own creative endeavors or not boils down to how much we enjoy it for its own sake. If, some day, as some people believe, everything will be done better/faster/smarter by AI and robotics, why would we do anything at all? Because we enjoy it. Because it's meaningful to us on some level beyond the practical. 

This has been the way of things at least since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, and probably before. Some new technology comes along to automate production of some thing, and that thing suddenly becomes easily obtainable with far less effort. Yet there always exists some sphere in which people continue to do things in the old ways because it pleases them to do so. It's why some of us cook meals from scratch when just about any food you could ever want can be found ready-to-eat. It's why we build shelves and odds and ends of furniture in little woodworking shops in our garages when any and all of it is mass-produced in automated factories and can be delivered to your home. It's why we grow gardens even though big farms do it far more efficiently. It even applies when our vastly superior competition is not a machine but a fellow human being: millions of people practice arts and crafts that professionals do far better, and millions of us play sports or watch our friends play at a level vastly inferior to what you can see on TV in an NBA or Major League Baseball game.

Ultimately, it avails us nothing to fret about AI, nor to put ourselves in the role of a Digital Age John Henry, wrecking ourselves to prove some cosmic point that man is superior to machine. Embrace AI if it helps you perform some task you don't particularly relish. Ignore it when it would infringe upon something you genuinely enjoy. I will admit, for my own sake, to being mildly curious what AI can do, but I haven't felt even a little temptation to use it in my writing, not even experimentally, because I enjoy the process for its own sake far too much. It would be like delegating eating my favorite food or listening to my favorite music to a machine simply for the sake of efficiency. I like coming up with ideas. I like sifting through them to separate the wheat from the chaff, and refining them into something more polished, and puzzling out how they relate to one another. I don't care if an AI might churn out a final product that others consider better. The journey is the destination, and to me, taking an AI shortcut would diminish it. Your mileage may vary, and that's OK. Your using AI to write a novel or create a D&D adventure module does not in any way infringe on my right or my ability to do so using only my own hands and brain. 

If something's not your bag, by all means, hand it over to AI to do for you... or maybe not. Maybe consider learning a new skill, even if you'll never be more than mediocre at it relative to machines or more talented humans. They say comparison is the thief of joy, and what could exemplify that adage more than worrying about whether we measure up, in the business of being our own unique human selves, to machines which maybe can do things faster, smarter, better, more efficiently but are utterly incapable of feeling enjoyment or fulfillment in what they do? In the final analysis, someone or some thing will always be objectively "better" at anything we might choose to do, and all we have left is that which we enjoy for its own sake.

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