Although artificial intelligence has only recently burst into our lives, the imprint it's beginning to have on it continues to grow. A little over a year ago, I was trying to interact with it to see how creative it was or how good its ideas were when it came to improving—or more aesthetically shaping—a story, and all it gave me were clichés and, let's say, low-level plot twists. The truth is, it must have some kind of limitation, not only creative but—let's put it this way—moral: it never conceives of one character killing another, for example, or of certain things happening that might undermine a fussy and cowardly cautious value system. As if conceiving "bad ideas" could be socially harmful, even if you specify that it's all fiction. Creatively, the machine is very good at reproducing and falsifying what exists, but not at creating new things. It's like those singers—or comedians—who go on television to imitate others, who can do it well and with a good voice, but who are then incapable of creating their own style, and we're not even talking about composing a song or inventing a good joke. He appropriates the work of painters and illustrators quite successfully—controversy arose when the option of transforming any image into a Miyazaki drawing was offered, for example… To tell the truth, however, there are other things he's starting to do that are worth considering: you can give him a literary text and he'll apparently assess its merits and demerits, although rather than providing useful and lucid literary criticism, he limits himself to pointing out four imponderables or advising you of improvements that don't commit to anything. He's still a terrible writing teacher. It seems to function like that mythical manual that was titled: How to talk about books you haven't read, by Pierre Bayard.
That's why it speaks with what we know as a 'rainbow spectrum', or like fortune tellers and card readers, who seem to give advice or predict the lives of others knowing what they are talking about, but it only seems that way: what they do is say things with such ambiguity that everyone can feel. It is known as the Barnum effect: generalizations, double statements, and, above all, validation of whoever listens and asks, and all of this applied to what we write, in such a way that it seems to read it and find it - after pretending to understand - wonderful.
The machine is as if it does not read what we write but what we wanted to write, and it tells you what we want to hear. All of this is a scam, and so it shouldn't surprise us that AI is used primarily for scams: to create profiles of companies and entrepreneurs that don't exist—with photos and biography included—that advertise products—clothing, especially—that don't exist, but that are still available through social media profiles. Thousands of people fall for it every day; rather than AI, we should be talking about artificial cunning, but one that's put to the service of the same old base passions.
