As readers’ of my rambles (and a hat-tip-of-the-season to you, hope you’re well and can take a break) will know, the next 400-odd words usually spark into life (well, a dull flame) with a single word. So rather than spoil a good thing and attempting to pull off a sparkling intellectual sleight of hand, let’s get right down to the task as per - with the rather wonderful word ‘prestidigitation’.
Never coming across it, had to look it up and rather than being something to do with digital, discovered it’s the term for ‘conjuring tricks performed as entertainment.’
The eye-catching nature of it for me wasn’t in the magic-circle company it keeps (although that’s a good enough reason) but the way a word like this could easily stand-in for a handle for what artificial intelligence engine’s do with instructions for image-making. You press ‘enter’ and voila! a magical digitation appears. And just like all really good contouring tricks, it seems so amazing that you can barely believe your eyes.
Which you really can’t - on so many levels, given the deep-fake misuse and one end, to the idea of whether actual artists, illustrators, authors actually made it (or whether that matters. Which I think it does, but this article isn’t that hill.)
The ability to prestidigitise is such a powerful phenomenon, and so unlikely to be dislodged or switched off (as some have argued for) that after this year has turned it really will feel like we have lived through a pre- and post- era of prestidigitisation.
Magic tricks have been fooling our eyes for ages and we like being surprised and entertained, even if we’re not party to how the trickery was achieved. The problem is when deception moves from entertainment to offensiveness, or rather, just cheating.
At the end of an article (unrelated, but when you start thinking about a thing, you’ll start seeing it everywhere) on GPT, was an arresting sign-off:
“My eighth grade math teacher told me not to rely on a calculator since I won’t have one in my pocket all the time when I grow up,” Phillip Dawson, an expert who studies exam cheating at Deakin University, told Recode. “We all know how that turned out.”
While it certainly looks like AI-chat is going to end up as ubiquitous as Deakin’s adding-up machine, I’m rooting for thinking (writing, making, whatever) for yourself and less on relying on a machine to help you ‘find the lady’. Leave the illusions to the conjourers.
