Is AI Forcing Us To Appreciate Imperfections?

The evolution is quite beautiful to witness.

Photo by Isabella Fischer on Unsplash

Once upon a time, everyone and their father wanted to have perfect pictures, and perfect writing, and perfect songs. We paid meaningful sums or downloaded expensive software to edit pictures — for Instagram and imaginary adversaries — or just to fit into a mode that was so carefully constructed for algorithms and online validation: smooth, blemish-free faces and skin.

We compared artists (especially the female ones) to one another. We wanted them to sound a certain way, to reach a certain pitch. Then came the writing/editing software. I mean, I have Grammarly installed on my computer. Even as I write this, it is actively marking some of my words in red and yellow.

But AI happened. To be specific, consumer-facing, readily available AI. Because AI has always been there, it just wasn’t available in iPads and mobile phones for random X (formerly Twitter) users to undress people (if you know, you know).

It was all shiny and widely considered helpful at first. People were happy to have a machine think for them, write for them, plan for them. It was said to be doing the heavy lifting, whatever that meant. And it was neatly wrapped in a web of corporate American buzz words like boosting productivity, working smarter, not harder, moving with the times, skill stacking, etc. Only for it to turn our world into a monochromic, soulless land of slow-witted people. Every article reads the same. Every song sounds the same. Nearly every picture is unreal. Now we’re building even more AI tools to detect AI-generated images or writing. Laughable!

However, we’re witnessing a gradual shift in public acceptance of AI and AI-generated media. And there seems to be an agreement, largely unspoken, that imperfections are the new gold. If a human sang that song, I want to hear them breathe at some point. I want to hear the ‘stress’ in their voice. I want their voice to be so distinct that I do not think of another artist when I hear them. If a human wrote that essay, I want to see originality in their sentences. I want to see them start a sentence with a preposition simply because they could. I want them to defy the so-called writing rules and let their voice shine!

Ultimately, AI is a bunch of code set up to regurgitate its training data. It doesn’t deviate from what it was fed and how it was programmed to operate. But I could decide to rewrite this entire article, and perhaps, share a different line of thought about AI without worrying about compute limits. And most importantly, I am human. Flawed and all. You might find extra words here and there that shouldn’t really be in this article. You might find grammatical inconsistencies that Grammarly (or other editing assistants) could not catch.

I would not be pasting this on an LLM and asking for input, correction, or fine-tuning. I need you to see my imperfections, and I need you to know that imperfections are perfectly normal. It truly gladdens my heart when people identify these imperfections and rightly attribute them to human-made art.

Long may it last!