You can just say it

There is a weird collection of arguments for appraising the value of humans and their creative artifacts. It usually goes something like this: In the age of AI, we should still prefer humans in certain roles because AI could never perform the tasks required for that role. Or, a human can at least do it better. Or, perhaps the output from a human and AI may look similar, but human output is preferable for subtle stylistic reasons that an AI cannot reproduce. Or, at least the AI cannot reproduce it consistently. Observe the scuff marks around the base of the goalpost from constant movement. Allow 28 days for the concrete to cure.

This line of thinking boils down to, “Humans are valuable if they produce high-quality output.” This argument dangerously depends on the existing-but-narrowing human-AI capability gap. The gap certainly existed in the past (2023-era ChatGPT). It may still exist now. I do not know if it will hold in the future.

Consider instead

“Humans are valuable.” You can just say it. As a human yourself, I advise you to. You do not need to qualify it. This is a robust¹ statement that is not conditional on a point-in-time snapshot of the leading frontier model’s score on some recent benchmark.

Qualities of “quality”

As a related but importantly unnecessary aside: How do you measure the quality of a creative artifact? Is it effective? Does it accomplish the thing it is meant to do? This question implies two subcomponents² of quality: intent and material form. It seems to me that many arguments for the value of creative artifacts focus too much on form at the expense of intent.

Creation is the distillation of intent into form. Intent is usually inseparably embedded into the form of the artifact. A human iteratively (sometimes painstakingly) shapes and reshapes their creation until it sufficiently matches what’s in their mind’s eye. The odd thing about generative AI is that it can produce substantial form with minimally applied intent. A human can show up to a task with an unclear mental model of what they mean to accomplish, and an AI can generate something anyway. “Write a letter of resignation for me to send to my boss.” “Hmm…I guess that looks good.”

Perhaps “AI slop” is really a way of expressing that it’s difficult to identify the intent behind the form. By that definition, humans are very capable of generating slop, too; generative AI has simply lowered the entry barrier for creating intentless form. It could be said that intent is expressed in the prompt. For prose text artifacts, a well-developed prompt is perhaps near the intended form already. In a recent conversation about (not) using LLMs to mediate human communication, my friend Tom Hudson told me, “If you’re going to use an LLM to write me an email, I’d much rather you just send me the prompt; at least then I’d have an idea of what you actually meant to say.”

The pathology of generative AI is that it too easily allows substantial form without discernible intent. That mistake is harder to make when creating by hand.