The text on the computer screen, and the computer printout too, has a sterile, untouched, factory made look, like that of a plastic whistle or a new car. The body does not do work like that. The body characterizes everything it touches. What it makes it traces over with the marks of its pulses and breathings, its excitements, hesitations, flaws, and mistakes. On its good work, it leaves the marks of skill, care, and love persisting through hesitations, flaws, and mistakes. And to those of us who love and honor the life of the body in this world, these marks are precious things, necessities of life.
— Wendell Berry
I have yet to read a more prescient quote than this one by Wendell Berry on his writing Why I am Not Going to Buy a Computer. Berry wrote on continuing to write by hand and by typewriters, and his refusal to buy a computer in the late 1980s. However, this exact emotion in his writing can be felt, even more so today, almost 40 years later. As we become more disconnected from the work we do, let writings and art be created by AI, we forgo the meaning, emotions, and learning behind such work. Anything done autonomously is not done by someone at all. A human has nothing to inherently gain from it. The creation process is completely stripped out. And I believe this lack of connection to the work and what this quote represents mimics the exacts reason why there is so much passion against the creation of media, writings, art, videos, etc. created by AI. There is no remnant of thought put into such a piece. It feels devoid of life, yet still full of flaws and mistakes, the exact opposite of something that has been worked on with care. The “body” has not put a mark on the piece. Technology, at least from Berry’s perspective, at the time at least meant a sort of perfection without such mistakes. Those that can be erased by a backspace, not the mess shown when crossing out and erasing words by pen and paper. Nonetheless, AI does not yet even have this quality of “perfection”, and it being marketed otherwise, as something even sparkling and magical, making it seem like the average person shouldn’t even be able to comprehend such a technology, that they should be in awe of it1, is what makes it even more egregious to have such flaws in it output and even more outrageous to those most affected in creative spaces.
As just a software engineer, I am not so ignorant and appalling to even closely compare software or coding to art. Quite the opposite, AI as a means to an ends for coding is mostly a positive. It truly is just much faster than writing, and at a corporate level, outside of system design, there isn’t necessarily meant to be an art or a craft to the boilerplate code on something already well defined (a personal and passionate side project is not in scope of this comment). While this only proves that coding was never the bottleneck, it still exemplifies and further proves the amount of human work and care that needs to go into a product even in large industries. AI is probabilistic and any probabilistic system can inherently never be perfect as it also still makes numerous mistakes. Work still needs to be reviewed by humans. AI is not so elegant, to make a comparison similar to Berry, as the humble, sterile Microsoft Word.
All this to say that, if anything, it has only become more obvious how much human work is needed in society when people are laid off, attempted to be replaced, and finding even Anthropic still having job opening for Software Engineers. As Berry closed out his work, I will as well, as again it still shows how timeless feelings across various technological advances, people remain consistent. “… I am not without hope. I knew a man who, in the age of chainsaws, went right on cutting his wood with a handsaw and an axe. He was a healthier and a saner man than I am. I shall let his memory trouble my thoughts.”
- Berry, Wendell. “Why I am not going to buy a computer.” (1987).