My venerable old sticker-encrusted laptop finally died after ten years of faithful service through coffee shops, airports, office breakrooms et al. God rest its slimline DVD drive. It was an ugly beast and hardly top of the line when I got it, but it was a workhorse, with a decent keyboard, and all the ports you could possibly want.
(Well, it's no longer usable as a laptop anyway. Seems like its battery controller is knackered and it will only power up on mains with no battery connected at all. And yes, I've tried all the things.)
So I finally pulled the trigger and bought myself a new one. It came, as expected with Windows 11 pre-installed.
I dare say that you can figure out where this is going...
I've been using Linux as my daily driver on both my desktop and that old laptop for a while now, but I occasionally dual-boot into Win10 for the odd thing, mainly FLStudio since I've never gotten it to play nice with my audio interface when running in WINE.
Since I want to use this laptop for music stuff, amongst other things, I was considering either installing Linux in a dual-boot configuration (can be fiddly, and I'm lazy) or even just leaving Windows on it as-is. It can't be that bad, surely, I thought.
It's not like I'm a massive Linux nerd. The old laptop didn't meet the requirements for 11, and I peevishly didn't like the nagging to upgrade. But Win10 was fine. It worked. Hell, I even defended Windows 8. Win 8 had some nice improvements over 7, and the much-hated fullscreen launcher that everyone moaned about didn't bother me in the least. I could still hit the Windows key, type the first few letters of the application I wanted to launch, and hit return to launch it. It was barely ever on the screen for more than a few seconds.
I was willing to give 11 a chance, I really was, but the first time startup process was SO FUCKING ANNOYING. Gigabytes of updates to download, ads for Office 365, insistence that I sign in to an MS account, AI bullshit, cajoling to sign up for GamePass, asking me to turn on Recall (fuck. no.) etc etc. By the time I finally saw the desktop I was so pissed off that I almost immediately shut it off and began preparing a Linux install on a USB stick.
Which is where you find me now. I'm not even dual-booting. Fuck it. I'll fiddle with FLStudio some more and if I still can't get audio recording to work I'll look for an alternative. Bitwig looks nice,
I know it's been said a million times before but my god have Microsoft ever shat the bed.
I expect I could have persevered, disabled all the AI guff, ran de-bloat scripts and bullied it into something usable (at least until the next update turned all that shit on again) but I really can't be arsed.
Not that Mint is perfect. I had an issue with it freezing up which required a bit of searching and an adjustment to a configuration file. But at least it's not constantly trying to sell me shit I neither want nor need.
"You get more conservative as you get older" they say. Well politically I feel further to the left that I ever have, though the saying is true in one respect. When I was young I was wide-eyed and excited about technology and shook my head pityingly at the oldies who didn't get it. Now all I hear about are machines that catch us in addiction loops, harvest our data and feed us mindless AI slop and fascist propaganda, and I just want it all to stop and go back to CRTs and rotary dial phones.
I normally hate that kind of thinking. I'm always suspicious of "everything was better in the old days" style nostalgia, not least because it often ignores all the ways in which things were significantly worse for a lot of people, conveniently forgetting how advances in civil rights, healthcare, assistive technologies, etc etc have improved the lives of millions.
This isn't to rubbish nostalgia itself. As a retro-gaming enthusiast that would be massively hypocritical of me. It's natural to miss and wax lyrical about beautiful things that have passed, as all things must, and to take inspiration from them into the present.
But at the same time, progress is non-linear and not every great shift is necessarily a positive one, and the part of me that is nostalgic for an earlier time when my life was simpler goes into overdrive when I'm aggressively sold a shiny new technology which, after scratching the surface of novelty, appears to be actually making the world worse.
For the first time in my life, I am happy to be called a Luddite.
The term "Luddite", to mean an individual who is opposed to the adoption of new technology, originally referred to 19th century textile workers who, on being threated with reduced wages or outright unemployment, sabotaged the automated weaving machines brought in to replace them. (Nedd Ludd himself, whom the movement was named after, appears to be an aprocraphal character.)
You might call someone a luddite for not wanting to use a smartphone, for example, but unless it's because they are concerned about the effects of such devices on society and not just because they struggle to adapt to them and learn the necessary skills, then the term isn't really accurate. The original Luddites weren't simply against technology, but were fighting against how technology was used by the wealthy to disenfranchise the workers.
I am a software developer by trade. Developers are seeing a depreciation of their skill and being laid off en masse by CEOs, dazzled by AI hype, who are convinced that LLMs can do their job just as well, even though that has been proven time and time again to be false. And those of us still employed are under increased pressure to use these tools to generate code and show increased productivity as a result, even though we end up spending as much time reviewing and debugging what it spits out as it would take to write it ourselves, while failing to exercise those mental muscles involved in the act of creation.
I also work in the games industry, where artists are being similarly devalued, replaced by cut-and-pasted AI slop or assigned to clean up its mess without the opportunity to improve their creative skills in the process.
The big difference between the weaving machines of the past and the AI generators of today, is that even if the former produced a lesser quality product, they could produce more of a good-enough product that it drove prices down, which was at least good for the everyday wearer-of-clothes if not for the workers making them. But code is complex and requires genuine reasoning skills to work efficiently and without bugs or security holes - skills that LLMs do not posess, despite what the AI evangalists who bang on about AGI being just around the corner (it isn't) tell us.
And AI generated art? Well, that's a misnomer for a start. It's not art.
Ok, so the definition of art is one that has been argued over for centuries, but I'll tell you what I think it is. It's anything created by a sentient intelligence that is done for non-utilitarian reasons.
AI image generators are remix machines. They have no consciousness, no personal history or preferences, no - for want of a better word though it's one that I would have shunned in the past - soul. They do not generate for the joy of expression for they have nothing to express. They mash up pre-existing, stolen work of humans to make something to a given specification. Even an artist working at a game studio when tasked with modelling a gun for the latest installment of insert generic shooter here has some kind of personality or style that will bleed into the finished product, even if very subtly and sandpapered away by the demands of the medium. The most impressive piece of AI generated imagery has less artistic value than a toddler's crayon scribble. When I look at that scribble I have a tiny, momentary connection to the individual who created it. When I look at an AI generated image I feel nothing. Just sad.
And yes, I'm aware that a human has to prompt an AI to generate the image, but coming up with the idea is the least important part of the creative process. It is all the micro-decisions, mistakes, tangents and redirections that make it interesting and human. The idea that da Vinci decided to paint a portait of an italian noblewoman isn't what drives millions of visitors a year to the Louvre to see the Mona Lisa.
Oh and don't get me started on the generic AI generated music that is flooding streaming platforms. Now any twat with access to the software can call themselves a "musician" by generating the blandest fucking gabage imaginable, tagging it with a generic genre, and publishing it on Spotify to parasitically soak up streaming revenue.
Making art of any kind is a fundamental and important part of the human experience. I genuinely believe that it's necessary for our mental health, and we're devaluing and debasing it and handing it over to machines to do while we spend our lives doing drudge work.
I am not denying that there are valid uses of machine learning for specific cases. It's good at things like image recognition, for example. I love that I can go into my photo library and search for all pictures of my cats. I have a friend who suffers from cognitive issues caused by a seizure disorder. He's an extremely intelligent and creative guy, but long periods of focused concentration can be painful and triggering for him. He uses LLMs and image generation to get his ideas out because it's otherwise an insurmountable struggle for him. He calls it his "cognitive prosthesis". It would be churlish of me to begrudge him that. No technology is inherently good or evil, only how it's used, and under capitalism that generally means using it to further enrich the wealthy and take from the rest of us. At no time in history has this been more true than with the AI boom, where every tech company under the sun is intent in jamming a chatbot into their products, whether anyone wanted them or not, just to ride the hype wave and inflate their stock prices while laying off actual skilled workers.
I'm going to go and calm down now. None of the above hasn't been said elsewhere by smarter people than me. Cory Doctorow in particular has written frequently and eloquently on the same subjects. But sometimes you gotta just get it off your chest, y'know?
But I do believe there's a silver lining. As the world fills with unimaginative AI slop, and the novelty starts to wear off, real human-created art will gain a certain value in contrast. Not a financial one, perhaps, but a quality that sets it apart from the machine-generated. It's already tempering some of my own tendancy towards snobbish criticism, where I can say "well, this isn't to my taste, but at least a person made it". That's got to be worth something.
