Kickstarter Diaries 14: Why Not Use AI?
The latest episode in my tragicomic behind-the-scenes account of life during a crowdfunding campaign.
As the AI debate rages, I started wondering about the Endangered Alphabets initiative that I’ll undertake if my current Kickstarter campaign is successful, and how it would be different with AI.
My plan is to make ten carvings in endangered writing systems and send them back to their communities of origin, where each can be put up in a public place, a place of honour, as an item of pride for the community, an acknowledgement that someone in the outside world knows they’re there, recognizes and respects them, and supports their right to exist, their right to read and write in their own script.
And I imagine someone saying, “Wouldn’t it be a whole lot easier and quicker to make them with AI and a 3D printer? Or use a CNC router, have the laser cut the letters, spray-paint the top black, run it through the sander, and get the same result?”
Let me count the ways that the results might look similar but would be very different.
- The laser cut and even the 3D printer would actually be considerably more exact and consistent than my carved lines, whose slight imperfections would be visible, even if only unconsciously, and would make my version look more human. Someone put effort into this, they will imply.
- The machines can’t feel joy or satisfaction or thoughtfulness or meditation or challenge. If I hand over the act of writing to a machine, then I am robbing myself of those possibilities, and in doing so, I’m sort of robbing the world of a person who has felt those things. I’m a better person for going through all that, and my work is better for being made by a person who has gone through all that.
- If everyone used AI to make endangered alphabets carvings, the number of people who can make a living carving by hand would go down steadily until the profession was abandoned and the hand skills were lost. Moreover, anyone in these communities who has hand skills would start yearning for the days when they can have AI and play with the big dogs.
- Each of these carvings will take me a good six weeks. I’ll spend those six weeks learning by doing—learning about wood, learning about carving, learning about the cultures whose scripts I was carving, learning about writing itself. In several cases I’ll track down people from the script community to ask advice, send out feelers, build bridges. Learning takes time and involvement; ergo all that time and effort are priceless.
- Do I really want to send the message to my friends in minority communities around the world, “I decided that carving some by hand for you was too much work, so I had AI do it?”
Please support old-school endangered alphabets hand carving HERE.
