Let writers and musicians and artists do the hard work of actually creating the original artifacts of culture. Then have the machine flood the market with low-cost copies, with cheap derivatives. I did some searching to see if Houellebecq had made any recent pronouncements about AI. I couldn’t find anything. So, for the hell of it, I asked Claude, Anthropic’s chatbot, what Houellebecq might say about AI. Here’s what it came up with:
The machines had finally learned to speak, and predictably, they had nothing interesting to say. Claude, ChatGPT, Bard — these names floating through the digital ether like the brand names of antidepressants, promising relief from the fundamental problem of human existence: the need to think.
I watched my neighbors queuing at the coffee shop, each hunched over their phones, asking artificial intelligences to write their emails, plan their dates, explain their feelings back to them. The barista, a philosophy graduate drowning in student debt, served lattes to people who no longer needed to form coherent thoughts. There was something almost beautiful about this collective surrender to algorithmic mediation, the way a mass suicide might be beautiful if observed from sufficient distance.
Not perfect, but pretty damn good. Maybe the machines do have something interesting to say.