poliphilo | A Gutenberg Press Moment

I must admit I haven't given AI a great deal of thought because it's always seemed like something that wasn't going to have an impact until after my time- but now, here it is, like a bowling ball among skittles- in the form of cheaply available apps that can create images and produce texts that are pretty much indistinguishable from the honest to goodness work of human minds. The struggling student can issue a prompt and have it write them a cogent and grammatically flawless essay, the person who can't draw for toffee can issue a prompt and have it make them a photo-realist image. The one thing it can't do is be original- because however it mixes up its materials its always drawing them from the vaults of what has already been done...

But that's for now. Jordan Peterson calls this a "Gutenberg Press moment". We're at the beginning of a New Age. Gutenberg has just run off his first set of Bibles, and the copyists are still busy in their scriptoriums, the illuminators are still grinding their rare earths and most of them are completely unaware of what's just about to hit them...