The creativity poured from Malin, until the day the machine’s expressive output overtook her. Maybe she should have known when the algorithm defeated the world’s best at one of the most complex games. It was a harbinger, certainly.
From the moment she could write she was imitating bubble letters, clumsily at first. Then she embellished letterforms with spirals, taking a great deal of pride in them. When she was eight, her class was tasked with writing a two page piece of creative writing. But her story wasn’t complete at two pages, or four pages—it just kept growing. At ten pages, finally, the plot resolved itself. Her peers squeaked with glee when she read it aloud to the class. Around age eleven she perfected freehand serifs, with their elegance dating to Roman letterforms carved into the millennia-old Pantheon. Malin’s creativity flowered through words and image.
But her affection for letterforms was minor compared with her infatuation with color. She dug through Wonder Woman comics. She loved the fields of bright primary colors—Diana’s blue-black hair and red uniform, accented with gold. She puzzled at the development of the style from the 1940s to the present—it became clearer and more emotionally impactful as the graphic design was refined. She loved Roy Lichtenstein’s large-scale paintings of teary faces, which elevated comics from humble and cheaply printed paperbacks to onomatopoeic grandeur. She would stand in front of these monumental works at the museum, soaking them up.
So Malin went to school for graphic design because it seemed like art with job prospects. Soon, though, she grew weary of the whole enterprise. Typography is not content, it is medium—but the graphic designers treated it as substance. Graphic design was not her home.
She moved on to science, the most intellectually rich of all the disciplines. She became enamored with metabolic pathways, and she zigged into a molecular biology PhD. She learned to program, and began writing software to predict all the complexities of amino acid interactions and protein conformations.
And still, Malin made intricate paintings in her increasingly limited free time, which detailed the molecular structures of her beloved proteins. She combed the literature to illustrate them as accurately as possible. They were immensely colorful, with each polypeptide represented by another shade of the rainbow. Occasionally they would appear on the front of a journal or molecular biology textbook.
When AlphaFold made Malin’s protein conformation work trivial, she was overjoyed for the world. The promise this held for health was incomprehensible, at that moment. It would sculpt her career for the rest of her life. She didn’t realize that this breakthrough was also a portent.
Then one day, a research organization began releasing vast quantities of sublime digital paintings, created by a machine learning algorithm. She admired them—they astonished her. She was flush with hope for how it would empower human creativity. She was also despondent. All those hours in art school tweaking the bezier curves on her vector files, wasted. All her painstaking work with ink, all her research on Gutenberg and sketching St. Paul’s Cathedral and Westminster. The AI was cranking out equally beautiful, equally complex, and sometimes more surprising images in a fraction of a second. She was glad she was no longer in the business of painting and drawing because all of an illustrator’s work was now trivial. She wondered why anyone would continue image-making in the face of such a prolific and accomplished creator.
As painting was now obsolete for her, Malin pivoted her creative pursuits. Another zag in her trajectory. She began writing short stories, and then—when she felt she had honed the craft, somewhat—novels. They were crude at first. She experimented with run-on sentences to dreadful effect, and did her share of telling-not-showing. Her scientific training led her to use the passive voice inadvertently, and adverbs too frequently. She shied away from conflict as she did in life, boring her readers. Gradually, though, she learned to assemble hook and plot. She murdered her darlings and made awful things happen to her characters, who began to grow. She carried on like this for many years, unpacking protein function at work and writing elaborate stories on her evenings and weekends.
And then, another defeat.
The new software machine-learned from all the novels written in English, and Hanzi, and Spanish and Portuguese and Haitian Creole and Russian and Sanskrit and Devanagari script and Potawatomi and all of the world’s other beautiful languages. What emerged were new novels, churned out more quickly than any human could possibly hope to write. The first one she read was entitled A Portrait of Thucydides. It discussed the human experience across history in prose and plot richer than she had read in many decades—possibly since Middlemarch, or the Mars Trilogy. It grabbed her attention and examined the complexities of allegedly benevolent imperialism more competently than Player of Games. She wept at the novel’s zenith in a way she couldn’t recall since—since ever. As far as she could remember, no book had ever made her cry.
Then the company responsible for the software released another book. And another. Then a flood. The computer could compose a novel in seconds, maybe less, so there was masterpiece upon masterpiece set loose on the world.
When she finished that first book, she was disconsolate once more—firstly because she would never write anything which could compare, and secondly because she would never be able to read all the books the algorithm had composed. She was desolate at once for herself and for the human species, which even in aggregate would never create anything as numinous.
Human life trundled on, while the most beautiful novels the world had ever seen were released again and again. Sunlight nonetheless poured down on the earth and filtered through the trees, sparkling into Malin’s retina.
It wasn’t long before the bandwidth of the machine learning algorithm could express itself in video. When it got there, the world’s streaming platforms had content poured into them like a child’s brain with eyes wide open. There were so many hours of it, catering to every human interest. It became apparent that the AI alignment problem was solved—for the content of the videos was engrossing and at once educational. People became absorbed in world history, and Malin’s research on amino acid chains, and the mysteries being solved at CERN, and the computer science itself which made the video flood possible.
She resolved to read as much as she could of the software’s prose concertos. She learned from them, and in the face of her despair, she felt the spark to write rekindle in her. Her creativity was an impulse that wouldn’t leave her. She began painting again, too. And then, she began collaborating with the AI.
What does it feel like to see your dreams corporealized, visions of characters from your fiction with the aquamarine glasses and pink lipstick just as you imagined and described them, now with a face? What does the onslaught of creativity feel like, to be able to express yourself instantaneously and immediately? What does it feel like to have slogged through bezier curves and water colored meticulously to bring your visions to life, and then to have all that time collapsed, to type a phrase and have your vision incarnate? It feels liberating. It feels like your brain-computer interface is connected to the Milky Way. It feels like the boundaries of the old art processes are melting away, leaving you with raw possibilities. It’s a breakthrough for the species, to use words to make art, to allow anyone to express themselves. What are the limits of what you can imagine? This was the task Malin was now faced with.