Hey ChatGPT, Does Anything Matter Anymore?

Meaning is something you create

Two of my favorite activities in the whole wide world are writing and speaking Spanish. LLMs are pretty damn good at doing both. People whip up thousands of words on ChatGPT or Gemini in minutes. Companies like Eleven Labs and Riverside are amazing at doing AI voiceovers of people on podcasts, so it looks like they actually speak a bunch of different languages. Again, this can be done in minutes, whereas learning a language to true fluency usually takes years.

It is time for me to despair, then, right? The things I love can be done faster and cheaper by others, with little to no effort, so why should I even bother anymore? I should even be angry at technology companies for opening Pandora’s Box to the world, and making me feel purposeless and robbed of my passions, right?

No. I understand the concerns with AI in general, and that is an essay for another time. Here, I’m not talking about potential financial threats AI poses to certain people’s jobs. Anyone who got laid off from their job or something probably does feel exactly the despair I described in the paragraph above. Which sucks.

But all that aside, I’m more focused on using this to talk about meaning, and the idea that meaning is something you create, broadly speaking. Whether AI makes us all richer or crowds the internet with garbage or whatever else it is going to do doesn’t change the deeper point: its existence doesn’t strip you of the ability to find meaning.

Despite the fact that parts of the internet are drowning in legions of fake polyglots and AI-generated slop passed off as writing, I still have the power to find meaning through writing and language learning. I can simply choose for this not to affect me. It is a Sisyphus-like, rebellious happiness. Because just think: when you genuinely love something, you do it for its own sake. What other people do or say about it is not a real concern, because the experience of doing it is inherently fun to you, and therefore meaningful.

When Tesla makes a robot that is better than Stephen Curry at shooting three-pointers, do you think he is going to care? Of course not. That man loves hooping. It wouldn’t matter if aliens landed tomorrow and they were all ten feet tall and had such a long wingspan that they could lay it in from half court. Chef Curry would still be shooting that rock. Art is something you do just to do it.

Real love is not conditional on anything, and meaning is self-created. And the world is bursting and overflowing with incredible potential to create a sense of significance. In that moment you crushed it at work, in that creative flow state, in the look in your lover’s eyes, in the post-workout high, in the music that makes the hair on your neck stand up, in the calm, cool morning walk, in the violent laughter you share with friends, in the memories of childhood.

These are all especially meaningful because you decided they were important. I’m not making the case for an unrealistic sense of romanticization or positivity. Rather, I’m talking about what the great Viktor Frankl called tragic optimism. That is, even in the face of unavoidable confusion and hardship that is built into the very nature of life, we still have the power to turn uncertainty and pain into triumph by choosing a defiant attitude. This is an attitude that helps us respond to our circumstances the way that a hero would.

Would Batman whine if there were digital Batman’s in cyberspace doing the same thing? Or would he just keep, you know, being fucking Batman?

Come on Bruce.

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