Kung Fu vs. AI
this blog post is inspired by a blog post by one of my besties.
Originally, kung fu referred to any skill learned through great effort.
There’s a genre of video that pops up every so often where a laborer shows their sheer skill and efficiency, or kung fu, at doing their assigned task. It’s used to dispel the notions of unskilled labor, notions that if you threw anyone into the orchards of Florida, they wouldn’t be able to collect as many oranges, tangerines, or mandarins as the laborers who’ve been doing them for years or decades. Some of the most personally stimulating videos out there of this genre are people showing how much time and effort goes into cleaning pools, laying tile, or even cleaning and replacing a horse’s horseshoes.
Kung Fu is in everything. Everything is kung fu.
I recently looked up “how to make washing dishes not suck total ass”. (for obvious reasons)
One of the responses on Quora referred to something about mindfulness and Buddhism. The person said that every action is meaningful, and to fully live your life is to fully enjoy and embrace the actions you take. Enjoy the feeling of the Scrub Daddy. Embrace how you have to arrange your plates and dishes so they don’t collapse. Think intentionally. Think about the scrubbing and the wiping. The more that you enjoy the actions that you do, the more you tend to enjoy your life. That’s the philosophy. This philosophy is echoed in things like About Time, where the main character learns the secret to life is just… living life? Or phrases like, “Enjoy the little things”, “Stop and smell the roses”, “Live, laugh, love”… and/or “eat, pray, love”?
Doing things matters. Doing things is what life is made up of. Even the things that we deem inconveniences. I had a conversation with a friend about the trap of avoiding inconveniences. He said that we’ve built so much of our lives around avoiding inconvenience that we’ve begun to avoid living our lives. Much like Adam Sandler’s character in Click, we’ve been trained to live our lives in autopilot. We tune out when we commute, tune out when we work, and tune out to relax when we’re at home, prepping to work again. All we do is tune out. And if all we do is tune out… what is there to do or to be when we tune in?
All this to say that our lives are made up of kung fu. Everything that a human being does IS kung fu. From the software engineer who artfully codes to save lines, to the 4 year old getting a coloring sheet at a restaurant, everything that the human spirit touches becomes art, becomes skill, becomes kung fu. There is beauty in the things that we make, the things that we do. There is a reason that I want to eat my grandmother’s beef stew - a stew refined over a probable hundred repetitions. There is a reason that when a child draws a technically deficient drawing of you with a heart next to it, you want to hang it on the fridge, and not throw it in the trash. There is a reason why when your friend shares with you some slash fanfiction from their teen years, you laugh and read with them instead of leaving them on read.
Things matter.
People matter.
When you read this random blog post that is posted on some random blog hosted by some random site, you are reading a 100% human effort. You are experiencing a level of telepathy, as Stephen King would say; thoughts that have originated from my mind and are now transferring themselves into you as we speak. It is magic. It is… (say it with me) kung fu.
Which is why I fucking hate our new generative AI overlords.
Everything that I have learned to see the beauty in, everything in the world that came as a result of human skill, labor, kung fu, is now targeted to be replaced by Sam Altman and his fellow GenAI goons at Microsoft, Apple, and Meta. They’re putting up Midjourney models in Skechers ads in the subway, they’re using Sora to generate ads about how you can bet on anything, they’re talking about how you can generate episodes of your favorite TV shows, that way you can get everything you want, when you want. The graphic design field is a fucking graveyard now that everyone can generate “professional” level graphics at the press of a button (as well as a carbon footprint of charging your phone to full battery). We have everything we want at the touch of our hands, the only thing it costs is humanity’s ability to work, feed themselves, and the massive impact on the environment.
In our quest to rid the world of its kung fu, we’re making sure that kids who live near data centers, in predominantly Black communities like Boxtown, are having their first severe asthma attacks in 15 years. But I’m sure that email is worth rewording, right? I’m sure that even with easy tools and templates in apps like Canva, which make it so easy to make a flier, having it done by a generative AI is worth it. The ability to avoid paying working actors to be in your advertisements makes it worth it. The ability to write a recommendation letter for a kid who trusted you to evaluate them at a press of a couple of keys. The ability to write a best man speech. The ability to write your vows. The ability to write a beautiful speech to be read at a wake. All these things, all these beautiful ways that humans can and do express themselves, now can be done even faster and easier with the help of GPT 6.902967.
Look.
I know.
I know that its so so so so so so so so so so so so so tempting to just have these tools make your life easier. I know it’s so easy to use this to claw back some time that your full time job has stolen from you, or to look things up that you’re too lazy to put some effort into. BUT. BUTTTTTTT… in the process, you are stealing valuable critical thinking skills from yourself. And if you take into account that aforementioned philosophy of mindfulness, you are taking away pieces of your life that are meant to be experienced. The kids graduating now who have used AI tools to cheat their way to their degree will not get that time, those challenges, those opportunities to hone their skills, minds, and their kung fu back. The only thing they will get in return is a couple of words from the fake sycophantic bullshit slop machine like “Wow! What a great idea!”
Even when you ask it if you should kill yourself.
A thing that is made by a person will always be more valuable than something generated by a thoughtless program, trained on stolen and unethical material. That crayon drawing that your niece made of you, where you have misshapen limbs and a fat-ass head, is more valuable than any perfectly painted portrait someone could generate of you from Instagram. So as a human being who just wants human effort and skill to be preserved… make that thing you want to make! Write that thing you want to write! Sing that song you want to sing!
However good or bad that product comes out, it’ll have the one thing that makes it worth something.
Kung fu.
Hey, great read as always. Makes me wonder if AI could truly embody such learned skil.