For the first time since 2021, I browsed an AI-generator website. Nothing against them, I'm just reaching middle-aged and 'not getting around to' some of the newer things out there.
A lot of the images on the front page share generic qualities. Slow motion seems ubiquitous, if the image is moving. Wrinkly-cyberpunk looks like another common production. Lots of similar female faces and crowds of dead-looking dancers moving in unison.
What really hit me, and maybe I'm the first to say it, is how similar I felt to those slow-moving bodies and dead looking face. Look, I've got a CV. And if you're in my field, perhaps our CVs look similar. Dragging myself to the finish line of this degree has been tragicomic the whole time. It's a good ending note to realize after a great deal of very personal and private struggle that now I must make myself look as much as possible like others (fit the mold; play the game) while also somehow standing out in a crowded field.
These beautiful lifeless AI people simulate the same conundrum. When our systems are factories, how does one feel original?
It's no secret this blog is a small protest against death, among other things. One of those other things is the creeping laziness of middle age, and the cognitive as well as physical aches and pains that come with looking at crowds, new things, competitions, and job postings and thinking: wow, again with this? It has to happen again?
I'll always try to say something original, so here we go: it is predictable that AI art should be trapped inside the same problems of people stuck in traffic. You're never "in" traffic, you "are" traffic. This stupid, aunt- and uncle-sounding wisdom cracks open and lays before us a delusion carrying us through every conscious moment. We are of and not outside systems, including the particular torture of job hunting and CV building. As I blink and gape at job postings and imagine what it would take to get interested, I feel parts of my thoughts clicking in to the groove lines of institutional rhythms.
Well of course, you've got to publish. Find something to say. And get a grant; there are lots and it's not that hard to write the proposal. Even the practice of applying can be helpful.
Some go mad and take jobs in national parks. Some stick close to the earth in jobs they can easily feel better than. The stupidity of the professional caste I'm in and trying to stay in is that we routinely seek out jobs titles we feel inferior to. I feel like an AI wanting to be a real boy (see? everything new can be recognized as very old). Those grimacing AI faces were produced to simulate the same heady cocktail of human wanting-to-want-something. I know I ought to want a job. The material needs of life necessitate the job, and thus the want. Then I am taught to adorn the want with that phrase stolen from the faithful: seeking a higher calling.
A fellow I knew briefly in person and now mostly online habitually posts self-help advice, often masquerading as personal melodramas bookended by dime store self-reflection mottos. Not to go at him too hard, of course. If you took his online posts to be representative of his life, you'd think this guy was on a non-stop tour of eye-opening experiences, every day dropping into a deeper circle of transformative consciousness. So much learning going on; surely he'll ascend to some higher layer of existence soon. Really it's just content; a lot of what professionals post about their breakthroughs and achievements resemble the same soft lies stand up comedians use to set up jokes. Professionals don't tell jokes though; they are jokes. I had lunch with this guy a couple of times and on the second time he left me with the bill halfway because he was double-booked and the other appointment was more important. He didn't tell this story on his online profile, so perhaps he didn't see anything to learn from it.
Another story, another professional: a trainer of trainers, a speaker about speakers, a job called 'consultant'. How I wish consultants were more like medieval court eunuchs. Theatre is truth because everyone admits they're acting. So, this consultant spoke at lunch at length about how she was helping people worldwide, amazed at all the different cultures, and excited for new engagements, workshops, and papers put about the engagements, workshops, and papers. I shared a few key details of the messiness of my PhD process, her face kind of fell off and she shook her head saying "Oh no, no". I smiled and moved on; pain is a personal obsession of mine, why share with others?
I'm telling the stories, so I get to sound like the protagonist. But either of these people might tell a different story of a messy, frustrated PhD student struggling to understand a complicated professional world, who was a bit too candid and honest at what were meant to be working lunches, not personal confessionals. And, they'd be right. My retelling the tales on this blog is not a whole lot different than them waxing poetic about their insights on social media. Content is content, after all. Though there is no 'like' button at the end of these essays, and nobody is reading them.
Consultants such as these people have the difficult task of performing care in place of relationships. Like therapists, they have to be privately more insane than their clients in order to handle the weight. Line cooks have cuts and burns all over their arms; they've eaten and puked up everything; they're amateur alchemists learning through brutal trial and error. What do you think consultants have done to themselves, that they should be such experts on failure?
I'm getting far away from the title of this post. I guess consultants, whatever that word means, comes to mind as a professional version of the absentee or misinformed mentors populating the academy. When I meet one in the wild I am reminded of the specters who called themselves my advisors and passed through my life quite quickly. Job hunting brings up all the old cuts and burns, the ones I did to myself to learn something because no one took me seriously enough to help.
Scanning some social media accounts of professionals, I'm reminded less of the bombastic, creative, offbeat platforms where 'creators' operate, and more of the gray creativity of the generative AI galleries. It's a carnival without any sound, and I have to stay in it with this job hunting. Such a strange dance to be done.