---BEGIN ESSAY---

For those (perhaps fortunate) people who have never been part of a community surrounding a competitive game, “the meta” is a term both describing a popular and strategically dominant approach to the game and the community’s aggregate judgements of how different styles of play stack up against each other.

While the terminology of “the meta” might be specific to gaming communities, its concept (of strategies becoming dominant, and of meta-judgements about the comparative value of different strategies) pops up wherever there are people competing for some finite resource—be they physical like money and land or social like attention and recognition.

I want to reflect about this idea from within the framework of this subreddit’s debate on generative AI. In doing so I will reference two pieces of writing:

The first is this essay posted two days ago by Freddie DeBoer: The Modern Curse of Overoptimization

The second is this post made by /u/Tyler_Zoro also two days ago: Young commercial artists: There is someone out there who has learned what you've learned and then learned to use AI tools; you're in the job market with them.

I suggest you read both, as I will in this post reflect upon the latter through the lens of the former. Even if you don’t read them, though, I will make an attempt to make this post intelligible nonetheless.
Externalities

Let’s briefly sketch out DeBoer’s thesis in the above essay: When enough information in a system allows for agents within it to take a statistically optimized approach, negative externalities arise for other agents within the system (and this is noticeably happening in many realms of life).

A Negative Externality happens whenever you incur a cost as a result of someone else’s actions. You are not a consenting party to whatever transactions they undergo, but you are nonetheless part of the equation. A great example is pollution, because even if I have no transactions with a business that pollutes the air or the water in my community, I will incur some cost because of its operation (be it because me or someone in my familty falls ill or because I need to purchase a water filter or because I need to fund cleanups through my taxes).

Now you may notice that the greatest charge to be levied against DeBoer’s essay is that the negative externalities he outlines are a bit petty compared to, say, pollution. It is much harder to get restaurant reservations, all sports teams have the same play style, all travel locations are always full of other tourists, dating apps are an exhausting numbers game. These come across more as inconveniences and frustrations about the contemporary post-internet world than they are massive structural problems, and I didn’t want to proceed without acknowledging this.

Now of course I won’t mourn eBay scalpers and middlemen, but I do think it’s worth stopping on the image of the world painted by some of these examples. The feelings of frustration he describes should be intimately familiar to many of us. Personally, I can’t help but identify them as the most banal forms of the greater phenomenon of alienation, wherein we are split from ourselves by the pressures of social mechanisms we are subjected to.

That we should not be able to book a restaurant or find a partner or travel without having this pressure to ‘game’ the system (or pay our way through the inconvenience) adds up to something greater than the sum of its tiny, vexing parts. It adds up to a world that, at the risk of sounding dramatic, gently but persistently erodes at our ability to be authentic within it.
Work

My reading of Tyler’s post is that in it, he identifies the hybrid usage of generative AI and ‘conventional’ art skills as ‘the meta’ (or optimized strategy) for a present or forthcoming state of the commercial art market. I think he may well be right, and for the purposes of this post, I will assume that he is in fact completely and unreservedly right.

There is a fatal inescapability in the reality that any subset of the economy, such as the art market and its own diverse subsets, will be subject to competition and that “adapt or die” is not a commandment so much as it is a statement of a sort of ‘natural law’ of said systems. This is a simple consequence of the incentive structure that a system where people compete creates. And of course, both this and corollary facts predate generative AI by a long stretch.

But here is where I want to tease out an important difference that has emerged over time, and that is the manner in which (as outlined by DeBoer): the better information the more that suboptimal approaches are penalized within the system.

Why should we concern ourselves with this? (I hear you ask) What value is there to suboptimal approaches? What is wrong about the incentive to optimize?

To this I answer simply that there is nothing about a human being that is not suboptimal. The charge of alienation against a system is that it forces humans within it to separate themselves from their nature. We can make many controversial statements about what human nature is or isn’t, but I expect it should be less controversial that there is nothing about humans that could not, subjected to a ruthless calculation, be seen as improvable and therefore optimizable.

So then, in a system that is more lenient towards approaches other than ‘the meta’ (because the information that enables decision-making is more limited), there is greater room for authentic and diverse approaches to flourish. I contend, therefore, that Tyler’s post is quite correct about what approach someone seeking to be successful in the actual or forthcoming market should take on but also that it constitutes an encouragement of a system that has, does, and will stymie authenticity and diversity.

Now here I expect to run into a point of friction with transhumanists, who will (aptly) levy the charge of romanticism against me, that I have romanticized our limitations whereas it is preferable to transcend them. If you should be convinced of transhumanist premises to their fullest extent, then there is nothing I will put forth that will move you, for those premises do not form the basis of my argument, and from them my conclusion will not follow.

But if you’re willing to bear with me for another section, let’s dig into analysis by analogy.
Play

I deliberately chose the words ‘the meta’ to describe what DeBoer calls ‘overoptimization’ in his essay, because I think games create a great vehicle for understanding the effect of this phenomenon on realms of life dedicated as much to enjoyment as to competition.

Here I will again bring us to the space of competitive gaming where, if there is any dominant trend in all of them, it is (aptly) that of ‘the meta’, a community tendency towards converging around dominant strategies. This phenomenon in competitive gaming is frequent enough that I cannot do it as much justice as others have in the limited space I have here. (I liked this video essay on it for mmorpgs, and it goes into many of the things we have outlined, limiting choice and therefore authenticity)

I want to mention how ‘the meta’ or broadly ‘metagaming’ in noncompetitive TTRPGs is something universally cautioned against (while of course, not being universally bad).

It’s worth it to focus on the reasons for that caution, for their applicability to this argument. The idea is that when a player is focused on the decisions as informed by information about the game rather than its world, that the roleplaying ceases to be authentic and therefore loses its beauty, spontaneity, and therefore much of its fun.

Likewise, alienation happens when, subjected by systems, we are forced to step out of our very own ‘role’ as individual, authentic people. This has always been the case to some extent, the lives of all humans have been ruled by social systems, but I think it is especially noteworthy when a historical shift (such as our access to information) greatly increases the potential for alienation in our lives.
AI

Alright, “so what does this have to do with AI?” (I hear you ask, growing impatient)

Let’s bring it home. I think the phenomenon of ‘overoptimization’ as understood by DeBoer is a novel phenomenon even though many of its facets are old. One of the primary aspects of it is that it is highly dependent on how much access to information we have and how efficiently we can create insights for actions and decisions on the basis of that information.

What we call AI are just a set of loosely related and highly sophisticated statistical models. They are, in themselves a means for us to access and manipulate information about different human systems and create novel optimizations for them.

From that, I contend that the extensive use of AI is a threat to human authenticity by means of increasing information in many domains, thereby creating new optimization incentives, and making us subject to everything as a game with a ‘meta’ we must choose above our selves, or get left behind.

I will, finally, address the charge of romanticism once again. It would be accurately said that here, my insistence on authenticity would not be of much use, may evoke overly-romantic ideas about ‘starving artists’ refusing to ‘sell out’ and would result in nothing but destitution and disappointment the overwhelming majority of the time. To any pragmatically-minded person, or artist, I would say that you are right about the low utility of a fervor around authenticity, and I would not advance it as a universal or inflexible approach. I would merely question whether what’s most useful must be, in turn, most good. And like with transhumanists, if we cannot resolve that between us, we are unlikely to ever agree.

---END ESSAY---

Critique the above essay.