For all the concern that Artificial Intelligence might not be a benevolent force in this world, it has turned out that AI is actually quite flattering to us lowly humans. AI-generated thirst traps now populate my social-media feed, all created with the app Lensa, which endows even ugly-ass fools (like myself) with perfect skin, great tits, superhero muscles, cool hair, and retro-futuristic outfits. I understand why this trend is so popular: We’re all vain!

Science is winning in December. We just saw a breakthrough in fusion, which may mean a clean and unlimited energy future awaits. And we also appear to have crossed a threshold for AI this month, with OpenAI crossing a million users in just five days, a milestone that, for reference, took Instagram 75 days, which was once considered a record. The writing and art-generating tools, ChatGPT and DALL-E, respectively, have placed AI in the palms of our hands.

As we find ourselves standing in this freshly liminal space, in which discerning what is or isn’t “real” has grown even more difficult, some things have grown rather clear. The power and necessity of human-generated creativity has become even more vital, for example. But I’ll get there…

Now that AI is available to the public, I’ve been playing with generating my own versions of climbing-themed art.

When I stare at some of these creations, I oscillate between finding them beautiful but also somewhat unsettling, as if I’m peering into the bottomless, despairing eyes of Cthulu himself. The AI doesn’t quite grasp climbing or understand how to render it perfectly yet, leading to some interesting rock-scaling monsters that look like someone was given the pieces for how to assemble a human but then lost the instruction manual.

I created an AI generated cover of Climbing Magazine. Not too bad!

I’ve attempted to pair AI words with AI art, creating a “female rock climber in the desert” and asking for an Instagram caption that would “explore her struggles as a woman in a male-dominated sport.” Here’s what it spit out:

“As a woman in a male-dominated sport, I often find myself feeling like I have to prove myself on the rock. But I refuse to let that stop me from pursuing my passion for climbing. It hasn’t been easy, but I’ve learned to embrace the struggles and find strength in myself. I may be the only woman on the wall sometimes, but I won’t let that hold me back. Here’s to all the women out there who are breaking barriers and proving that anything is possible #womenwhoclimb #nevergiveup”

I asked ChatGPT to write a news report about Jakob Schubert and Adam Ondra working on Project Big in Norway:

“Professional rock climbers Adam Ondra and Jakob Schubert are making waves in the climbing world with their attempt to climb Project Big in Flatanger, Norway.

Located in the remote Flatanger region of Norway, Project Big is one of the most challenging and sought-after rock climbing routes in the world. The route, which was first established by Norwegian climber Hans Christian Doseth in 2012, is a massive overhanging cave that stretches for nearly 500 feet.

Ondra and Schubert, two of the world’s top climbers, have been training for months in preparation for their attempt on Project Big. The climbers, who are known for their incredible strength and technical proficiency, have been working on their endurance and power in order to tackle the demanding route.

On Monday, the climbers made their first attempt on the route, with Ondra taking the lead. Despite making steady progress and overcoming several difficult sections, Ondra was ultimately unable to complete the climb, falling just short of the top.

Undeterred, Ondra and Schubert are already making plans for their next attempt on the route. The climbers, who have become friends and rivals over the years, are determined to succeed where others have failed.

“Climbing Project Big has been a dream of mine for a long time,” said Ondra. “It’s an incredible challenge and I’m excited to see what Jakob and I can do together.”

While the climbers may not have succeeded on their first attempt, their dedication and determination are sure to inspire other climbers around the world. As they continue to train and prepare for their next attempt on the route, the climbing community will be watching closely to see if Ondra and Schubert can make history and conquer Project Big.”

Honestly, this is just as good—and about as factually accurate—as any of the climbing news stories I’ve read on the AP.

As I envision a future in which I can do three hours of work in three seconds, I ask ChatGPT to write a review of the Scarpa Instinct:

“The Scarpa Instinct rock climbing shoe is an excellent option for intermediate to advanced climbers looking for a high-performance shoe that can handle a variety of climbing styles.

One of the standout features of the Scarpa Instinct is its construction. It features a microsuede upper that provides a snug and comfortable fit, while the Vibram XS Edge rubber sole provides superior grip on a variety of surfaces. The shoe also has a slingshot rand that wraps around the heel and toes, helping to keep your foot in place and ensuring maximum power transfer to the toe when edging.

In terms of fit, the Scarpa Instinct runs true to size and has a relatively narrow fit. This may be a downside for climbers with wider feet, but for those with narrower feet, it provides a performance-oriented fit that allows for maximum sensitivity on the rock. The shoe also has a moderately asymmetrical shape and a slightly downturned toe, which helps with toe hooking and precision foot placement.

One of the things I really like about the Scarpa Instinct is its versatility. It’s a great all-around shoe that can handle a variety of climbing styles, from steep overhangs to technical face climbs. The moderate downturn and aggressive toe shape make it a good option for steep sport routes and bouldering, while the comfortable fit and good sensitivity make it a good option for longer routes and all-day climbing.

Overall, I would highly recommend the Scarpa Instinct to intermediate to advanced climbers looking for a high-performance shoe that can handle a variety of climbing styles. The snug fit, aggressive toe shape, and superior grip make it an excellent choice for climbers who want a shoe that can help them push their limits on the rock.”

Though not pitch perfect, this content is shocking “good” insofar as “good” means comparable to much of what we already see across the climbing media landscape.

I admit that I’m straw-manning my own argument a little bit, as I’ve chosen three genres of climbing writing—faux-inspirational Instagram captions, news reports, and gear reviews—to replicate, with the understanding that these genres are the lowest rungs of climbing writing. Still, what the AI created was about as good as what you’d expect out of an average magazine intern—without any of the grammar errors, or the difficulty in finding it housing while it spends its summer working for free.

Predictably many people are concerned that this new technology spells doom for writers, photographers, and artists. And I think it probably does for some folks, but only the untalented hacks who’ve never had an original idea in their lives, which is to say, more than a few people I can think of who enjoy careers as climbing bloggers or pro-climbing influencers.

This technology indirectly offers a critique of the kinds of mass-produced “content” that we in the climbing and outdoor media space have collectively created over the last decade. So much of what gets posted online is not actually “writing”—it’s content. It’s clickbait. It’s another piece of chum in the ad-supported waters of climbing media, churned out with the hopes that it will drive enough clicks and impressions to convince the last remaining advertisers to stick around for another year. It’s precisely this “content” that AI is mining in order to create these masterpieces.

That an AI can generate 500 words on the Scarpa Instinct in three seconds is amazing, and though it is not totally accurate, it’s close enough to be workable. Before I get to the possibilities and fraught potential this technology holds, I want to linger on the ugly reflection I see before me. In the same way that looking at a pile of your own shit can give you some clues as to how healthfully you’ve been eating, this generic AI prose might be viewed as the unseemly recycled waste of our culture’s media diet. Content nuggets for days.

Gear reviews, in particular, look really bad. After all, AI would not be able to write reviews this good if not for the fact that dozens of gear writers have spent the last 10 years producing hundreds of thousands of more or less the same exact words. These hapless little baby birds have regurgitated the same copypasta fed to them by the same companies and brands, and turned it into reams of reliably generic pablum that is ripe for AI mining (minus all the affiliate links, of course).

Obviously, I include myself in this picture, and count myself complicit in writing more than my fair share of generic reviews and news stories over the years. Guilty! Though I’m always honest in describing what I like or don’t like about the gear I review and I often try to talk about new gear in an interesting way, I acknowledge the difficulty in breaking free from the established, tried-and-true mold. It’s hard to do, and it’s not clear what could or should be different about the format, structure, voice, and so on.

But now it’s all too late. Given that ChatGPT can reliably review a pair of climbing shoes better than any Columbia J-school grad, it would be foolish to believe that we would want to continue writing in this style any longer. No way. It’s over! The gear review is dead, and ChatGPT has killed it.

Nietzsche wondered, upon announcing that God is dead, “Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?” Indeed. What makes me hopeful about AI improving the climbing media ecosystem is that we now have no choice but to become ever more worthy of the space our words, photos, and art occupy.

On the positive side, I see AI becoming an indispensable tool for writers and artists, allowing us to increase our productivity in the same way that digital cameras improved photography by letting photographers 1000x the number of frames they could shoot. Consider the panic old-school photographers felt at the advent of DSLR cameras, which performed all of the light metering and exposure calculations for them. They thought that this would send their profession, their hallowed craft, into the fires of the dumpster. Same with Photoshop. Two decades later, this technology has had next-to-no downsides, and has only driven the creativity and quality of photography forward. I can imagine that AI may have a similar effect on writing.

We may now need editorial standards that disclose AI involvement in the creation of stories and articles. But that seems like a relatively easy problem to address. Perhaps gear reviewers who rely on AI to churn out content for affiliate farms would be required to disclose that they used AI, and then deferred to a human editor to integrate an authentic and original point of view. These ethics will need to be hashed out.

That said, I’m far less excited about leveraging AI to generate even more shit content, which we don’t need because we already have too much of it. As people become so jaded and skeptical as to not trust anything that seems as if it were written by an AI—in other words, the sooner AI does the job of the talentless hacks—I can imagine our appreciation for truly talented writers with unique voices and interesting ideas will grow.

Reading, after all, isn’t just a process of uploading information into your computer brain. Reading must become much more than that. One of the things I love most about reading writers I love is that it feels like I’ve been given a window into the inner machinations their mind and soul. The weirder and more unusual or unexpected and surprising is often the better!

Pretty soon (if not already), AI will replace the job of writing for the sake of assembling information. Then all that will remain is the stuff that is actually good, the stuff that makes life worth living and writing worth writing! The stuff that moves you, and changes your mind, or makes you throw your coffee cup across the room because it’s offensive or challenging to your deepest beliefs. It’s the unbound creativity, the willingness to transgress, the courage to subvert orthodoxies, the messy ideation, the incisive criticism. The poetry, prose, and passion.

Soon our skills as artists will no longer be evaluated by merely putting words down on paper or drawing lines on a canvas, but in our uniquely expansive abilities to create and reimagine what it means to be human, to recognize what is salient and interesting and do something different that hasn’t been done before.

AI will take the role of producing content, which is fine and great. But more content is actually the last thing that we who care about climbing media need.