What Seoul's snow ducks and ChatGPT have in common
Don't be fooled by looks
Tis the season.
Snow descends upon the city in silence, and from the depths of an unfathomable whiteness that muffles out the whirrs of deadlines, meetings and email notifications, they emerge.
Sometimes in pairs, other times alone, but most times assembled in an impeccable row, they stare winter in the face with an unflinching cuteness.
Snow ducks are once again taking over Seoul.
Their provenance isn’t quite clear, but they’ve been cropping up in the most random and unexpected of places for the past few winters (e.g. Changdeok Palace).
They’re not hard to spot, and once you get the hang of sniffing them out, any excursion into a public place feels like a real life version of “Where’s Waldo (or Wally)”.
It’s amusing enough that snow ducks dot the landscape of some of the most regal scenes in Seoul—like who expects to find a snow duck in the Gardens of Versailles?What’s more intriguing is that people are voluntarily carrying around snow duck clippers to leave behind little snow creations in a manner reminiscent of “I was here” etchings on stone.
This begs the question: what’s so special about snow ducks?
Our God Complex
The key to branding is identifying transhistorical human truths. Understanding what we desire as humans is the first step in unraveling the snow duck conundrum.
That aside, I’m not accusing anyone of hubris when I say that most of us are born with “god complex”. While we normally associate the term with an inflated ego, I want to use it in a completely different context: creation.
People are fascinated with life. We express awe at human creations that replicate the liveliness so replete in nature. It is, after all, so much more easier to destroy than to create. An examination of human history suggests that humans have a proclivity for destruction; as demonstrated by colonialism-driven cultural displacement, the World Wars, deforestation, and the occasional snowman terrorist who leaves behind a trampled mess in his wake (it goes without saying that the list above is by no means comprehensive).
If humans wield a monopoly over the realm of destruction, it can be said that God (or the entity responsible for life) is sitting on the other end of the spectrum, her hands gracefully orchestrating the creation of so many wonders we humans can only imagine begetting. I’m not religious. So feel free to project your idea of God onto the figure I’ve described above. The point here is that recreating the essence of life through means other than biological procreation is difficult to the point that it acquires a God-like quality. This endeavor is sometimes spelled out as A-R-T. And in present times, it also manifests as artificial intelligence (AI).
I’ve read somewhere that AI is the study of humans, and that what AI researchers are ultimately trying to do is reproduce the human essence and life form through artificial methods. When distilled, the concept of “human essence and life form” refers to the ability to make decisions and articulate one’s thoughts independently, based off the accumulation of experiences we label “big data”.
ChatGPT, which is being hailed as the next Google but better—in the sense that it sounds more human (heck, it formulates prose to a level that invites homework laden students with the temptation to ctrl+c, ctrl+v query results)—is a prime example. ChatGPT does more than spew out chunks of information. It holds a factual conversation with users. Albeit, the program is designed to avoid answering questions that solicit its opinion e.g. do you think Trump was a good president? Overall, ChatGPT gives users the impressions that it’s alive, and to those users who have somehow managed to circumvent the “do-not-offer-your-opinion” barrier built into ChatGPT, the chatbot appears to—may I dare say it—have a conscious.
To circle back to our snow ducks, the seemingly innocuous act of shaping ducks from snow belies the sublimity of the human desire to imitate God—or to create. Each time we engage in the act of creating, we are, to an extent, imposing our idea of order onto reality. An order baked into the plastic mold of the clipper. It is during this fleeting moment that we trespass into God’s domain and feign control over elements that we are normally subject to through creation.
While God, if (s)he exists, may scoff at us, it can’t be denied that humans have a need to exert control and fulfill our fantasies of being God. This is what makes us human. This is what is coursing through the deep recesses of our id, goading us towards the snow duck clipper, and towards the birth of a wintery creation.
Brands that let you play God
“Metaverse” was the buzzword for 2022 and we’ve seen it be thrown around with a liberty that would make any deity furrow her brows. While the hype around the Metaverse is a tad bit dubious (isn’t this what Club Penguin and Neopets was about back in 2006?), in other aspects it reinforces the observation we’ve made above: people like to play God.
The digital spaces we design (Roblox), the avatars we adorn (Zepeto), the pets we breed (Axie Inifinity)—these are all elements that give us the freedom to erect a world that abides by our order. We get to pick and choose in a game of creation that is made possible through virtuality. The best part about the Metaverse is that we can indulge in extraordinary elements at very affordable price points—the four factors of production (labor, land, capital, entrepreneurship) operate a bit differently in this virtual landscape. Want a lambo with crystal-studded unicorn wings? No problem (just mail the PR team whilst holding a lot of virtual cash/coin).
While I’m not a Metaverse-savvy user myself, I do see the merit of being able to build a fantastical world from scratch. And if you’re not into the whole build-a-virtual-world thing, you can always help yourself to a box of LEGOS. The bottom line is, humans will always harbor a desire to create regardless of whether they’re in virtual or physical space. Therefore, the question we should be asking ourselves at this point in time is “what type of creator am I?”