(A blog post that was definitely not written by AI…)
In Alone Together, Turkle goes to great lengths to discuss the nature and implications of robot pets. Did this discussion age well? Kind of. Is the topic more philosophical than it is practical?
Well…
The “False Human”
Hang on, let me try something. Let me fire up chatgpt.com, ask it why AI-generated content is so annoying, and see what it says. I will not provide its full AI-generated quote, or a screenshot of a quote. ChatGPT could be plagiarizing its response, and maybe one day AI will find a way to catch AI. All derivative AI-generated content that contains plagiarism will be brought down, and the entire World Wide Web will collapse in an anti-AI apocalypse not unlike the 2008 housing crisis.
Naturally, it starts by praising me for asking such a great question.
Next, it answers with bullets. Each bullet contains an emoji, and each point it makes is valid. Once again I sit in stunned silence, wondering why I am bothering to write this when generative AI can make the exact same points I am about to:
AI cannot comprehend, not truly. At the risk of beating a dead artificial horse, what we think of today as AI is a probabilistic word generator (I think…apparently there’s a long debate on this that you can find on HackerNews), and calling it a “second brain” is still in the realm of metaphor/hyperbole. ChatGPT goes on to call itself “too perfect,” because of course it does. Yes, AI-generated responses are always too perfect. They are just too correct and too concise to match the stupidity of the inferior entities called humans. Also, AI has nothing behind it. If you ask a question and someone responds with AI-generated text, one can’t help but ask:
- Does this person really think that I am incapable of recognizing when something was generated by AI?
- Does this person really think that I can incapable of using the exact same AI tool to ask the same exact question?
- Does this person really think that I would bother sending the question to a human, if I wanted an inhuman response?
- Is this person a person?
- Am I a person?
- Are we all NPCs in the matrix?
Sending an AI-generated response without characterizing it as such sends an implicit message. The message is that someone doesn’t care about us, a bit like how a home-cooked meal can say “I love you” but a repackaged fast food meal says “these are steamed hams.”
Bad People
At the risk of oversimplifying everything from human psychology, to crime, to the new hit Netflix series coming out in 2028 written/directed by Vince Gilligan (or his AI doppelgänger), some people are…bad.
I mean, obviously “bad” is subjective. “Bad people” do not form some nefarious collective that operates in the shadows, using AI to control the population and keep the lower classes from rising up and eating the rich.
But, all of that being said, bad people are using AI to do bad things.
They are impersonating real people to push scams. They are flooding the World Wide Web with AI-generated content passing for real content. They are hiding everywhere, embedding themselves in everything, and they are often not even human. Tech companies, aware of how two letters add to their valuations, plow on ahead.
Closing Thoughts
The Death Of The Author writes of art. It argues against relying solely on an author’s background and true intentions – let the art speak for itself. Does anyone truly care who the author was (I am probably butchering the meaning, but let me disable the comments section and continue)…
As it turns out, yes. Consumers care quite a bit what a piece of art is trying to say, who created it, what its many interpretations can be. AI “art” is none of this. We can derive meaning, and perhaps if it is human assisted we can continue to see it as art. But I see us heading towards this slippery slope…
Medium content. The blog titles were made by AI. The blog content was made by AI. If you comment on it, an AI responds to you. There is apparently no supervision, no one individually fact checking everything or even writing original titles. It’s AI run amok.
And it could be the future of the vast majority of content online.