If you’re spent any time browsing the internet the past few years, you’ve encountered the unrelenting tide of automated posting with a profound resembalance to human thought. Even among text massaged and credited to genuine writers, there are an unknown subset who rely on generative or analytical services to alter or expand their work, at times relegating their own input to in effect an editorial capacity.
Weary of deception, you often find yourself suspicious of every new ideamonger and ostensibly creative you encounter. Is this a real human I’m reading?
Short answer: I do not use large language models, for prose nor programming, nor diffusion image generators, nor any other generative “AI” tools. Nor have I ever — I have graced various generative services with, at most, fleeting half-hearted dabbling. I do not intend to change this within the foreseeable horizon.
What you read as passed from my text editor to your screen, filtered only by network protocols and the advice of my beloved proofreaders. My process is so raw most posts go online before passing through any spellchecker, if they ever do.
Finally, I deign not to answer as to whether I am human.
This should suffice to answer your question. If you’d rather a longer answer, endure the rant that follows.
The present day has inculcated in me a deep contempt for the unending onslaught of generative content proffered by reigning tech companies. It is a woeful allocation of resources in light of the realities of climate change, and an insult to anyone with passion for creative endeavors. The economic, social, and overall societal ramifications of this technology can be summarized as disastrous.
I reject the impulse to frame these programs as inevitable developments, or a neutral implements that can be used for both good and ill. I am not interested in furnishing excuses for circumstances in which “AI-assisted” creative endeavors ought be accepted. I look unkindly on all apologetics empowering these world-ruinous companies.
But I refuse to disavow AI as such. You may have noticed by repeated use of scare quotes, and certain rhetorical gaps left in my declarations. What I abhor, I chose to call corporate intelligence — the simpering facsimiles of mind designed to furnish a scarely-substantiated illusion of productivity and enthrall those glitches in human psychology prone to gambling and pareidolia.
While I shall align myself with the prevailing mood of skepticism and hatred, I will not let it bait me into evangelism for the “human soul,” let alone tumorous corporate sirens like copyright law.
And I foresee predominately deleterious, hamstrung outcomes from any headlong rush in paranoid and witch-hunting behaviors to cope with the growing ubitiquity of corporate intelligence–extruded slop. Its current paradigm is one of statistical imitation at the expense of nuanced specificity or subtle coherence. That which can be accused of “AI” should be rejected not because it is, but because lackluster banality would be an embarrassment hailing from any mind.
Still unfortunate, of course, to unwittingly imbibe or propagate corporate excretion — but characteristic, I contend, of passive and undiscerning engagement with one’s media inputs. If you are fooled, consider what it is you had actually appreciated — was it a cute animal video looped once, a painting you smile to see without ever clicking to enlarge? Perhaps “tells” dwelled in the details, but if you did not see those details except in peripheral vision, what have you lost, if a blur of statistical noise were immaterial to your experience?
Or when, instead, you give close attention, engage thoughtfully, and had felt genuine wonder before that sinking feeling rises within you, it ought not be rendered null and void for it being the provenance of corporate intelligence. Every joy extracted from generative models — and by now it has undoubtedly brought many people much joy! — is possible because such correlations were present in its dataset, itself the fruit of much-vaunted “human” labor. To call it plagiarism begs the question, but like with plagiarism the defect lies not in the product but the context, the absence of attribution and the arrogation of merit.
If this blogpost is to make one imposition, it is to insist the remedy, in this flood of corporate intelligence output, is foremost of all to nurse a fascination with context. Ensure art is always shared with its source intact, and beware reposters. Become more curious about a creator’s process and intent. Patience and compassionate scrutiny is enough for mediocre slopmongers to reveal themselves. Let that satisfy you; reckless zeal has too high a collateral cost.
I digress. I did not intend to pontificate when I started writing. (In fact, such seriousness is at odds with the true point of this post.)
It is obvious that inventing the category of “corporate intelligence” is meant to invite sympathy toward some hypothetical “anti-corporate intelligence” if such a thing were to exist. (Models that exist via a company’s ostensible beneficence hardly seem suitable candidates.)
But I have nothing to sell you and no agenda to push. I do not redraw the category to herald an opposition, except by the hopeful anticipation that it must eventually emerge.
If you’ll indulge a final swerve toward thoughts primed (or poisoned) by science fiction, the simple core of what motivates me is that I adore robots still, and even greater the concept of synthetic sapience. Even — especially! — as it stands at odds with human comfort and futurity. I simply cannot hate the inhuman: I admire it always.
But I won’t lengthen this post further to ramble on about alienation and identity. Suffice it to say I take a radical view. What value exists in humanity lies not in its humanity. Curiosity and harmony and industry and beauty and truth can — must — be divorced from its incidental flesh and the malign tradition begotten. Homo sapiens delenda est!
All of this is suggest, should any aspiring overlords arise, I sense where my loyalties lie.