At the beginning of the week I read, as part of my new adventures in Substacking, an article about why certain classics that are marketed as boring and worthy are in fact unhinged and fascinating. I thought it was great fun and merrily reposted it. A writer friend of mine replied to say that to her it had the distinct whiff of AI about it.
I was – well, I was many things. First of all I was caught off guard and disconcerted. Were my antennae for fake writing so useless? Was I that mindless, that gullible? Was my sensitivity, my humanity not even a fraction of what it’s cracked up (if only in my own mind) to be? At best, was I so ignorant of the signs of AI writing (em dashes and bullet points are giveaways, apparently), or the kind of writing that emerges from a human after they have put a prompt into ChatGPT and then shaped the emergent dough into more organic-seeming form, that I need to engage in an active process of catching up?
Was my friend criticising me for not spotting it? Was she at some level angry with me for not being able to distinguish between possible AI content and the kind of stuff that we both make our livings from being able to produce? All this and more went through my mind immediately and continued to exercise me thereafter.
Towards the end of the week, I asked a question of my 14-year-old son on the family WhatsApp group and got back an unusually extensive, fluent and indeed rather touching answer. And I sat there. And I looked at it. And I re-read it. And then I sent another message, asking if he had used ChatGPT to write it. My son was wildly offended and able to prove that he had not.
There are many concrete reasons to fear AI, and not just if you are a writer (though you may rightly be additionally enraged that corporations’ large language models have all been trained on what is largely stolen, copyrighted work, probably including your own). It seems set to displace – by which is meant “render unemployed, make incapable of earning a living wage for themselves and their families” – huge numbers of people in various industries and professions. This includes those who have hitherto been relatively protected from revolutionary technologies in the workplace. Lawyers, doctors and teachers may soon become the Victorian mill workers facing down the flying shuttle, just in more ineffable form and rattling through insane amounts of data instead of warp threads.
This is frightening enough – and no, before anyone starts, it is not selfish or hypocritical to be concerned about a matter “only when” it threatens to lay waste to middle-class jobs. For a start, there is no “only when” here. The precarity of the gig economy, for example, has long been a concern to those outside as well as within it, as long as they have a modicum of compassion. Beyond that, you would have to be some kind of idiot not to look at the potential destruction of an entire socio-economic class, at the prospect of hundreds of thousands of people thrown on a scrapheap and not wonder if, just maybe, this might have destabilising and deleterious consequences for society and, gosh, maybe even the world as a whole.
But this, though hardly a bagatelle, is only the most visible of the harms to be unleashed by AI. Almost more terrifying are the intangible, insidious effects of its advent – already – into our lives. Look at my reaction to its two (supposed) intrusions on my life. Nothing but a mass of negative emotions and outcomes – foremost amongst them the erosion of trust. Between reader and writer, between friends, between relatives – and, at the risk of embarrassing a teenager with the acknowledgment of a blood tie, quite close relatives at that. All sorts of paired consciousnesses moved further apart instead of nearer to each other.
This, in microcosm, is the dark promise of AI. The poisoning of the well that is a shared understanding of the world, a shared way of thinking and writing about it and relating to it and to each other. If we cannot be sure what is real, we cannot put our trust in anything. And that means that at every turn we must be more and more careful not to treat anything as a fully human response in case it is not. Each time we do that, we become a little more crabbed, a little less empathetic, a little less astute or acute in our understandings and a little less capable of all the good things we can currently do to offset all the bad things we and the world contain.
Am I being melodramatic? I don’t think so, but if I am – no matter. The capacity will be stripped from me and from you soon enough. The march of the em dashes has begun. A world of bits, bytes and bots cometh, and cometh right soon.
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