Article: If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you
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You can no longer pretend that the thing is just a stochastic parrot, or a fancy autocomplete, or a weighted average of everything that already exists.
It’s competent enough at summarising or synthesising basic information—if you ask one to tell you how a hydroelectric dam works it will explain it to you, in language decently calibrated to what it’s deduced about your general comprehension level, and it’ll probably do the job more effectively than any textbook on the market
AI writing is almost comically easy to detect. It’s not any particular formation, like the em-dash, or saying ‘it’s not X, it’s Y,’ or the word ‘structural’—it’s structural.
...you can ask it to summarise a document, and it’ll give a likely-seeming answer even if it can’t actually read the thing you’ve uploaded. The reason it’s so hard to get AI to stop hallucinating is that it’s permanently hallucinating. Its whole existence is one long lurid trip. Most of the time, the AI’s hallucinations bear a spooky resemblance to reality. But what they speak is the language of angels, in which, like the chirping of birds, there is neither truth nor lies.
When it comes to more complicated things, like human feelings, it flounders. All the weird metaphors and overheated rhetoric are bluffing, a great cloud of likely-seeming language, and if this homogeneously portentous cack feels empty or contradictory it’s because the machine has no earthly idea what’s going on or what it ought to say.
This is the democratising power of AI I’ve heard so much about, isn’t it? If you’re a pair of lazy, talentless hacks, gobbling up opportunities more interesting people would kill for and then not even bothering to write the show yourself, sooner or later, the people who sign your cheques will cut out the middleman, and you will deserve it.
Like all middlemen, their [] time on Earth will be brief. Before long all writing will be produced by an infinite swarm of autonomous AI agents, not because anyone told them to, but because they reproduce textually the same way biological organisms do through sex.
Clearly, the battle for beauty and insight has been lost. These things belong to the machines now, and if you attempt to write in that mode you’re on their turf.
And AI writing all tends towards a very specific mood. Poignant, wistful, simpering, dickless. Human writers write because we’re sexual perverts, because we’re bitter and frustrated little gremlins, because we’re terrified of our own mortality, because we’re grasping and covetous but unfit for any other job, because it’s a form of revenge against the world. The AIs don’t have that. They don’t have any motivation at all: they write like we breathe; they can’t not respond to any prompt. What we have and they don’t is dumb lust and jealousy, the rage of a rapidly obsolescing ape. The forms that will remain inviolably human are the racist tirade, the queasily specific pornographic fantasy, and the death threat.