#artificially generated

Image description from the notes by @summery-captain:

"A post by James L. Cook, reading: "I was watching an interview with Noam Chompsky and he was asked about AI software, specifically Chat GPT and its impact on education. He replied that Chat GPT isn't about learning, it's about avoiding learning.

And then the light went on.

Recently I was in discussion with a peer group about an article written by James Marriot for the Times. He's basically an art school drop out that never spent any real time developing his skill to become an artist. And now he's bitter that he's not successful and that artists with real skill are 'gatekeepers' to his success.

To be honest it was a very entitled rant that demonized people who have worked very hard to hone their craft as elitists and prestige squatters. In his article he welcomes AI generators because he thinks it levels the playing field between his mediocre efforts and those snobby, gatekeeping artists.

And that's where the connection hit... (channels Chompsky) AI image generating isn't about making art. It is about AVOIDING making art. Let the computer do it. I'm too lazy to log the long emotionally wearing hours. I'm too impatient to listen to masters. I'm too self-absorbed to spend my time laboring over a work that requires me to use sophisticated critical thinking. Let the machine do it.

You order a burger, the cheapest thing on the menu. You just need something to get you through your shift at the grocery store. They call your name and you take the bag, returning to your car. You open the bag, take out the wrapped burger, and look at it. It looks wrong, only because it looks so perfect. You shift your SmartGlasses up. The food doesn’t look nearly as appetizing any longer. Generative AI was layering HD improvements over the food in real-time.

This is possible thanks to the McDonalds Auto-App Contract, a system of design where the MegaCorp that owns your SmartGlasses gets paid millions of dollars to make each pair automatically download their company’s Generative AI Filter app and open it while you’re in the vicinity of a McDonald’s. You eat the burger, flaws and all, because damn the so-called evidence. Your personal AI said it was ‘proven’ to make food taste better, but we all knew it was an excuse to cut costs again.

The CEOs were playing Russian Roulette with profits. Anything to cut costs, to get a little more money than the last guy, then ditch before they fail. People always rise up eventually. But the SmartGlasses just made it take longer.

You wish you could just throw your SmartGlasses away, but every company in the world uses them, now, and ditching your SmartGlasses is like ditching your identity. No one would bother to hire someone without this industry-standard proven technology. And still, the only peace you feel is when the batteries die. You know you have to recharge it, but during that wait it’s like living in another world. One that was once beautiful, now made bland enough for holograms to be layered over everything. Your soul twinges for a different life, but you don't have to wait long because the SmartGlasses are solar-powered and they’re fully charged again. Your lunch break is almost over. You can't forget because the timer at the top right of your glasses is ticking down to when you have to be clocked in again.

I was thinking about how people often say "Oh, Chat GPT can't write stories, but it can help you edit things!" I am staunchly anti-A.I, and I've never agreed with this position. But I wouldn't have much integrity to stand on if I didn't see for myself how this "editing" worked. So, I sacrificed part of a monologue from one of my fanfictions to Chat GPT to see what it had to say. Here is the initial query I made:

Chat GPT then gave me a list of revisions to make, most of which would be solved if it was a human and had read the preceding 150k words of story. I won't bore you with the list it made. I don't have to, as it incorporated those revisions into the monologue and gave me an edited sample back. Here is what it said I should turn the monologue into:

The revision erases speech patterns. Ben/the General speaks in stilted, short sentences in the original monologue because he is distinctly uncomfortable—only moving into longer, more complex structures when he is either caught up in an idea or struggling to elaborate on an idea. The Chat GPT version wants me to write dialogue like regular narrative prose, something that you'd use to describe a room. It also nullified the concept of theme. "A purity that implied personhood" simply says the quiet(ish) part out loud, literally in dialogue. It erases subtlety and erases how people actually talk in favor of more obvious prose. Then I got a terrible idea. What if I kept running the monologue through the algorithm? Feeding it its own revised versions over and over, like a demented Google Translate until it just became gibberish? So that's what I did. Surprisingly enough, from original writing sample to the end, it only took six turnarounds until it pretty much stopped altering the monologue. This was the final result:

This piece of writing is florid, overly descriptive, unnatural, and unsubtle. It makes the speaking character literally give voice to the themes through his dialogue, erasing all chances at subtext and subtlety. It uses unnecessary descriptors ("Once innocuous," "gleaming," "receded like a fading echo," "someone worth acknowledging,") and can't comprehend implication—because it is an algorithm, not a human that processes thoughts. The resulting writing is bland, stupid, lacks depth, and seemingly uses large words for large word's sake, not because it actually triggers an emotion in the reader or furthers the reader's understanding of the protagonist's mindset.