The first half of this article is interesting, before it swerves into caustic old man voice ("But a still graver scandal of AI — like its hydra-head sibling, cryptocurrency — is the technology’s colossal wastefulness. The untold billions firehosed by investors into its development; the water-guzzling data centers draining the parched exurbs of Phoenix and Dallas; the yeti-size carbon footprint of the sector as a whole — and for what?") There''s also this titular banger:
"AI-made material is itself a waste product: flimsy, shoddy, disposable, a single-use plastic of the mind."
The statement resonates, even if the way they get there in this article doesn't. Dealing with AI-produced writing does feel like using a single-use plastic fork that is too small, too flimsy, and impossible to clean in any meaningful way.
The editors at n+1 are not keen on LLMs. But, as they point out, the world of writing for pay has been in a good deal of turmoil this whole century
Well before the inflection point of OpenAI’s 2022 debut of ChatGPT, freelance writers and adjunct instructors were already beset by declining web traffic, stagnant book sales, the steady siphoning of resources from the humanities, and what was hard not to interpret as a culture-wide devaluation of the written word. Then along came a swarm of free software that promised to produce, in seconds, passable approximations of term papers, literary reviews, lyric essays, Intellectual Situations.
Rather than address this larger issue (how should a writer go about making money?) The editors are not pleased with what they see as the popular writers' response to AI-prevalence (dominance?)
Call the genre the AI-and-I essay. Between April and July, the New Yorker published more than a dozen such pieces: essays about generative AI and the dangers it poses to literacy, education, and human cognition. Each had a searching, plaintive web headline. “Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?” asked Princeton historian D. Graham Burnett. “What’s Happening to Reading?” mused the magazine’s prolific pop-psych writer Joshua Rothman, a couple months after also wondering, with rather more dismay, “Why Even Try If You Have AI?” “AI Is Homogenizing Our Thoughts,” declared Kyle Chayka, with the irony of a columnist whose job is to write more or less the same thing every week using his own human mind.
But they do accurately identify something I've been wondering about:
The single, vital aspect of humanity that LLMs can never match, the essays assert again and again, is our imperfection. “AI allows any of us to feel like an expert, but it is risk, doubt, and failure that make us human,” writes Hsu.
"So, inconstancy, fallibility, forgetfulness, suffering, failure — these, apparently, are the unautomatable gifts of our species. Well, sure. To err is human. But does the AI skeptic have nothing else to fall back on than an enumeration of mankind’s shortcomings? Are our worst qualities the best we can do?"
There has been a sneaking trend to make the enclaves of humanity those places we have for most of our history tried to avoid and wall off. It is true that we are occasionally stunningly beautiful in our hideousness. I don't think it serves us well in the long run, though. And the editors at n+1 seem to agree.
Patriots of the humanities, they say, "No!" They bring up the Luddites and some vague Marx things and end with a call to starve the machines:
When we press a chatbot to fine-tune its answers or sift its sources, we serve the machine. With every click and prompt, every system-tweaking inch we give to the spectral author, we help underwrite AI profits (or at least the next round of equity funding; no major AI product has yet come close to actually making money).
Don't publish the AI writing, they say. Don't read it, don't grade it, almost pretend that it doesn't exist (calling to mind a child covering their ears and yelling: "I can't hear you!").
A literature which is made by machines, which are owned by corporations, which are run by sociopaths, can only be a “stereotype” — a simplification, a facsimile, an insult, a fake — of real literature. It should be smashed, and can.
They forget that they are wearing clothes that would have been impossible if the Luddites had their way, living in a society more prosperous than any Luddite could have imagined.
deep researchthese media people are apparently capable of.