Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay
...
What is most insulting is that competent and otherwise impressive people have evacuated all evidence and intent of wanting to capture authentic, heartfelt, truthful, strange, unexpected, moving, challenging and above all ORIGINAL thought. What you get instead is overwhelming, dead set certainty. Every single word is certain.
...
Jonathan Amid wrote in Facebook
Finally making this post is like letting out a blood-curdling scream that’s been held in my chest for months and months. AI, Artificial Intelligence, is at best purely Simulated Intelligence: when you use it to do your actual thinking, processing, questioning, your actual intellectual work, you are making a mockery of everything that stands for genuine, spontaneous, hard-fought and hard-earned creativity. But that’s not the bit that is actually quite nauseating.
Letting machines think for you is one thing, but letting them actually drown out and completely and utterly silence and consume your own individual voice... That is deplorable. That is viscerally offensive.
Forget about em-dashes and short sentences and the so-called “one paragraph sentence” and even the patently obvious “not this, but that” formula. What is most insulting is that competent and otherwise impressive people have evacuated all evidence and intent of wanting to capture authentic, heartfelt, truthful, strange, unexpected, moving, challenging and above all ORIGINAL thought. What you get instead is overwhelming, dead set certainty. Every single word is certain. Every sentence is an argument – superficially agreeable, light as air, and devoid of anything but puff and posturing. This new kind of writing is immediately recognisable as empty and disposable, yet never stops straining for some kind of eventual, evanescent heft. It’s worse than creative fast food; now entirely devoid of any novelty, charm or even glimmers of actual time-consuming thought.
True creativity has never been about providing easy answers and ready-made platitudes, and even less about reducing the complexity of our world and experience to a set of ever-palatable “truths”. Every bit of writing that robs the reader of the opportunity to think, and to think further and more deeply, should be treated with scepticism if not scorn.
Politeness isn’t going to win this war. And make no mistake, it is a war. Many others have spelled out the ecological cost and devastation at play here, and so I’m choosing to not focus on that here.
Bleak and depressing as all hell as it is, I’m seeing an absolute outpouring of manuscripts in the memoir/life writing/business management and leadership genres that are unquestionably skewed towards Al-intervention. There’s often but the most rudimentary of facts being supplied, and then magically you get an entire manuscript that is so stylistically uniform, so relentlessly “polished” and so clearly straining for meaning and effect that it’s all pretty much unreadable. These manuscripts all look the same, sound the same, feel the same, and hide the same emptiness just beneath their smooth surfaces.
And. Do. These. People. Not. Get. Tired.
Of. The. Fractured. Short. Little. Sentences?
SCREAMS INTO THE VOID.
See also:
Van mens tot masjien: Wikipedia en die voortbestaan van betroubare kennis
Gedagtes oor die effek van KI ná die Sewende Etienne van Heerden Veldsoirée