Deceiving Reality

“With the arrival of electric technology, man has extended, or set outside himself, a live model of the central nervous system itself. To the degree that this is so, it is a development that suggests a desperate suicidal autoamputation, as if the central nervous system could no longer depend on the physical organs to be protective buffers against the slings and arrows of outrageous mechanism. ”
― Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man

You know what riles me, bugs me, hits me, disturbs me most about the use of LLLms and generative text? It is how it subverts human relationships and communication.

It is people using it in conversations, as a substitute for their own thoughts.
It is teachers using it to post things as their "professional knowledge".
It is writing something that YOU did not write, think, consider, ponder, wonder ...
It is that many use LLMs non-attributed, stealthily and mix it in with real voices.
It is platforms like this, or many classroom teachers, pushing us to "push the button" and get text without us thinking for ourselves, writing for ourselves.

The real evil was at the beginnings of ChatGPT when they easily could have watermarked all generated content as "not human" but refused to do so. OpenAi lied and muddied the waters with declaration that this was all but impossible to do, technically a challenge etc …

And at that point, the real evil was that WE, our governments, organizations, communities did not demand that all Ai generated content be labeled as such. As a basic requirement for legitimate, transparent access to knowledge and online communication and discourse. It is everyone’s right to know who they are talking to, who is the messenger and from whence the message came. Where is today’s “digital transparency act”?

Half efforts by the European Union are all that I’ve heard of. Labeling as “AI-generated” is only neeeded for the Ai companies are deemed a security risk. Not good, not good at all.

Imagine if you went to the grocery store and weren't informed something was "artificial" and you ingested, digested it as "real". Wouldn't you be angry that the avocado you ate was not from a tree but grown in a petrie dish? Yet with technology, we give it a pass.

And that's the thing - more important than food is our capacity to think for ourselves, write our own thoughts and share our own ideas, beliefs. It's what has made our culture great and lead to what little prosperity, health, wealth we have. Start removing that ... we are doomed. Our souls will dry up and we'll be just voyeurs, watching life, conversations and not engaged and part of it all. Everything will become artificial, slowly but it will.

More coming from my pen, on this topic, in the days to come. Next up, I’d like to talk about the wholesale theft of IP (intellectual property) by these big tech companies. No permission asked, just scrape and put on their own servers so they can train LLMs and replace the human created originals. Next up will be War and Peace sold by tech companies, written by AI. Of course, it won’t be labeled War and Peace. Most likely, Chaos and Prosperity.

But nobody will know the difference. Poor Aaron Schwartz must be rolling around in his grave …