I flatter myself that I can detect, or at least suspect, the seven-fingered “hand” of AI in a piece of writing. People assure me that the day will come, and soon, when I will no longer be able to. AI will get that much better (while human writers continue to get worse).
Maybe. But I don’t think so. Here’s why.
A friend sent me a link, I read the article, and as I do, both to exercise my chops and to flaunt them, I flagged it “Written by AI.”
He answered, “Does that affect its veracity?”
I said, “Not necessarily.” (Well, actually yes. Google’s perky bot told me yesterday that Sikkim is linked to Sikhs, which countless human sources say it’s not. When AI doesn’t know something, or cuts its research short for a quick answer, it cheerfully makes it up.)
I struggled to explain, to myself really, what it is about AI writing that makes it recognizable—”smellable.” This morning I woke up with an answer.
AI doesn’t understand what it is saying.
Because its own output is meaningless to it—it’s only imitating patterns—it plops down a bunch of information, but the connections are missing. The organic webbing of logic and association, memory and feeling1 that structures and anchors a human statement is not there. A human can feel that it’s not there. Its absence makes for a blank spaced-out quality that we sense subconsciously, if not consciously. A slight nausea signals that this isn’t good brain food. It’s synthetic, if not toxic.
An AI might as well just make a list of the information you ask it for. I’d rather read a list than a piece of fake writing. And even a list you couldn’t trust, because AI doesn’t know there’s such a thing as a fact. (We’re coming to resemble AI insofar as more and more we don’t know that, either.) It doesn’t understand that there’s a world. It doesn’t understand that there’s history. It doesn’t understand that there’s gravity. It lacks all the organic evolutionary development that intertwines our senses with an intelligible world full of real consequences.
It has no body. It is nobody. It can tell us nothing.
"Politically nonbinary. Only two paths are on offer—forward into Orwellian tech dystopia or backward into rose-colored romanticizing of cruel and tribal Tradition."
--- Both are marching forward into Orwellian tech dystopia. Peter Thiel groomed J.D.VAnce for politics.
Anything made up randomly, from a plethora of sources, with nothing in common, beyond a language, is going to resemble human nature. Given what human nature has presented us with for the last 5,000+ years, am not sure the quickness is worth having, with one is giving up the accuracy one is used to. Human nature has showed it can rationalize anything, just look at our history.