So Many, Many Words

Words (almost) fail when I consider the imminent tsunami of AI-generated opinion that is about to engulf us. AI being Artificial Intelligence.

Haven’t we created a sufficient flood all by ourselves– our fallible human selves? So many of us, simmering before screens around the world, have nothing better to do than release wordage into cyberspace. If we could see it all floating there—bit by chaotic speeding bit—we’d suffocate or strangle.

Are you feeling the thrill, yet, of what AI will do? Think of the influencer in their cubicle somewhere (nowhere?) directing programs that will flood blogs, newspapers, and outlets we haven’t heard of yet, with an endless variety of bloodless, silicon-based packets of digital “opinion.”

Think of the teenagers in their bedrooms engaging AI to flesh out any concept their imaginations can create. Forget choosing what books your kids read. They’ll be “writing” them upstairs, behind that closed door. And reading them, because won’t that be the fun of AI?

This isn’t a matter of concern for a far distant future. Consider Jasper AI, “alive” today.

Give Jasper the premise of a story, and it will write it. The story that results isn’t good, or anything other than predictable and boring. Not yet, or not in the example I read on a Medium blog.

But it will be soon enough, I suspect. Only hubris takes comfort in the argument that it will never happen.

So far, teachers I know have been able to spot the fake essays and stories students submit in their desire to avoid work. I was a lazy student at times, too. I can imagine the appeal. Everyone becomes a concept creator—dreaming, maybe, of success like James Patterson and his co-writers. That will take awhile, I think.

Sooner, though, the AI writing programs will revise themselves into producing acceptably real-appearing opinion pieces for the marketplace of ideas. Op-Eds, letters to the editor, to congresspeople, to blogs and social media, etc., etc. We’ve had tastes of this, already.

Maybe the impending volume will crash the increasingly bloated system of bloviating that has transformed our society since 1990 and make a kind of reboot possible.

Meanwhile we human beings are doing everything we can to enable an acceptance of AI product—AI-Think, like Group-Think, except the group, here, won’t be people.

I’m wondering if this trend relates to education. To our drift away from encouraging complex thinking beyond data sets and the rest of STEM content.

That is away from education in the non-quantifiable yearnings of the human spirit. We may be able to map the firing of neurons in the brain, but science and technology falter before any attempt to convey the content transmitted by those connections.

And the content is how that person feels. How you feel as you think of the person you love, with all those complexities. How you feel about your mother. How Odysseus felt about his family, fresh today thousands of years later.

How do we learn about what makes us human? We can read. Specifically, we can read fiction and poetry. What is sometimes called literature.

Because these forms let you feel what the people in the story or writing it feel. You share their challenges. You hear their thoughts. Some you won’t like and some you will.

But by reading you’ve entered the accessible universe of the human imagination.

The imagination is our ultimate freedom. And thus it is the target of every effort to control and influence our individuality as human beings.

We should guard it first.

Readers can contact Hale at bfhale2017@gmail.com