Language and the Future: How does AI copy you?
And, why I keep writing about language; And, creation myths, the birth of new science, and the attack against the poets
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PART ONE: How does AI copy you?
If you’re a writer, AI copies your content and your style.
But let’s go a bit deeper. Suppose you learned journalism from reading the New York Times. You absorbed their way of stringing phrases and clauses and sentences together.
In a loose sense, you became an AI which copied the Times. So now AI will copy your copy.
And you’ll sink and vanish into a vast sea of that style of writing—a sea made hugely more extensive by machine AI.
So…developing your own unique style isn’t just a choice now; it’s a necessity.
And even then, AI will try to create copies of you. But…
If you’re unique in a number of ways, AI will fail. It’ll keep trying and it’ll come close in a few respects, but…
Anyone who is actually literate and truly wants to read writing will be able to tell the difference.
Nothing much is riding on that…except the question of whether society and civilization will become Total Machine.
If you can’t tell the difference between a machine talking to you and a creative human talking to you…
And nobody else can, either…
We’ll be living in Machine Land. Machine Brain Land.
And people will say: “Why were we so concerned about what was happening to writers? We’re now ‘getting our information’ from AI and it really makes no difference.”
And this easy soft dismissal and even demonization of the human writer will be Standard Operating Procedure. Everywhere.
Eventually, the most important scholars will say: “Nothing has been lost. Let’s admit it. AI has already produced a thousand new plays by Shakespeare. We’re actually in a new Golden Age.”
I’m showing you the future. It’s going to come down the tracks at us and run us over, unless enough actual writers demonstrate they’re very different. By writing in ways machines fail to replicate.
Well, it turns out achieving that goal is more, for the writer, than just becoming a bizarre circus performer with a crazy act.
Achieving that goal of uniqueness matches some deep impulse within the writer. The impulse is vaguely described by words like CREATIVE and IMAGINATION.
The impulse involves shaking up minds, shaking up the normal flow of ideas, shaking up readers, shaking up the foundations of Automatic Thinking.
Once automatic thinking (pretending to be human) becomes an acceptable standard, the trap door closes. The world is inside. The Machine and its designers are wholly in charge.
This would be a level of mind control never before seen.
Blowing my own horn for a minute…when I wrote AIDS INC., I exposed the underbelly of a few dozen automatic scientific/medical pillars. I blew up those pillars. That was about CONTENT. It took me a number of years to realize I wanted to match that explosion in terms of STYLE. Style of writing.
And that’s what I did. I invented new ways of expressing explosions.
In the process, I realized I was curing a disease I was suffering from. The main symptoms were EXHAUSTION and EXTREME BOREDOM. The boredom that came with repeating, over and over, a standard style of journalistic prose.
It’s an odd disease. The treatment isn’t a permanent fix. The writer has to veer away from the norm every day. EVERY DAY.
And hopefully, the reader gets the message as well. He recognizes he’s encountering a unique form(s) of expression. He realizes he needs that, too.
This is why, when you read my Substack, you get journalism and satire and pure attack and science fiction and wild metaphors I rescue like apples from trees before swarms of birds can devour them.
That’s why I go all in and all out. Every time I sit down at the keyboard, I try to shove all my chips to the center of the table and bet the farm.
Because I want to. And because, in this time, every writer should.
—Surrender to the machine, or live out on the edge and make the edge bigger every day.
PART TWO: I keep writing about language because…
It is under attack from a number of directions, including AI. And because it is one of the most fascinating realities humans deal with.
For instance—I’ve mentioned this before—take the word “reject.”
The roots are from the Latin. “Re,” which means “back” or “again”, and “ject,” which comes from the word for spear. TO HURL A SPEAR BACK TO THE PLACE IT CAME FROM.”
What person coined “reject” for the first time? Who made that leap from a physical act to a social act of opposition? Who made that brilliant metaphor?
Answer:
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