AI takes over

A few writer friends of mine are upset that AI is taking over literally everything. They point out that whenever a grocery store puts in self-checkout, someone loses their job. Writers then are endangered too, because so many things are just being written by AI these days.

The obvious solution is to have a kind of revolution where everyone, led by the writers, refuse to accept AI in a kind of Luddite way and demand that only real people be allowed to write stories or copy for a survey or tourist brochure. The last one of these was actually the Luddite movement, where workers protested machines taking over their apparel factory and destroyed some of the machines. This isn't going to happen with AI, and in fact, I see AI taking over gradually and insidiously for a while with no one even noticing it except a few out-of-work writers. Why wring your hands over a change that is inevitable? I say inevitable because as long as these programs are out there there will be people who ue them to make their lives easier or more to the point to have a competitive advantage over some other schmucks who are over there in the corner writing their own copy. The programs are free as I write; I could use AI to fill this blog (hey, that's an idea) and generate thousands of key words while it's at it, ensuring that the world comes to my doorstep.

The point of this blog is not so much that we should start a revolution that will prevent innovation from taking over, but rather, that these change come with this kind of inevitable predestiny and the whole culture adopts the changes without really thinking about what possible consequences there might be. We not only don't identify them, we don't even question them, we make no effort to discern what skills we humans are losing in the process, and there is no group in place to even look at the process and do something about what might be lost. It is like going blindly into a marriage.

I read an article that said that grocery stores are walking back on their innovation of self-checkout because it is costing them too much money. People steal, often inadvertantly, and it costs them just as many store employees to watch you do it yourself as it used to take to do it for you. The stores invested thousands in the machines and now will have to start over. Well, I could have told them that having me do it would lead to and individualized disaster whereby I make mistakes left and right and who even knows? It was their mistake and now they have to pay. And this may play out all over and with other machines as well. They aren't always all roses.

Don't look to me for expertise in what happens when soulless communication floods the market until everyone assumes all writing is soulless or done by machines. To some degree there may be a walkback like the grocery stores are experiencing, but in general innovation is inevitable and will not be questioned by anyone except a few remote souls like me and a few very angry unemployed writers like my friends. It'll just happen and that will be it. Certain human skills will be lost like the ability to add large figures or the ability to memorize long stories like the Iliad (one result of the innovation of printing). Things get lost. People move on. They may look back at this little window of time and say, people could have stopped it, but nobody even thought of it.

Keep up with ChatGPT

The first four or five paragraphs of this article I found hilarious:

Mahdawi, Arwa. (2024, Jan. 12). What is Going on with ChatGPT? The Gueardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/12/chatgpt-problems-lazy.

Still processing it. I may comment later.

Luddism

With a new book, Blood in the Machine, a number of reviews have come out exploring the ideas in the book and the concept of Luddism in general. One of the better reviews is here:

Barber, Gregory. (2023, October 23). Everyone is a Luddite now. Wired. Online: https://www.wired.com/story/everyone-is-a-luddite-now/.

The review makes a number of points, probably from the book, that I would like to explore. It starts with the story of people putting cones on self-driving cars in San Francisco, because that paralyzes them. I like that image; it made me smile and it stuck with me after I'd finished reading the review. But it brought up the question: How much of a Luddite are you? Are you willing to stick a wrench in the machine that you believe will change the world for the worst?

This site has always been somewhat of a Luddite site. All I am advocating here is that we recognize what changes like computer-generated grammar correction will do to our writing and language, but recognizing it is one step away from rejecting it, if you can see that what is happening is bad. The same goes for Chat GPT. If we as a culture come to recognize that it's not taking us in a good direction, we would reject it, right? One would hope it would be that simple.

But the article and the book are right about another thing: although Luddism has gone mainstream, as the vast majority of us are wary of Chat GPT and all AI-generated products, nobody is really doing anything about it. These changes are inevitable in the sense that as long as people are able to use them, somebody will use them, and this will happen until soft spots are found where the technology is actually useful and causes an improvement in someone's eyes. The rest of us can be as Luddite as we want; it won't change the projectory of progress, or at the very least, it will only slow it down.

I find this most scary in the area of genetic modification; it's gotten so that AI-generated books (I am a writer) don't really scare me anymore. I read a computer-generated bear story the other day, and that got my rankles up, because I've told bear stories for years, and I have actually seen bears and interacted with them. Knowing that this one was computer generated made me mad enough that I delivered my best one on the spot, but on reflecting, it was knowing that the AI one was computer generated that made me mad, not the language itself. It's easy enough to consider AI-generated language wooden and without feeling or real substance, but if I hadn't been told it was AI, would I still look at it that way? Would I even be in the habit of asking if it was real? Language is just language, and we tend to impute the real person of the writer behind it, even when that real person isn't there. And we do that by habit, habit generated by years of experience.

Luddism has gone mainstream, and there are many kinds of Luddites. And, the time between the origin of Luddism and now has been marked by the opportunity of the industrialists to define Luddism and make the rest of us consider Luddism to be "technophobe" or simply "bad at computers." OK so I'm a little of both and so don't mind being called a Luddite, even now, but I have a number of questions about it, including the following: What exactly would resistance to AI look like? Is it possible to actually break the system (by feeding mass junk or mass twisted material into it?) as opposed to just objecting to it and never buying an Amazon book that specifies AI creation? Is there a range of ways to resist AI or any other tech innovation?

Luddism is founded on the belief that tech innovation is spurred by the owner class which doesn't care about its effect on the common person or even its effect on society as a whole. Therefore it's the obligation of the "people" to throw a monkey wrench in the works as a favor to the rest of us who will inevitably suffer if the innovation isn't stopped. The Luddites saw themselves as helping the world by ruining the machines that had come to replace people and put everyone out of work. Of course this just happened to be at a time when there were enough people put out of work, and a town where those people were a significant percentage, and the unemployment caused was severe enough that they really didn't have many options left but to resist. I have options. I can retire, or find some other line of work, or even just forget about it; it won't affect me strongly at least right away, and I don't have all that much time left anyway. I have a son who is driving Uber who might very well ask, shouldn't we resist this gig economy? At the moment it's one of his best options, and I don't think he's going to put a monkey wrench in the works. And I don't even know how one would go about doing that, with the gig economy or with AI.

ChatGPT

Everyone's been talking about the new program that just writes a paper for you. The fact is, writing is going the way of the abacus. Your process for writing will be the process of feeding the machine the right prompts.

As a writer, a lifelong non-plagiarist, content creator, etc., of course I'm a little threatened by this. Because it is easy to publish, and easy to create new things (just by feeding prompts), there will probably be an explosion of self-published ChatGPT stories, etc. Will there not? I could name my next book, "A real human wrote this."

Seriously, nobody knows yet the full range of implications of having a computer that can write out whatever you want, in whatever form, and even learns to do it better every time. It can write essays, papers, stories, whatever you ask. Should I master it? It sounds kind of interesting in a way.

Its weakness apparently is in doing research. Well, I'm glad I'll still be good for something.

I'll put here my range of thoughts on the matter, and my experimentation, if I get that far, and its results. If we are about to lose skills (namely writing skills), let it begin by having fun, having a machine do something for you. Just like we did with the calculators.

Siri cont'd

There are actually several Siris in our lives; my wife has two. One is an Australian guy who doesn't have a clue about the streets around this small Illinois town. I bite my tongue as he leads her to go west a half a block when we're going east. You're listening to this Australian guy instead of me? Whatever. I don't want to be speaking over him, or confusing the issue, so I just shut up. It's only half a block.

But it seems that my method, knowing the streets so you know which way is fastest, is rapidly going out of style. She'll use Siri even when she's been somewhere several times, knows the streets full well, and should be able to go there blindfolded, so to speak. She'd rather have this Australian guy telling her when to turn right, how far ahead, what to look out for, etc.

There are actually a couple of interesting things about the Siri trend, besides the fact that we as a population become a lot dumber about east-west, north-south, better roads for through-travel, etc. One is that theoretically Siri should be able to pick up on a traffic jam, an accident, in our case a train, etc., and warn us. I left Chicago one night and a simple 20-minute commute out to the southwest suburbs became forty minutes, because of some accident which couldn't be avoided I'm sure but which, if Siri were onto it, and I were on Siri, I could have gone around. I think it's just a matter of time before the overhead satellites pick up on these things and the premium Siris will be able to tell us, Sox game, accident, road closure, whatever. There's no reason they can't be up to the minute.

But as for a population that doesn't know from east, I'm not sure I can live with that. If people are really so clueless that they can't get home without technology, that doesn't bode well, because I am still old-fashioned enough to believe that all technology is simply an aide, a helper, and not meant to replace real awareness of where you are and how it relates to the area transportation hub.

When you're driving a 13-foot high truck and come to an 11-foot bridge, you should know that Siri has let you down, and simply failed to take into account the fact that this particular route was not made for 13-foot trucks. Siri cannot entirely be blamed for not having all this stuff programmed into her/him and I think it's only a matter of time before all this stuff will be programmed into him/her. This includes icy conditions, wind, and the kinds of things that should just simply warn you to get off the road. If my wife wants to hear it from an Australian chap that shouldn't bug me so much as he's just as capable of relaying the collective knowledge as anyone, though I suspect the collective knowledge isn't quite there yet. Siri doesn't know the low bridges, the bad road conditions, or the Sox games yet. But he/she will, it's only a matter of time. And that changes the whole traffic equation. It basically means that, say, on that forty-minute trip out of Chicago, only those of us who don't have Siri will still be on that road. All the others will simply go around, one way or the other, and save the rest of us the bottleneck. It'll be a better world. When everyone has Siri, the yellow-jackets will simply be able to clear out the accident, without the rubberneckers or the anger of people who've been backed up for half an hour. That will be a better world as well.

Almost as good as effective public transportation, which I guess is too much to ask for, at least in my lifetime.

Siri

What happens when a whole culture of people decide to stop worrying about where things are, and instead rely on Siri to just get them from one place to another? I'm serious, your responsibility ends with typing in your destination, you no longer have to worry about whether you've gone north, south or what to get there. Just let Siri take care of it.

Siri is often wrong, though it rarely matters that much. Siri will send you a mile or two out of the way, and that's if you're lucky, if miscommunication has not cost you more. Sometimes Siri knows what he/she is doing yet there are communication issues betwen you. Sometimes it's just plain wrong.

My wife never had a clear concept of north, east, south and west anyway, so she was more than happy to cede over all route control to a computer. Even now she doesn't know which way the various states are - where's Iowa? How about indiana? They all run together for her. Siri is a godsend to her if only because Siri made it so that wasn't a problem. You could get to your destination even if you had no clue about where it actually was.

In the end though it's a scary world if you really really have no clue about where you are. I'm not even sure Siri can get you out of that jam.

General update

OK here's the main news. I retired altogether from ESL/EFL about three years ago. I moved to the mountains of New Mexico, where for a couple of years, I became a substitute teacher in Alamogordo, a small town not too far away. Then I retired from that too. My children are still in school but we've moved back into the mountains (just before the coronavirus) and we are just trying to survive without going into town too much. Because my wife and I are in our sixties we consider ourselves vulnerable and want our children to enjoy their teen years but with as little risk as possible. Fortunately they've come to see this tiny town (Cloudcroft NM) as the height of urban variety. But our luck may not hold out forever.

This brings up the question of what to do with this site, which I have always used to make my presentations and demonstrate both the goods and bads of technological interference in the writing process. We the people are now doing all our writing with technology by our side, with the red and green lines doing subtle correction at our side, and autocorrect just jumping in and changing our writing at will. I'll be the first to say, sometimes it's good and sometimes bad. I don't know if I'm done speaking on the subject.

I do get invited to TESOLs to make the same presentation, and I am honored to see those invitations. It's like there's a recognition out there that people need to learn how to deal with what I've called "the elephant in the room." Let's face it, people are not going to stop using spell-check/grammar-check, and if you disable it you are setting up a false writing condition, because they'll have it almost everywhere they choose to write. It's like teaching writing by having them carve their initials into a tree. You can go Luddite on them but it's not necessarily teaching them all the skills they'll need to navigate in the environments they'll write in.

Enough of that...I'll only say, my verbosity has been curtailed by retirement (even coming back to this page feels like work sometimes), and, I feel like there is still work to do, things happening out there. So I'm not quite ready to just say, it's all over. Maybe it's not. Bear with me.