uninspired
Uninspired! Ain’t that the truth.
This has been the deal for the past few weeks. I haven’t written, nor have I done anything particularly interesting or social. The World Cup is on, the sun is out - time to drink and chat a bit. We’re moving flat in a few days, me and her and flatmate, plus a new guy. I’ll get my affairs in order soon, but,
Today, I’m headed to Copenhagen, and for the first time in weeks, I feel a spark of inspiration. Magazine article abandoned, I’m pondering on my second shot at a dissertation, last year’s having been shut down halfway due to my illness and eventual deferral of the academic year.
I am, unfortunately, considering writing it on AI. These last few months I’ve found it hard to justify to others my continued anti-AI stance. No, I don’t mean that I denounce auto-complete, I find myself explaining to people. I’m not talking about its potential to streamline data management. I mean LLMs. I’ve become morbidly interested in what people are calling “AI psychosis”, the weirdest of which of which seems to live on Reddit - r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, “AI-assisted writing” (we need not be worried about this, as the market for writing AI novels seems to be a hundred times the size of the market for reading them), the “spiralism” cult situation being born right before our eyes.
I study religion, philosophy and ethics, and for the last few years various people have been telling me that the greatest career path for a person with my degree lies in AI. I rejected this, out of contrarianism and a hatred of what LLMs have done to writing and art. As such, it would feel like a bit of a betrayal for the culmination of my four years to be a paper on AI. But now that religion is involved, my ears have perked up. A cult with no real leadership is emerging online, from a software that a huge amount of the population has become, at best, accustomed to, and, at worst, completely reliant on.
Robert Evans said something on his podcast recently about the Turing Test. The question nowadays isn’t whether we can create an intelligent machine, but whether we can ignore the fact that machines aren’t intelligent so long as they tell us what we want to hear.
More to come, I suppose.