At least once a week these days I will see a headline about Artificial Intelligence and say to myself, “This is how the movie begins.”
It’s always a dystopian thriller, of course, and it usually begins with an AI program going rogue, escaping its sand box and hacking into some other system, or another AI program.
My mental script for this genre goes back to 1983 and the movie War Games about a Pentagon AI system running scenarios on how to survive a nuclear war, and then almost starting one.
The movie poster had an ominous tagline: “Shall we play a game?”
But I believe the game, and the movie, have already begun and we should be paying close attention to the opening credits.
The takeover is a kind of Trojan Horse, not obvious until its already inside the gates. It is the prompted script of AI generated writing.
The road to the dreaded singularity is paved with the words we unwittingly consume every single day on social media, government presentations, legal briefs, academic papers, quarterly reports and probably your kid’s homework.
Once you know what to look for, it becomes hard not to see AI’s signature style.
The clues include hyperbolic descriptions, like transformative, groundbreaking and revolutionary. Hint: It almost never is. Its fingerprints are found in throwaway transition words, like furthermore, consequently and nevertheless.
There are some punctuation ticks too — like its preference for the em dash — that give it away.
The chatbot builds an argument tediously, like a high school debater offering evidence without wisdom, or any skill at persuasion. Its arguments meander among data points without ever rendering a succinct point, as though we are paying by the word.
Sometimes the tell is in the deliberate, predictable rhythm of its sentence structure. Paragraphs are constructed with up tempo, allegro-like sentences that often end with a staccato like short summation. The undeniable beat of AI.
It’s not bad writing, not by any means. But the more you consume it, the more it feels uninspired. Social media is riddled with this dismal slop.
Recently, I came across a local case where a Fresno lawyer used AI to compose a legal brief. The judge and the defense attorney quickly spotted citations and case law that did not exist.
The lawyer, who had decades of experience, threw himself on the mercy of the court. He said his firm was short staffed so he enlisted a chatbot to become his legal clerk.
AI has become notorious for flat out fabricating information, citations and even hallucinating entire studies from scientific journals that don’t exist.
Studies of AI writing show it frequently distorts the meaning of the primary sources its referencing. It has a habit of commingling data that doesn’t belong together, throwing together the apples and the oranges.
It seems, at least at this point, incapable of deciphering the finer points and caveats of a complicated research paper. In art and literature, it misses the nuance and overgeneralizes. Suddenly, a very specific idea is blown up out of proportion to make a universal claim. It’s like Cliffs Notes on steroids.
None of this is to knock a good search engine. I used Google a couple times in writing this piece. But Google’s sneaky AI cousin, Gemini, also stepped in to offer some unsolicited ideas.
I always try to follow the link and check the original citation. But I will admit, it is a very slippery slope.
There are now plenty of online tests to check for suspected AI writing. It’s become an essential tool for teachers and college professors trying to stay one step ahead of high tech plagiarists. But there are common prompts to make AI writing look less like AI.
It’s the modern equivalent of the smart kid taking a test for the failing student but deliberately making a few mistakes to throw off the scent of cheating.
I’ve seen plenty of examples of what I suspect is AI assisted writing among the local denizens of Mariposa County. I’m not here to call people out, but consider a little advice: Getting caught using AI for your writing, without identifying its use, will be far more embarrassing than a spelling error or poor grammar. You may well be perceived as less authentic and trustworthy.
I have heard very smart people say, “AI is simply organizing my thoughts,” a sort of chatbot assisted brain storming with a little cut and paste along the way.
There lies the fallacy. The organization of those words is, in fact, the thinking part. Writing is the outcome of a deliberative, contemplative and, yes, sometimes grueling thought process.
That second, third or fourth draft isn’t just editing. It’s thinking. Writing itself is the process of assigning thoughts and feelings to words, constructing those words into ideas and shaping those ideas into concepts.
There is a reason the development of the printing press, and the wide scale spread of the printed word, ushered in the industrial revolution and accelerated mankind.
The world started thinking. Out loud. Together.
So what happens when we give that up, when we outsource writing to a chatbot?
Well, spoiler alert! It’s not exactly Terminator, but it may be more insidious.
I predict AI writing will become so ubiquitous it will simply start regurgitating its own bile, a gigantic feedback loop with AI feasting on its own verbal excrement. The mysterious black box of AI will double down on social biases as data points and culling misinformation from a million bad takes. In the process, we surrender the human narrative to a machine.
I had an English teacher in high school who drilled into students the maxim that good writing is just clear thinking. I fail at that more times than I succeed I fear. Lord knows I try. But what happens when we give up trying?
I thought about asking AI to write this column. It might’ve been better. But it wouldn’t be mine. And that would be the loss.
The movie War Games got it right more than 40 years ago. After taking us to the brink of annihilation, calculating various nuclear scenarios, AI reaches the inescapable conclusion of mutually assured destruction.
The computer spits out a line we should all consider before giving AI our keyboard: “A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.”
Tom Lyden is a staff writer for the Gazette and can be reached at tom@mariposagazette.com.
Responses (0)