Resist the abolition of the human voice
Dramatic title huh.
Here’s the thought:
- Generative AI is trained on a huge corpus of existing writing.
- Gen AI is used to produce prodigious amounts of new writing which is published to the web etc.
- The tone, phrasing, and content of AI contributions doesn’t represent an individual authentic voice, but an homogenisation of what came before
- (with the proviso that, yeah, you can make AI imitate a persona and get some colourful results, but the 99% of output is going to be averaged-out prose suitable for landing pages and polite emails)
- Gen AI is trained iteratively on the web corpus, which includes an increasing proportion of things it already wrote
- Can you see where I’m going here
As authors writers, people continue to use AI writing assistants, the character of human writing is going to flow into some median AI-generated basin.
Culture
The words we use and the way we change language are culture. I strongly believe in culture, folksiness, dialect, distinctiveness, and all the rest of it. We, the humans, should create and shape our culture, as drivers, not passengers.
For years I’ve been avoiding the “canned responses” in email and chat apps because those are not my voice. They are not authentic to me. The more we use them, the fewer original and interesting things we have to say.
All that to say: I don’t want my writing to be driven by a co-author trained on the mean average of everything humans have written (even if lots of it is good).
What to do
I’ve seen some folks write that to resist the artificialisation of our language and communication, we could write more in cants and argots, group jargon*, in-jokes, and using informal and novel new adaptations of language which are intuitive to us as communicators. Let’s allow language to continue to grow and evolve as humans shape it.
*I’m about inclusivity (and clarity), so this is not about excluding people and groups… more about building earnest and jovial connections with anyone and everyone who wants to express their own thoughts.
I’m not sure yet how to balance these things. I’ll keep writing here in a way that I enjoy.
Anticipating the smartipants
Someone out there is going to say
“…but isn’t Gen AI just a new tool and a new medium which is a human innovation, and should it not change the culture in the same way that the printing press, telegrams, SMS, and the internet did before it?”
…and I hear that, I do. Maybe I’m wrong. But I think there is a nuance between us writing for a new medium with new freedoms and constraints versus us delegating the writing altogether.
My Pledge
I pledge that the content on this website is not generated or aided by a Large Language Model, GPT, Gen AI or similar, except for those instances which are specifically marked and done for humourous effect.
Pensamos, hablamos, disfrutamos 🧠 🗣 😎
Somos la cultura 👩🎨