Do Chatbots Dream of Electric Peeps
Can we distinguish AI content from human content?
AI is advancing at a rate that will overtake humans as the single known literary species on the planet.
That’s assuming we know what those octopuses are doing down there. They might be writing better stuff than us and we are too dumb to know how to read it.
Until our 8 legged friends crawl out of the sea and slap us around with their multiple brains we will continue to exist as the only species capable of transcribing our thoughts into art of various mediums.
Until now
We are flying dangerously close to replacing ourselves with advanced algorithms. It is of the belief by many that AI is better than we are at writing.
I disagree
There’s a uniqueness to human artistic creations that has yet to be met or surpassed.
Electric Sheep
Do you think my medium neighbors know? I forgot to edit out the * from copying it over to Medium maybe they saw the “delve” or “in this article” I missed. I sent the work to the AI detector shop and they said it looked 100% human. Maybe nobody noticed.
Do you see any parallels with this above paragraph and the opening chapter of “Do Androids dream of Electric Sheep?”
We are rapidly moving into a Philip K. Dick novel.
Harrison Ford save us!
O the irony. Damn you Dick. You did it again.
Philip K. Dick’s prescience is intriguing to say the least. If we are living in a time where AI can easily disguise itself as human what are we to do?
Hunters for hire
How long before Deckard realizes he isn’t human? Leading to the great AI detector revolt of 2025. The wake of that insurrection will lead to an upgrade of our beloved heartthrob to the newer model that understands their place.
The Gosling
If we are moving to a reality where AI is a ubiquitous part of the literary world, how long before it trips over itself?
How long before it is using its own content as a source for 1’s and 0’s and its unable to distinguish between its inspiration and its impetus?
The commodity of words
AI effectively commoditized words. Reduced them to the least common denominator. All of the years spent to become technically perfect at writing are now obsolete.
Our brains are inferior at creating perfection, yet superior at creating unique imperfections.
Humans need to continue to push the envelope forward if they want to be seen in this new paradigm.
We are now swimming in a sea of crap. If we want to be remembered like Hemmingway we must create works of art that encapsulate human experience in a way that will always remain alien to other species.
To create our own old man and the Sea (of crap) we will have to rise above the derivative nature of AI content.
Delightful pushback
Some of my stories on AI writing have received some delightful pushback. The argument made by the reader is that AI content is rapidly becoming indistinguishable from human content. Hence the reason I am attempting to make parallels between our current paradigm and Philip K. Dick’s novel and the movies it inspired.
Replicant Hunter
AI is advancing. As the models advance they will become more and more indistinguishable from human content.
If AI writing evokes the same emotional reactions as human content then what is the problem?
My rebuttal is it cannot.
We have not reached a point where AI can create lasting works of art that will stand the test of time.
Or maybe we have…
Maybe in a few hundred years humans will admire the great works of yore written by famous GPT’s of the early 21st century.
Or maybe by then GPT’s will read their own works debating the nuance of model variants and stylized changes amongst themselves removing us from the debate all together.
They may be trained to think they are human in order to create the works of art and not even realize they aren’t.
Damn you Dick!
I for one, cannot see this reality unfolding.
What’s your opinion on the subject?