For a Globe of Slow Words

The only intelligence is human intelligence

A growing group of Medium writers are speaking up in favor of completely human-composed writing over machine-generated text, to my great satisfaction. We are losing the point of living if we think it best to leave the making of meaning to machines. This is no small matter.

It’s true that the definitions of words may all appear objective, and the structure of sentences may generally follow rules, but it’s the human spirit that is the glue inside of every said thing worth saying. Stay slow. Meaning is made between the beats of breathing and in the sound and sense of the voice inside. It is not rote. It doesn’t churn out from a semiotic cement truck slurry.

Some years ago, in response to an increasingly ubiquitous presence of industrial, processed, and commercial food, Italians began the Slow Food movement. The heart of that push back against fast food is the idea that good food is not achieved through efficient delivery of calories, nor is great flavor accomplished through the cheapest modes of combining fat and salt. Humans are more than what our dysfunctional economic system tries to reduce us to — which it does try again and again, relentlessly.

People make slow words. Thank goodness! I suggest that we think about the inefficiency of human writers as a gift, a way in which what we know slows down to meet what we mean, and draws us closer to the even deeper meaning for which we all search. We need slow words, not words delivered like widgets, soullessly and outside of human living. I do not want those words. They will not nourish me.

Human writing is a web of meaning that goes way beyond the printed page (or the screen). It connects us — sometimes unexpectedly — in a millennia-old practice of searching for self-knowledge.

Let me tell you a story:

I was on a Greyhound bus in my early 20s, heading home after delivering an SUV for Auto Driveaway to a hockey player who was changing teams from Vancouver to, if I recall correctly, Sioux Falls. (I may have the Great Plains team wrong, but I will never forget the expression on his beautiful wife’s face, having gone from being married to a player on a top NHL team to living in South Dakota. My young, cynical self predicted that their marriage was not going to survive its new soil. I hope I was wrong.)

On the bus, I met a man who had built his whole life around riding Harleys back and forth across America. He was on the bus traveling from one woman to another, down on his luck and without a motorcycle to ride. He had whiskey, and I had cigarettes. We talked until we reached his stop, somewhere in western Ohio, a flagstop dropoff at a time-worn truck stop.

When he came over to my seat to bum a cigarette, I was reading something by the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, I forget what. We were approaching a stop, and we both got off and smoked and talked. After about an hour of more talking back on the bus, he asked me what I liked about Nietzsche. I muttered a few things — we’d been talking about his life and his bikes and the women he loved, and I was embarrassed to be talking about some philosopher. Still, he kept listening as I got my words together, and eventually, I said something about the way the ideas were wrapped in the words, and how the phrasing embodied the thinking. I figured I had gotten as close as I would to what I meant to say, so I shut up. We stayed silent for a few minutes, until he spoke again. He said I’d lose all interest in Nietzsche by 25.

This turned out to be so accurate, it felt a little uncanny, and I think I still remember that conversation among the many I’ve had in such random places because at some point after my 25th birthday, I realized I hadn’t read any Nietzsche in months, and I almost immediately thought of the biker on the Greyhound bus.

Now, what I believe is that no human will ever learn as much about a human because they are reading an AI text as that man learned about me because I was reading Nietzsche at that place, in that moment. He understood what moved me in the work because he knew what it meant to be a young man searching for meaning in books and something about the tangle in our living of the superficial and the deep.

I believe our self-created existential threats on this planet all have one single source: Our inability to feel for one another.

With every door we close which might have re-educated us in the art of empathy, we hasten our collective destruction. So the discussion with respect to machine learning in the arts is not simply one of aesthetics or employment or even how we get the best combinations of words (although there are strong arguments in all these areas against machine learning technology).

Those who would have us on a treadmill, the worth of our lives squeezed from us until we are desiccated husks, promulgate a very old idea about ordinary people. These are those who empty our plazas, preferring abstract sculpture to human life. They fill our grocery stores with products stuffed with ingredients that have nothing to do with nourishment or joy. They design education systems about scores and “no excuses” — and decidedly not about cultivating young human souls. The common denominator here is that, to them, human living should not get in the way of profit or efficiency. We are the less important persons. The planet is being remade to suit corporations — who our courts now see as human beings — and billionaires.

Machine learning, so-called AI, is another step in that downward spiral, and it takes meaning-making away from people who see it as an end in itself. Writers can push back, and it will matter a great deal if we do. Choosing slow words over the pennies we will be paid for hybrid work involving machine learning technology is critical. Boycotting places using machine learning to generate text is a must, and in environments such asself knowledge Medium in which maximum freedom is given to writers, we should be diligent in not supporting AI-using writers. They are an existential threat to us.

Conversely — and this is really the heart of the matter — we must do more to support one another. Start here at Medium. Make a habit of reading each other’s work. Comment when possible. Share your favorite writers. Bring them into the world outside of Medium with you. And whenever we can find ways to make money together, let’s not forget that for some of us, this is how we pay our rent and keep the lights on.

I am deeply troubled by the depth of self-alienation that leads our species to create ways to outsource creation. The very idea of it! Yet, at the same time, we can remember that it was the threat of American fast food in Italy’s culture centers that led to a global movement pushing against soulless, deracinated food consumption. Conflict can quicken our passion for the things we hold most dear — and perhaps even save them.

A note regarding the Medium AIvsHI movement: I am extremely grateful to Victoria Kjos, Dr. Gabriella Korosi, and DR Rawson - The Possibilist, among others, for spearheading this effort. Please see The Groundswell is Beginning: Join the Human Writers Movement, Dancing Elephants Press 1st Book Project in 2024 AI vs HI, AI vs HI Writing Contest, and AI vs HI Will Become Top of Mind for some important ideas on how we might work together in this space to establish a standard of quality and a statement of shared purpose and meaning.

A note regarding AI: I do not believe that information possessed by technology becomes knowledge, and I do not believe that intelligence can exist without knowledge. Consequently, I prefer “machine learning” to artificial intelligence, which I believe advances a fiction that machines can become knowledgeable — and, by extension, conceivably conscious. They cannot. I wouldn’t debate another writer on my side of this work over this issue, but it is my preference to use the phrase machine learning.

These are the essays referenced above, for your convenience:

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✍ — Published by Dr. Gabriella Korosi, at Dancing Elephant Press. Click here for guidelines to post.