What Kind of Loser Uses AI to Write a Blog? Or Code?
Like there aren’t enough bullshit posts already… This is not the Singularity I was hoping for.
I just read an article by an ignorant child where, at the end, they proudly chirped that they had used Jasper AI to write it.
Originally thinking it was only poorly written, at that point I felt like I’d just bathed in a sewer.
Overreact much? you ask. If you didn’t know it was artificially generated until they told you, then what’s the difference?
If I plagiarized this entire article but no one knew it, would that be OK?
I’m not a brilliant writer — for proof, see here, and here — but one thing is certain, when you read this:
In my opinion, using a writing ‘AI’ is nothing more than the glorified cut-and-pasting of other people’s words.
well, you know I actually wrote it.
I understand — as a programmer, Jasper and GPT are super cool.
And also a crime against humanity.
They shouldn’t exist, at least for anything other than automated summaries or some such — but not within 1000 parsecs of the ‘creative’ realm. They’re for people too stupid or lazy to write themselves.
I don’t want to overload on the hyperbole, but to me writing is important. It is essential.
Communication is the single biggest differentiator between humanity and the rest of the animal kingdom. It’s our thing. Books, the internet, newspapers and magazines, and the telephone — without communication — especially writing — society as we know it disappears. The Declaration of Independence just wouldn’t be the same by word-of-mouth. And without words at all, we’re living at the whim of whatever troglodyte can wield the biggest club. I’ve always wanted to be a writer (along with being the inventor of the first General AI, and, especially at the age of 14, a professional motocross racer): I’ve two novels I’m still editing and a host of unpublished sci-fi short stories which will shortly be foisted upon an unwilling public. I may suck at it, but the suckage belongs 110% to me.
Writing as a Medium of information is already under assault by lazy-ass typists spewing out crap with posts like:
Generate passive income — all you need to do is write 10 articles a day for six months and you too can have this Singapore penthouse.
I wrote a digital course in an hour about something I knew nothing about and I made $6.43!
I created a no-content book on Amazon and made $10 last month!
It’s a free world, so knock yourself out, losers. You’ll get tired of the grind for minuscule rewards and stop.
Please.
I beg of you.
Just.
Stop.
Those dipshits don’t need to write for a living anyway, because they’ve got all that passive income, right?
This filling up the screen with meaningless, worthless drivel irritates me, because in my opinion writing should be about you saying something real to me. I want to know a little bit about you, or what you as the author have to say — you know I’m paying attention because I’ve stopped playing Genshin Impact, Captain Kirk is currently paused while making out with the green alien cavegirl, and I’m reading.
So take the time to write something real.
Or don’t do it at all.
The world is filled with enough garbage, we don’t need a circle jerk on social media reading and regurgitating the same nonsensical, non-functional, and non-interesting material in an ultimately futile bid to amass ‘views’.
When I write, I promise to have the courtesy to do the same — it may be stupid, it may be poorly written, it may have entirely too many references to 1960’s sci-fi shows, but it’s really me. And with every scroll-down-click you get to decide if you want to continue the conversation or not.
But even the nonsense spewed in those inane never-get-rich blog posts is better than the product of what is currently termed ‘Artificial Intelligence’ — an appellation that is only half right.
Machine Learning text generation tools are a perversion of writing. They’re cheap whores to fill the hole where a soul should be.
I understand basically how they work, and they’re stupid. Mind-numbingly stupid, because artificial intelligence is (currently) an oxymoron. All the forward-chaining-reverse-predictive-greedy-algorithm-tensors are just dismembering sentences somebody else wrote (that was the ‘training’ — i.e feeding in real people’s work) and then regurgitating the half-digested pieces onto someone else’s screen as a facsimile of creative effort.
Not to be overly crude but, you know, fuck that and the horse they rode in on.
Machine Intelligence (MI) the thing or Machine Learning (MI) the process, means that the computer knows nothing — nothing at all — about the meaning of those symbols its flipping about. It’s merely recognizing patterns in data. That data can be images, words, or digital pumpkins, it makes no difference. There is no intelligence. Which is why people are posting images of electric vehicles rolling over child-size dolls, because ML doesn’t ‘know’ doll from daughter from dandelion.
I understand, it’s useful and has significant applications — ML is already better at diagnosing lung cancer than radiologists — but it’s no more ‘intelligent’ than a fountain pen. It just has a whole lot more data. It brute forces patterns out of petabytes of information.
Fantastic.
But a replacement for human creativity? God no.
The current state of ML mimics human intelligence in the same way plunging a toilet mimics sex.
And if it ever could replace human creativity, why on earth would we want it to? Once robots are doing all the heavy lifting, robotaxis are driving us about (ha!), and the government airdrops us all the cash we need to buy our weed and Doritos what then will we have left but the arts — writing being the most important of them?
A side thought — Weed in the Doritos. Weedritos. Tell me that’s not genius!
I’ve seen people argue that Jasper/GPT/Satan are just tools, that they help with the ‘drudgery’ of writing: just auto-filling the next word. Or the next sentence. Or the next paragraph. Maybe the next chapter. But definitely not the whole story. Absolutely never not ever…(unless I’m really behind…)
The drudgery of writing? Really? If it’s drudgery, don’t do it. Flip burgers. Start a hedge fund. Join the House of Representatives — no brains needed for that; they’d just get in your way.
Well, you know what? I’m no Charles Dickens, but picking out the next word?
That’s the whole gd point.
Picking out that next word, and the next, building a chain of meaning that’s unique to you, right now, for this purpose, however brilliant or mundane — it’s our job. It’s supposed to be the reason we are doing this. Giving control up to an algorithm makes as much sense as hiring someone to eat for you.
Consider — articles are now being partially (or wholly) written by these ML tools, and some websites are already completely auto-generated without human input. I keep running across these obviously auto-generated posts, particularly in the finance sector but also in a ton of tech reviews/comparisons, and as well as in nutrition/fitness. And that’s just what I’ve encountered with idle surfing.
Then: Web bots scrape every public piece of non-paywalled content posted on the internet. And since this content, both words and images, are part of the dataset for training some of these MI’s, we now have computers writing content used to train computers to write content in a looking-glass that could easily cease to reflect humanity.
People are worried about racial bias in the datasets… how about anti-human bias?
I just saw an article, with photos, of a new Chinese project where they have drones dropping armed dog-like robots onto a test battlefield — think Boston Robotics with a Kalishnikov on their back. Couple this with the MI’s training MI’s and it’s like these sociopaths thought the Terminator movies were instruction manuals.
What About Coding AI’s?
Coding AI’s are just the same — crutches for the lazy and incompetent. Please tell me you use an AI in the interview so I can stop wasting my time.
And they come with the potential copyright issues (that ‘training’ source code came from somebody) which are currently in the news.
See Plagiarism Today article here. (not an affiliate link)
Or any of the other recent articles/reports accusing Microsoft CoPilot of plagiarism (legal note — these accusations have yet to be proven in a court of law) such as (allegedly) a reproduced part of some dude’s game code complete with the original cursing in the comments.
A Supreme Court ruling is due out soon that could have huge impact on these tools regarding fair use, and whether someone can, uh, ‘borrow ’ someone else’s work for fun and profit — and I hope all these tools die a quick yet excruciating death.
Fellow coders, if you value your jobs, please consider not using or contributing to these tools.
And you might think really, really hard before uploading to GitHub, the now-Microsoft-owned source of much of this code-mining.
The takeaway?
I for one will unfollow, unlink, unrecommend, downvote, cast into Purgatory, any writer/site/post that uses ‘AI’ to generate content, and I hope to encourage others to do so as well. Don’t be part of the problem. Don’t use Other People’s Words. NO to OPW! (I’m thinking t-shirt here)
The Singularity was never going to be pretty but if these ML tools take over I won’t even have anything decent to read while I’m waiting to be assassinated by a swarm of killer robot dogs.
Blatant Self-Promotion
If you liked this article, and are into software development, you might find my series on the principles of software engineering of interest. I developed it after witnessing the — shall we say ‘uneven’ — level of material in my daughter’s CS curriculum.
