Adversarial Conditions

The web subjects the public to ever more adversarial conditions for truthful information exchange. Our global village is powered by the internet, yet the internet is governed by companies whose political ideology is orthogonal to the success of society.

Without really knowing what we were doing, we built a platform more suited to the exploitation of the human mind than the promotion of human flourishing.

"If you wanted something that was wrong with your product," one analyst has called it "the most extreme possible form"—we have taken this as literal meaning since very early on—it becomes even worse when its consequences are ineffably dangerous.

The Internet turns us into digital prisoners: enslaved victims who could not communicate through our traditional means because they knew too much about how their own systems worked and why these decisions should be made (or shouldn't), but also aware of only partial effects due mostly or completely random events without any coherent strategy behind them. In short no two experiences share many features except ones marked differently at each point along the way.

When most websites are free from these kinds onerous controls, they have their value proposition concealed behind some kind of one-size fits all rules and regulations, because only users can alter them with knowledge at home. The result is that people know little about how networks operate or which company owns each node in a network before it's posted online—so many sites simply ask readers where there might be room for improvement so long as content remains unedited without editing an existing article based upon Google search results (in theory). Not having anything else to do but click through adverts produced solely out its own means makes us feel like parasites hiding beneath our beds searching desperately for consolation.

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British Columbia is under a "heat dome" - a climate phenomenon causing an extraordinary climb in temperatures. At our house in Burnaby, BC, it was 41°C outside today (105.8°F) and as I write this at 9:50pm on Monday the temperature inside our house is 36°C. As most British Columbians, we do not have central air conditioning, though we have purchased two window air conditioners and one portable unit to keep from succumbing to the heat.

Under such adversarial conditions I am in no shape to write a meaningful article, so I took the experimental step of asking a commercial AI writer to do the job for me. I fed it three sentences and in return I got the ... material you saw above the line.

Now comes the crucial question: Did you think I wrote that piece of text? Or did it feel somehow wrong or out of character or in the wrong voice for me?

I ask because in my 10 minutes of searching I found over 50 AI writing services offering "professional grade" output for blogs, news papers, and other publications. And based on their samples they are disturbingly good at generating human-sounding content from very little text.

Come to think of it, how would you know if this sentence right here was written by me, or one of those AI bots?

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Morten Rand-Hendriksen is a Senior Staff Instructor at?LinkedIn Learning?(formerly Lynda.com) focusing on?front-end web development and the next generation of the web platform. He is not well suited for operating in extremely warm climates and is currently in a state of melting.