Artificial Stupidity

"There are all sorts of temptations in this world that will eat away at your creative spirit, but none more fiendish than that boundless machine of artistic demoralisation, ChatGPT."

— Nick Cave, Red Hand Files #248

It is becoming rather tedious to continue reading about how AI is going to take everyone's job away, write essays for students, create poetry and fiction, compose music, generate text books, make illustrations and other commercial artwork—and some would add fine art to that too. In short, AI will take over and humans will be left redundant. And then we hear how, because there will be no work to do, people should have Universal Basic Income (UBI) to live on. Pocket money for the useless and the disenfranchised. What a bleak future. Why have people at all? Maybe we just need a few, two classes of course: those to maintain the AI machines, and those to reap the rewards.

It's all nonsense, of course. AI draws almost all its information from the internet, and the internet, as we all know, is riddled with lies, half-truths and fakery. AI is only as smart as its input, and its input is really quite dumb. To quote a student whose religion studies teacher at Elon University asked his class, instead of writing an essay, to generate one with AI and then mark it for originality and accuracy: "I'm not worried about AI getting to where we are now; I'm much more worried about the possibility of us reverting to where AI is." Yes, there were many factual mistakes in the essays, direct plagiarism, and misquotes galore. [1]

And as an aside, what a brilliant teacher! Talk about a deft response to a wave of fear—a martial-arts educator, turning AI's power against itself.

Furthermore, as predicted by that student, we have an additional descent into idiocy: Model Autophagy Disorder, or MAD for short. This is AI eating itself, and is a deliberate reference to bovine spongiform encephalopathy. A cow gets BSE by eating feed contaminated with parts that came from another cow that was sick with BSE. AI becomes stupider by consuming data generated by an already stupid data-spouting system. [2] We humans are already becoming less critical in our thinking as we consume the output of social media and the increasingly dumbed-down mainstream news. Our (human) input to the great world wide web is subsequently a shadow of its former 1980s/90s even 2000s self. If our already bland, trite, platitudinous data is consumed and spat out, time upon time in a matter of nanoseconds, just think how gross it will become, and how quickly!

Don't fear AI. Fear yourself. Fear social media. Fear tech billionaires designing algorithms to make us dumber and dumber, more and more susceptible to control. Gosh! There's so many real things to be afraid of these days, the medical-industrial complex, the DNC, Wall Street, government-enforced censorship of alternative views, cancel culture, the unexplained rise in sudden deaths of the under-forties [3], the next "killer virus" (the next lockdown), the physical collapse of UK hospitals and schools [4], the rise in adolescent body dysmorphia [5], obesity, depression, anxiety, war, J.K. Rowling [6], the list goes on.

Of course, what I really believe is don't fear anything (just conjure a sensible amount of caution in the face of danger). Instead have faith, in God, in love, in human connectedness, in the inevitability of personhood rising from the ashes of our crumbling civilisation and our burning land. We are only here for a short while; why spend it terrorising ourselves? There is work to be done. We have innate intelligence, so rather than seeking an inferior, artificial substitute, perhaps we can each awaken our own, and use it for the common good. Together we can feed, not on regurgitated fast-food data, but on fresh, healthy, original ideas, and critical thinking. We can again become nourished.

Note: this essay was written a year ago, and sent as a private newsletter to subscribers. I republish it here for Manoj Vadakkan — and anyone else interested :)

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[1] C.W.Howell on Twitter and Wired Magazine, 06/06/2023

[2] Self-Consuming Generative Models Go MAD by Sina Alemohammad, Josue Casco-Rodriguez, Lorenzo Luzi, Ahmed Imtiaz Humayun, Hossein Babaei, Daniel LeJeune, Ali Siahkoohi, Richard G. Baraniuk, Cornell University, 04/07/2023

[3] Cause Unknown: The Epidemic of Sudden Deaths in 2021 and 2022 by Edward Dowd

[4] Crumbling England: from schools to hospitals, how bad is the current crisis? by Jon Ungoed-Thomas, The Guardian, 03/09/2023

[5] Rising dysmorphia among adolescents: A cause for concern, NCBI NLM, 28/02/2020.

[6] Just kidding—of course!