The Hidden Dangers of Relying on AI for Creative Work
It might be too early to tell what the impact of AI or ChatGPT will have on us.
I remember selling solar to a programmer who was recently out of work, which he felt was due to the rise of ChatGPT in the workplace. He told me that it allowed a programmer to complete a few weeks of work in a few hours, and because of this, he was afraid of the shifting demands made on that industry.
The other day I was listening to the radio about a longshoreman’s union who were on strike at the ports wanting a halt on automation, which they saw threatening their livelihoods. I’m not sure how that will turn out, but I remember feeling at the time that this has been a recurrent theme for workers across the modern period.
Think of the English weavers trying to destroy the machines replacing their jobs, or how in some ways the cotton gin led to the destruction of the southern economy in pre-Civil War America.
In our own recent economy, we saw the reorganization of the auto industry and its reshaping of the major auto towns of the Midwest. Nobody can look at history and say that technological advances haven’t freed up human labor to concentrate on something else.
And that is the great idealism in technology, that eventually, we will make enough progress to free us up entirely from labor—a time where we won’t be consumed by just survival.
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However, technology certainly has had its detractors, whether from the laborers themselves or from a theological or philosophical perspective.
Just as anything in this world, the Aristotelian middle ground seems the best stance to take; it can’t be all bad or all good.
I’ve been using ChatGPT on a daily basis since I started trying to build a business online, and at times I am completely stunned at the ability to generate large amounts of information in a short period of time.
Other times I am very concerned about how superficial some of that information actually is. However, we want to characterize it, the technology is something that is remaking our society, from how we work to how we educate and to how we present ourselves online.
The Loss of Unique Thought in the Age of ChatGPT
A friend of mine who is very bullish on AI stopped by the other day and she taught me a lot about how to use the prompts to generate the writing that you want.
She was showing me how she built a custom chat to help her write her novel and the instructions she was putting in to help her.
One of the things that really caught my eye was this idea that you could feed in your own writing to the chat, and it would create a writing style that mirrored your own.
Naturally, I set up my own chat to see how my writing would work.
What really surprised me about it was that it still sounds like ChatGPT. And this is the problem I see with this advancement.
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How AI is Reshaping Our Ability to Think and Create
The medium itself is the message, as Marshall McLuhan theorized, and the medium encompasses the tools of composition.
Nietzsche saw this over a hundred years ago, how our writing instruments shape our thinking.
There is actually a period of transition in Nietzsche’s writing where you can see the impact of his changing of writing instrument from writing longhand with a pen to typing on this wild-looking typewriter called the writing ball.
The long sentences of his earlier work, where reflection took the center point, towards the more succinct aphoristic style of his later work.
Since one could argue that the written word is the reflection of thought, this distinct change in how he wrote marks a shift in his consciousness.
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Much like what I was saying when I was discussing SEO, things going through a certain medium remake those things according to the medium.
Think of the constraints of a social media platform like Twitter and the difference in the type of thinking it supports versus a more long-form platform like WordPress. Even the orientation itself of the medium shifts the type of content it supports. Think of the old Vine with its more comedic videos versus something like TikTok and the multiplicity of content on there.
The problem, as I see it, is not the medium itself like social media but the fact that increasingly the content composed on social media seems to be generated through ChatGPT.
The uniqueness of the individual’s voice is lost, whether that is content tailored for Twitter or for YouTube.
Because everything seems to be going through ChatGPT, whether that is just the generic voice of the algorithm or a custom one mirroring or attempting to mirror the author, there is a uniformity to all that it generates, a conformity blanketing all.
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Now, what about thinking itself? How is ChatGPT changing how we process the world? Is it changing how one thinks?
I know for myself that writing is one of the best ways I know how to think.
It is an exploration of that internal world that, for the most part, goes by too quickly for me to reflect. I am also someone who is prone to obsessive thinking, turning over the same thing in my mind multiple times, stuck on one particular memory.
Writing is a way to break through that.
It is a way to take a thought, maybe something that has been bouncing around in the back of my head, and expand on it in a sustained way.
Writing becomes a way to push aside every other thought to give precedence to thoughts I want.
Now, I do meditate and I have done so for years, but at times my thinking can run away from me, and typing is a way to bring presence to my mind in a way meditation can’t.
I find that typing allows me to follow one thought longer because it slows down my thinking, whereas with longhand writing, my thinking becomes quicker and jumps around more.
How Writing Through AI Limits Your Own Voice and Mind
What I’ve seen in my own mind with the stuff I’ve used ChatGPT for is that the thinking is limited to the prompting—thinking through how to structure the prompt to get me what I want.
I find myself refining the prompts based on the output given to me, adding things or changing things around.
But what about thinking through what ChatGPT has produced?
That certainly depends on what use I have for that information, but it seems like more of the time there is no thought after the prompt.
In using it to create more SEO-friendly content this weekend, the thinking is limited to the input, but the content generated by ChatGPT is skimmed. One could argue that by not learning SEO and relying on ChatGPT, I’ve freed up my labor to focus on things that matter to me, but there is a heaviness to this idea.
How much of me am I giving up?
How much of my thinking am I losing?
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