Caring About Our Content: How to Fight the AI Apocalypse

In a world generated by AI, dare to be human.

It sounds like something out of a bad low-budget science fiction film if I'm being honest. Sure, the very idea of AI has been the cause of fear and panic for as long as computers have been around. Isaac Asimov wrote about computer takeovers more than 50 years ago.

But, like all things that come to pass, the reality of an "AI apocalypse" will be far more banal and far, far more stupid than we ever could've imagined.

And, likewise, the way to fight it will be just as simple.

GPT-4, generative AI, and the Silicon Valley dream

Before I hit my main idea in this essay, I wanted to go back to the root of the problem. As weird as it may seem if you read through my Twitter feed, I'm not totally anti-AI. Artificial intelligence (which isn't really "intelligence", but that's a topic for a different day) is, like all technological tools, potentially useful. The predictive capacity of AI has a lot of potential to provide more accurate statistical models in tons of mathematics-focused fields. The ability to analyze massive amounts of data and output readable results with practical instantaneity is incredible and incredibly useful.

While AI's usefulness is easily noted in statistical analysis, the techno business dudes already know that it's been around for quite some time in that field. Large data models have existed for years, and statisticians have been using them for a lot longer than OpenAI has been around.

The problem that we face in the form of "generative AI" is primarily a problem of money: where money is to be made, there will be a tech "mogul" there to make as much easy money as they can, no matter the detriment to society (or themselves) that will result.

And so we've ended up here, with a rapid influx of massive LLM (large-language models) specializing in "generating" content. These models analyze existing work, scrubbed from the internet, to "create" a unique piece of content in response to a prompt. At their core, they're statistical modeling programs. They analyze existing bits of data in the form of words, for written content, and pixels for images or videos, then they output associated amalgamations of these analyses in response to the input of the user.

There's an element of randomization, which is necessary for them to produce "unique" content, but the fact remains that everything produced by any of these models is simply a pulling apart and reproduction of something else that exists, whether it's OpenAI's Chat-GPT, Midjourney, or Microsoft's disastrous Bing AI release.

Nothing is being created, only repurposed, which is maybe the most transparently Silicon Valley-tech bro-concept to exist. Tech companies like to tell us they're making something new when in reality they are only repackaging something that someone else put work into (remember when Uber tried to pass off a literal bus as a new invention of theirs?).

I'm not going to let this post turn into a screed about the evils of wealth-seeking technology dudes, though. They've had enough attention. I'm here to affirm the goodness that is actual creation, and the reason we, as a society, need to return to the willingness to create through effort, instead of allowing ourselves to slip into the ease of complacency.

Today's internet, and the banality of automated content

Much of the problem with AI-generated content is, surprisingly, not entirely relegated to AI.

Yes, I have many issues with the privacy-skirting AI training data. And I'm passionately opposed to the idea that mashing together other people's work is somehow "creating" anything, and the fact that people pass it off as something they "did" makes me want to vomit.

But there's something more at work here, a deeper issue that we, as a world, should address. And it's something that, unless we do, will continue us down a path towards endless banality and mind-numbing "content".

It comes down to this: the internet of today, and the overall mindset of "content creation," has left us with a void of thoughtful, meaningful, effortful work. In its place we have low-effort, search-engine-optimized blog posts, books, and videos that say nothing of purpose, serving only as a vehicle for advertisements and collectively making the world just a little bit worse with every new word that's published.

Now, I do want to make something clear: I'm not trying to write a curmudgeonly post about how terrible the internet is, how awful all writers are, and how technology is always a terrible thing.

I don't believe that, clearly. You're reading a blog post. On my website. That I made using Framer (that's not a plug, just a note that I do still think there's good tech being made out there).

What I'm saying here is that we, as a culture and as individuals interacting with and creating "content," need to be more mindful and more intentional about what we're creating and consuming. We should want to make good stuff, to create something that adds to the world, and when we're interacting with what others make, we should want it to add to our lives.

In essence, we shouldn't be complacent, just letting the overwhelming malaise that has struck our idea of the internet to truly take us over. The web can still be a place of hope, creativity, and true expression. But we haven't been making an effort to make it so.

This, I feel, is the root of the incoming issue with AI content generation. We've become so used to having our news feeds, Google searches, and social timelines built up of poorly-written engagement bait, blog posts optimized to show up in search results despite not actually providing any usefulness to the reader, and algorithmically-determined context-less headlines and low-effort creations by people whose only goal is the ad revenue from their click bait articles.

And so, as folks have figured out how to game the system by making useless, incoherent content to serve as vehicles for as many ads as possible, it only makes sense that the next step for these "creators" would be to automate the process, offloading the effort involved (as little as there already is) to something else, so that they can sit back and rake in the ad revenue.

If we let it happen, this is where it leads. It's not a new place, just a continuation of the place we're already in, filled with useless garbage, noise that fills our minds with static until we can't seem to think straight.

But I happen to think there's an easy way to fight back, and it all just comes back to caring about what we do.

The way out

I think this all comes back around to our flawed understanding of the value of creation itself. We've buried ourselves in the idea that creativity is only as good as what it produces when the opposite is closer to the truth.

Creativity is about the creative process. The results are the by-product of the effort, thought, and care put into every step along the way.

What makes a work of art, or even something as simple a blog post, valuable is the idea that the creator is making something they feel is important, and they care about it enough to go through the process to make it well. In the same way that nobody appreciates shoddy workmanship on a house, a car, or a laptop, why should we feel any different towards the content that's created online, the books that we read, or the ideas that we consume throughout our days?

The way out, then, is simple: we need to care. Content creators should care about what they make, enough to be motivated to make something worthwhile. The AI apocalypse isn't an armageddon of destruction but rather a whittling away of our ability to care. If we as readers or consumers don't care about the effort or craft put into something, and if the creators themselves don't care enough to put effort in, we'll all drown together in a sea of banal, meaningless words, strung together by an algorithm that doesn't have any feeling behind what it says, and has no motivation to create something with meaning.

So it's time to care. Care about what you read, what you watch, what you do. Care about the people behind the content you consume or create. Everything you do, on the web or in the real world, is an interaction with another human being. If we lose that, we lose a large part of what makes technology so special in the first place.