#112. Charismatic little idiots

Thoughts on the inevitable slow creep of AI

AI has begun a slow creep into everyday conversations I find myself in, and honestly, I hate it.

First there was the news of Meta using millions of pirated books to train its new AI model, Llama 3. Then it was a conversation I had with a soon-to-be high school graduate and his plans to pursue an internship in AI right after graduation instead of heading off to college. After that, someone suggested I could run a short story I wrote through AI to have it copyedited before submitting to a contest instead of asking a friend to do it manually, and I nearly breathed fire. And then it was the article my mom sent me this week about how we should all be preparing for the “most profound identity crisis humanity has ever faced,” aka, AI taking most of our jobs.

Cool cool cool. As if there isn’t enough going on right now without AI ushering in “the twilight of human intellectual supremacy” and a “crisis about what it is to be human at all.” Jesus fucking christ, Pam. Will we ever get a break from feeling like the world is burning down around us? I fear the answer may be no.

Me in 10 years

The millennial search for meaning never sleeps, and now it appears we have to factor artificial intelligence into the calculus of our lives, our jobs, our futures. No wonder the tech bros are all so focused on getting women to have more kids. They can’t replace our fertile human wombs with AI, or at least, not yet.

Personally, I’m in denial about AI’s ascendancy to the intellectual throne. A few years ago, back when I worked in marketing, I used ChatGPT a few times to help me write Instagram captions about candles. “Re-write this sentence in the style of F. Scott Fitzgerald,” I’d tell it, then fuck around with different authors until I liked the caption it gave me. I don’t think I saved a ton of time, but maybe a bit of mental effort? After a few weeks, I stopped using it. The novelty wore off, and eventually it just felt like cheating. To quote Jia Tolentino, “A.I. is frankly gross to me: it launders bias into neutrality; it hallucinates; it can become ‘poisoned with its own projection of reality.’”

If you’re a person who likes to read, you’ve probably heard by now about the debate between AI and humans when it comes to creative writing. Remember this experiment where Curtis Sittenfeld and ChatGPT both wrote a short story based on that same prompt? The AI’s story was… flat. Uninspired. It was missing the delightful spark of strangeness Curtis’ piece had. The AI just couldn’t account for the weirdness and spontaneity of the human brain:

By the time I was in an Uber, he’d told me his name was Brian, he worked for an environmental advocacy group, and the previous weekend, on a trail, he’d ridden his bike past a woodpecker sitting on the back of a deer; he’d been so close that he and the deer had made eye contact.

I typed, “Just to clarify, you did or didn’t also make eye contact with the woodpecker?”

“Sadly no,” he replied. “Next time?”

Personally, I choose to believe creative endeavors that rely on surprising-and-delighting an audience (i.e. real live human people) are safe, for now. I don’t think AI is going to evolve enough to have a genuine sense of humor, and even if it did, do people really want a nameless, faceless entity delivering jokes about, I don’t know, annoying periods they don’t have, or horrible dates they’ll never go on? Honestly, pass.

But what about jobs that don’t require as much creativity or personality? What about the future for the millions of people working in fields that AI is apparently “good” at? What kind of a world are we building for the next generation? Is the dominance of AI going to become yet another fucking thing for women to consider when they’re deciding whether they want kids?

Here’s what Tyler Cowen (a libertarian/right-leaning economist) and Avital Balwit (an enthusiastic AI researcher) said in their piece, “AI Will Change What It Is to Be Human. Are We Ready?” for The Free Press about raising the next generation:

If you raise them as we raise children now, they will run the high risk of ending up demoralized. If you raise your children with the uncritical expectation that if they work hard they can be a top person in their field, they will be disappointed. The skill of getting good grades maps pretty closely to what the AIs are best at. You would do better to instill in your kids the quality of taking the initiative and the right kinds of intellectual humility. You should also, to the extent you can, teach them the value of charisma, making friends, and building out their networks.

Let me type that paragraph again, but in English. It says: “Don’t teach your kids to be smart, AI already has that covered. Teach your kids to be popular instead. And because your kids won’t be smart, you should also teach them to be cool with being wrong, and make sure they know they’ll never be better than AI at anything they do for work.”

Am I the only person who thinks that advice sounds dystopian as hell???

Sure, being smart isn’t everything, but I have a big fucking problem with AI worshipping tech bros telling us that we’re all about to be walking, talking idiots compared to AI – so much so that our kids shouldn’t even try to get good grades in school. Even knowing I’ll never have to worry about this myself, my own identity is very Hermione Granger coded, so I guess they’re right – this whole thing will eventually send me into a spiraling identity crisis, probably.

All of this reminds me of one of my all-time favorite podcasts, The End of The World with Josh Clark (yes, it’s dark, but so am I 😈). There’s an entire episode about how AI could kill us all, and it’s a riveting listen. It’s dated now, though. It came out in 2018, long before regular people could even try out ChatGPT for themselves. So I did a little Google search:

and found this casual article from Scientific American, which is basically like, um, yeah it could but probably won’t – like an extinction level event is actually really hard to achieve, you know?

What do you get when a scientist, a mathematician, and an engineer walk into a bar, throw a cold one back, and start discussing the possibility of AI destroying the world? Here’s my favorite quote:

The good news, if I can call it that, is that we don’t think AI could kill us all with nuclear weapons. Even if AI somehow acquired the ability to launch all of the 12,000-plus warheads in the nine-country global nuclear stockpile, the explosions, radioactive fallout and resulting nuclear winter still would likely fall short of an extinction-level event. Humans are far too plentiful and dispersed for the detonations to directly kill all of us. AI could detonate weapons over all the most fuel-dense areas on the planet and still fail to produce as much ash as the meteor that likely wiped out the dinosaurs. There are also not enough nuclear warheads on the planet to fully irradiate all the planet’s usable agricultural land. In other words, an AI-initiated nuclear Armageddon would be cataclysmic, but it would likely still fall short of killing every human being, because some humans would survive and have the potential to reconstitute the species.

Don’t worry, guys! A scientist at the RAND corporation says there will be some people left over to keep the human race going! It’s all going to be totally fine!!!!!

Is all of this shit seriously happening? Or is all of this just a bad dream we’re about to wake up from, then laugh at how absurd it all was? I guess if you’re really paying attention, the AI-pocalypse is real, and it’s already here. I just read an article the other day in New York Magazine about how everyone is cheating their way through college, apparently. Here’s two excerpts that might give you nightmares:

Sarah continued to use AI when she started college this past fall. Why wouldn’t she? Rarely did she sit in class and not see other students’ laptops open to ChatGPT. Toward the end of the semester, she began to think she might be dependent on the website. She already considered herself addicted to TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and Reddit, where she writes under the username maybeimnotsmart. “I spend so much time on TikTok,” she said. “Hours and hours, until my eyes start hurting, which makes it hard to plan and do my schoolwork. With ChatGPT, I can write an essay in two hours that normally takes 12.”

Troy Jollimore, a poet, philosopher, and Cal State Chico ethics professor, has concerns. “Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,” he said. “Both in the literal sense and in the sense of being historically illiterate and having no knowledge of their own culture, much less anyone else’s.”

I feel bad for Gen Alpha, honestly. What a fucking insane time they’re going to have growing up, if this is the shit we’re dealing with right now. Every generation complains about the ones above and below them – this is nothing new. It’s funny if you let it be. But it sounds like we should be preparing for hundreds of thousands of charismatic little idiots running around in the near-future, wielding ChatGPT like a weapon as they shake AI generated bullshit in our faces.

And the sad part? They won’t know anything else. It won’t even be their fault, because we did this to them. Avital, one of the article’s writers – the one who is currently building an AI called “Claude” – is twenty-six years old.

Honestly, I feel bad for anyone who grew up with unfettered access to social media, so I guess that now extends to AI. I feel bad for Gen Alpha’s parents – my friends, my family. I’ve never been happier to have passed through my formative years without exposure to any of this shit. Can we really not catch a fucking break?

I listened to Josh Clark’s podcast episode on AI again this week, and there’s one line I can’t get out of my head. In 1965, Dr. Irving John Goode, an early AI researcher, said:

“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion,” and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make, provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to keep it under control.

If we build an ultraintelligent machine, we will be playing with fire. We have played with fire before, and it helped to keep the other animals at bay.”

To which Arthur C. Clarke, famous science fiction author, responded: “Well, yes—but when the ultraintelligent machine arrives, we may be the other animals.”

Um… gulp?

“A Grand Experiment in Parenthood and Friendship” by Rhaina Cohen for The Atlantic

It says a lot about the culture I live in that I read this essay (about two couples buying houses next to each other and co-parenting their kids together) and my immediate reaction was, “woah, crazy!” But that is exactly the point:

By contrast, when Americans have kids, the norm is to “isolate ourselves so profoundly,” Kristen Ghodsee, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Everyday Utopia, told me. Kids bring chaos—often more than parents can handle on their own. Some parents turn to family for help, but for many, that’s not an option. Their job may be far from relatives, or their familial relationships may be strained, or their relatives may be unable to care for their kids—or they simply might not want to. Building family life around friends offers an alternative that “remixes tradition,” as Raffi told me: You get the support of an extended family but through chosen connections.

“I Am So Fucking Tired of Listening To Women My Age Complain About Being Old and Washed” by

Angelica Jade Bastién

for Madwomen & Muses

This essay about aging is sooooooooo good. Angelica is a 36 year-old essayist at New York Magazine and this piece for her own newsletter is one of the best I’ve read in a while:

I completely understand the vexation women my age feel about getting older, even if I don’t share it, because this is exactly how we have been taught to regard ourselves. We live in a world where we are bombarded by our own technologically-mediated visage in ways human beings never had to contend with before. I’ve never wanted marriage and kids, so I blessedly don’t have that clock ticking away as a reminder of supposed lack. I’ve never felt that by being single something fundamental was missing from my life. But parsing your own desires from what you’re trained to want by an individualistic, youth-obsessed culture is a difficult and lifelong task. You have to want to push back against these forces for that to have a glimmer of possibility.

I am in awe that I have been able to craft such a life against the odds. Every pleasure I experience was fought for against the tides of mental illness, misogyny, racism, capitalism, and abuse. There is so much left to relish, you just have to reach out and grab hold. For as long as this yearning heart of mine beats, the taste of opportunity and pleasure shall rest upon my tongue.

“My Brain Finally Broke” by Jia Tolentino for The New Yorker

Jia Tolentino never doesn’t hit it right on the head. I think we’ve probably all used this phrase before (my brain is broken!!) but Jia explores what that actually looks like for her right now and damn if this essay isn’t haunting:

I feel a troubling kind of opacity in my brain lately—as if reality were becoming illegible, as if language were a vessel with holes in the bottom and meaning was leaking all over the floor.

Will I be able to convince [my kids] that the only worthwhile parts of my mind are those which have resisted or eluded the incentives of the internet? My kids are at an age when nothing excites them like the chance to do things unassisted. They have just a few years before they learn that adulthood, these days, means ceding more and more to machines.

Speaking of futuristic technology making everything considerably more hellish, of course this week’s book is The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami. What started as a revolutionary treatment for insomnia turned into a way to arrest people based on their violent and disturbing dreams. It’s Minority Report meets The Handmaid’s Tale without any of the action or reproductive dystopia. My book club gave it a collective 7/10 which is exactly where I am, too. If you go in expecting literary speculative fiction (not an action-packed thriller starring a female Tom Cruise) you will enjoy it!

Lorde announced a new album arriving June 27th called Virgin (k, love) and the cover is an x-ray of a woman (Lorde?) wearing jeans. And yes, that’s an IUD just to the right of the zipper. Hell yes.

In a recent interview for Rolling Stone, Lorde (Ella) said: “I’m an intense bitch” and whoops here I am running off to buy tickets to her upcoming tour!!

As we talk in her apartment and around her city, Lorde often repeats how “terrified” she is to open up about the album — and to let the world hear it. There are songs she forebodingly describes as “rugged,” vulnerable, and messy, fitting for an artist who’s unlearning the conditioning that taught her to be digestible and “good.”

“There’s going to be a lot of people who don’t think I’m a good girl anymore, a good woman. It’s over,” she promises, eyes bright and full of fire. “It will be over for a lot of people, and then for some people, I will have arrived. I’ll be where they always hoped I’d be.”

Last week, I talked to my friend

Leslie Stephens

for issue #2 of the Sheila Heti Summer Slow Read which will probably be one of my favorites of the entire series. Leslie is brilliant and vulnerable and a dream podcast guest. I could talk to her about literally anything for the rest of my life forever!

Also, I’ve heard there are some annoyances with the way Substack imbeds audio in regular posts and makes you stay in the app while you listen (ick), so I guess I’m starting a real podcast now so you can listen to it on Spotify or whatever??? See you on Sunday for issue #3 (What sort of trouble will she make?) I talked to my friend Cass (28, currently single, loves kids but doesn’t want any of her own) about the repeal of Roe v. Wade, the threat of the “unoccupied” woman, and people expressing serious concern about the needs of her invisible future husband, L-O-L.

Before you go, any thoughts about the slow creep of AI? What weird conversations have you had about it lately? Are you worried about existential risk or nah?