I’ve always thought our happy smart phone/internet availability would end at some point not too far in the future. My plan was to enjoy it until that time. I thought it would be the failure of the electrical grid, a catastrophic global weather event, or terrorist sabotage that would make the internet and our cell phones irrelevant. I had the right outcome but the wrong cause. Silly me.
It’s what is commonly referred to as “AI” that’s heading this way like a tsunami. For simplicity’s sake, I will refer to it as AI even though it’s not technically intelligent and not at this point sentient. When massively powerful computer programs can review everything on the internet, use it to generate additional internet content, and then continue to create ever more content until it is impossible to know what is original content, what is accurate, what is AI generated, and what is regenerated by AI, then the internet becomes fully corrupted and by extension our smart phones. Nothing is reliable. Nothing is verifiable. Nothing is constant.
It’s entertaining that the unreality of the start of the internet with access of so much writing, imagery, and historical reference is revisited at the end of the internet. Humans are once again used as test subjects in a giant experiment on the use of language, imagery, and revisionist history using this same language and imagery to rebroadcast in billions of different incarnations among billions of sites with more coming every second. It’s not like the internet was ever pretty. It’s just becoming even less so.
A simple example of this AI software/algorithm process using language research and prediction in a far less complicated software became ubiquitous in our smart phones. Everyone has been frustrated by auto correct. Auto correct sees what our sentence is, what the two or three letters are that we type, and then based on the language usage it has been exposed to, continues to reference, and our previously typed messages, guesses which word we are planning to type. Often this is a painless and useful process. (In typing this essay, how many times did I make a typo in a word but when I hit the space bar it was automatically corrected?) Occasionally, it also makes mistakes to the absolute frustration of the user. But we are human and only notice when it doesn’t work. I am training the program now as I write this to make better guesses in my style and that of others using the same platform or application.
The AI as it is being introduced does this on an incomprehensibly enormous scale. It’s why it’s called a “large language model.” Its references are so large, its products so undefined, that it’s unpredictable to even programmers and scientists who do not know what it will do to our existing systems and references. Corporations are not waiting to see how this impacts the internet because there is big money to be made.
That’s where the internet stands. Because no one can or will put on the brakes, this software generates ever more internet content as average consumers request content. It continues to build on that to generate even more content for it to reference when more consumers request it. It is self replicating. The content on the internet can and will become so unpredictable, false, misleading, and unreliable that it will essentially become useless and meaningless to us humans.
I see the internet and our smart phones becoming irrelevant and unable to reliably tell us how tell how tall Mt. Rainier is and who was the first white man to climb it with information on his bio, books, and profession. This has long been a problem with news and the interpretation of history. AI’s great appetite is likely to include the assimilation and reconstruction of many “established” facts. Who was Eleanor Roosevelt? When was she born? I couldn't have guessed this outcome. I don’t believe there’s a way to stop it. The genie is out of the bottle.
Every word I ever wrote and put on the internet is now fodder for this churning monster. We’re now not only squandering the natural resources of the planet but have moved on to squandering the creative human resources of our history, writing, and imagery. As I write this and post it, it too falls into this canyon of lost writing.
My written word may be mostly significant to me, but now every piece of writing, book, novel, speech, research paper, or anything ever written and uploaded is now part of this scavenger hunt and redistribution process. Is that piece really written by Plato? Let’s find the original so we can check. Now where did we put that?
It’s clear I’m mourning, struggling to know how to respond as I contemplate the loss of this great body of work. Is this what the destruction of the Library of Alexandria felt like? I can only imagine. Fortunately, our brick and mortar libraries still exist.
If you’re looking for me, I’ll be verifying hard copies of every piece of writing I have uploaded with the most recent edits and placing them in my safety deposit box. I don’t want to lose them while I’m alive. I want to be certain that the words are truly my creative effort. Any sharing will be made by postal carrier. It’s time to buy more stamps. I don’t want my email content used by AI either. Long live the pony express!
Reporting from the Society of the Troglodytes.
Joceile
4.23.2023
[Picture of my smart phone, a laptop, and a cup of coffee with a Black-capped Chickadee on it.]
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