toomuch.
The last few weeks have featured several instances of commencement speakers being soundly booed by their audiences for suggesting that AI is not only the next big thing but also something to be excited about — the next “industrial revolution,” as Gloria Caulfield told University of Central Florida students right before they loudly made their thoughts on the matter known. Given the extent that AI has eviscerated certain industries, thus making some students’ job prospects even more dire than they already were, such negative responses should come as no surprise.
Does this mean we’re witnessing a sea change, that we’re finally seeing a cultural backlash against AI? It’s probably too soon to tell for sure, but something does seem to be in the air these days, from audiences booing AI-positive commencement speakers to citizens pushing back against data centers being built in their communities. In any case, I do think it’s clear that more and more people are waking up to the fact that AI is not necessarily the unqualified good that Sam Altman and his fellow tech bros claim it to be, and more people are realizing the extent to which it can and will affect them.
It’s no shock to me, then, that some of the most popular posts I’ve ever written concern how to remove AI from your online experience, and specifically, your Google-mediated experience. But in Jürgen Geuter’s opinion, things are about to get even worse in light of the AI-centric announcements at Google’s recent I/O conference. Specifically, major updates to Google’s search that will replace traditional search results with an “AI-powered interactive experience.” Geuter sees that as nothing less than a declaration of war on the web itself as Google increasingly controls people’s experiences.
While [Google] packaged it as a lot of “AI” talk and “agentic” and whatnot, what their whole approach of decontextualizing information, of taking away links to sources and instead producing some LLM generated response means is that they want to establish a new abstraction layer on the web. Where Zuckerberg with his Metaverse failed Google is starting the next attack: Your website, your work no longer matters. The web is being fully hidden behind a Google-controlled surface. And I am not even talking about their browser monopoly. This isn’t just bad for users, Geuter argues. It’s also bad for writers, artists, and everyone else — pop culture bloggers included — who generate the content that people search for via Google. “Your work, your writing or art do matter a bit still: As (unpaid) raw material for their synthetic text extruders,” he writes. “You get to work for free so Google can have tight control on the flow of information and make sure that the responses people get are in line with what they need them to be.”
Geuter’s article may strike some as alarmist given that he foresees “a slopified AOL kind of environment where your access to information is limited to what Google’s synthetic text extruders deem relevant.” Not surprisingly, Geuter recommends taking some pretty drastic measures, like de-Googlifying your online experience and switching to Google alternatives for search, email, cloud storage, etc., in order to regain some autonomy. That’s certainly an ambitious endeavor, though Geuter is quick to admit that the time and effort required may not make it feasible for everyone.
Still, it’s a far better approach to challenging AI’s hegemony than the approach that Stephen Moore recently wrote about: dumbing down your writing. Now that AI-generated content is getting good enough to fool people into believing that it’s the genuine article — a development that poses no small challenges for society at large — some are actually advocating that we write worse in order to prove the humanity of our work.
To show our writing isn’t AI-generated, we should now add some editorial flourish, not in the form of creative sentence structure or word choice, but in the form of
[random typos or completely nonsensical words and sentences], cutting punctuation even when it makes sense, adding in unnecessary punctuation when it doesn’t!!, and continuing to take such a hard stance on the em dash you’d think it was a swastika. This person used an em dash! Call the AI-police and have their damn keyboard incinerated before it can do any more damage to society.We’ve got ourselves so worked up playing “is it AI” bingo, we’re clearly lost our minds. People are spending less time doing the writing and more time thinking “how do I make sure nobody thinks this is AI-generated?”, even if, in that process, they lower the quality of their work, or make it harder to read, or just make themselves look careless.
I’m with Moore: AI can have my em dashes when it can pry them from my cold, dead hands.
All joking aside, AI’s constantly improving capabilities and growing ubiquitousness should encourage all of us to consider how much is too much, and draw our own line in the sand. Where that line is, though, will be different for everyone. Maybe you’ll start using Firefox instead of Chrome, switch from Gmail to Proton or Tuta, and/or drop social media altogether to avoid AI-generated slop. Maybe you’ll choose to be more intentional and selective in your usage of AI chatbots. Or maybe you’ll choose to become an AI hater, plain and simple.
Any of those strategies, however, will be better than resorting to grammar that would make your 7th grade English teacher shake their head in shame and dismay.
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