Well here’s a disturbing point I somehow hadn’t thought about before. Are we training AI, or is it training us?
When I sat down to write this article, in which, to be clear, I did not use AI, I found myself writing the following sentence: “It’s not just in places we’re conditioned to see AI—Google AI overviews, LinkedIn influencer posts, and Facebook feeds—I’ve started seeing AI…” I stopped typing, freaked out, and deleted the sentence. Have I always written this way? I honestly don’t know.
This negative parallelism—“it’s not just x, it’s y” is maybe the most infamous AI writing-ism there is. It is something that is regularly called out as being obviously AI, and is the formation in the sentence Mamdani wrote that Spero called out. But I didn’t use AI. Did I use that construction because I’ve been immersed on an internet full of generic AI writing on every platform all day everyday for years? Or did I just happen to think that was the best way to phrase it at the time?
Related, I like Kai’s take on why we feel so… duped when we see clearly AI-generated text:
I’m not categorically against using AI to help out with tedious work. But there’s a difference between using a tool to say something you actually mean, and using a tool to manufacture the appearance of meaning something.
I know it’s a bit naïve to appeal to common decency when the same technology is busy guiding weapons systems, but please don’t outsource sincerity. Don’t pretend to care about someone or something just to get their attention.
The damage isn’t just annoyance. It’s suspicion that gets attached to genuine messages. Emails I would have read warmly now carry an asterisk. Did a person write this? Does this person actually care about my work, or is this just another prompt in the dark?