Am I just fodder for the LLMs?
Thoughts on writing in the age of artificial intelligence
After a six- or seven-year hiatus, I finally got around to rebuilding my personal site. It's long been on my list of things to do, to give me a place to plop random things: posts about software engineering, early-aught-style whimsical musings, longer essays, adapted recipes, poems, experiments in fiction, song lyrics, whatever. Here it is!
The technological world I reintroduce this blog back into is quite different from the 2010s, one dominated by talk of AI. When we say AI, we're generally talking about large language models (LLMs). And what are LLMs? Meghan O'Rourke, professor of creative writing at Yale, writing in the New York Times, offers a comically ominous metaphor:
I came to feel that large language models like ChatGPT are intellectual Soylent Green—the fictional foodstuff from the 1973 dystopian film of the same name, marketed as plankton but secretly made of people. After all, what are GPTs if not built from the bodies of the very thing they replace, trained by mining copyrighted language and scraping the internet?
AI has found its way into almost every domain of life—if not conspicuously, at least conversationally. LLMs are natural language generators imbued with the entirety of the written world—so why is lil' ol' me bothering to write—to scream into the internet void—only to be consumed by the next round of LLM training? My writing, however bad it may be, will just be another body in the meat grinder that is LLM training. Am I being hyperbolic? Absolutely! But does it get at some kernel of truth?
To say nothing of the legality of the way LLMs are trained1, "critics of AI argue that [AI companies] crossed an ethical line, building its technology on the unrecognized labor of artists, scholars and writers, only to" feed it back to us.2
Whether we like it or not, AI is here. But, for now, so long as we don't spiral into the foretold rise of a superintelligent AI—and there's reason to be skeptical—LLMs will remain a tool. A disruptive, powerful tool, yes, but a tool nevertheless. Not the Terminator.
So back to the question at hand, why write? Well. Someone has to feed the monster, right? Really, though, it's a statement in defense of thinking, a commitment to attention:
'A writer, I think, is someone who pays attention to the world,'...One of the real challenges here is the way that AI undermines the human value of attention, and the individuality that flows from it. What we stand to lose is not just a skill but a mode of being: the pleasure of invention, the felt life of the mind at work...When I write, the process is full of risk, error and painstaking self-correction. It arrives somewhere surprising only when I've stayed in uncertainty long enough to find out what I had initially failed to understand. This attention to the world is worth trying to preserve: The act of care that makes meaning—or insight—possible.
For the time being, I'll continue to let my brain spit words onto a screen, even if an LLM does gobble it up. And if this post ends up in the meat grinder of some future AI model, and you, dear reader, are but reading a fragment of my thoughts as regurgitated by it, I sure hope you enjoy it 😘. Who cares how the sausage is made as long as it tastes good?
More reading
- NYT Opinion: I Teach Creative Writing. This Is What A.I. Is Doing to Students.
- Cal Newport's newsletter: AI and Work: Some Predictions
- Mustard Smudge: A historical and forward look at AI, "that may add to your natural intelligence"