Are you sick of seeing AI Generated Content online?
Rest assured, this is a real human writing this content.
If you think about the most important relationships in your life, I’m sure the first ones that come to mind are the ones that are the most authentic. The ones that you can safely assume that you could wake them up at 3am for help, and they would help (not necessarily that they’ll be happy, because who really wants to wake up at 3am?).
Authenticity in the physical world, as a result of the digital world, has been hard from the start – scrolling and scrolling has been the reality for a lot of people, and we’re all so far engrossed in our “Ready Player One” realities, we’ve often neglected the relationships closest to us. In sociology, this is called “urban anonymity” when referring to a sea of people that are close together, but don’t know each other, leading to disorder. That definition has expanded further than just our physical selves – but also our digital world, with generative AI.
No longer can you just be trolled by your digital neighbor that lives across the world, now you have to deal with AI agents, who represent whatever the creators believe it should be for the larger group of people that utilize it – and it is unfeeling, inauthentic, often bland, and sometimes dangerous. The further degradation of our digital selves is at stake in the AI Generation. We were lost before – but now? Hardly difficult to say that we are in fact, moving towards “The Matrix”. (Where’s your tinfoil hat?)
I think it’s important that we revisit the notion of what it means to be human. To find ways to utilize AI responsibly to make our lives easier, but not at the expense of who we are as humans. We need to continue to invest in personal relationships, and make authentic and meaningful connection. That means that we need to start being transparent of the use of AI.
If you’re going to use AI, use it responsibly. Be transparent.
Ensure that you’ve notified your audience that you’re using AI as part of whatever content that you’re generating. And if you’re not going to do that – at least have the courage to modify the generated AI content, so that it’s personalized to you (“Rephrase this content in ‘talk like a pirate’ mode”). There’s only so many paragraphs of AI generated content that you have to read, that you begin to pick up that future/present content is AI generated. For those of us who use AI to solve daily problems and speed up our workflow, I assure you that if I read your content and pick up that it’s more than likely AI generated, I am not going to finish consuming your content. A lesson that even Fortune 500 companies are still learning. And one that they should learn quickly.
It’s also important that you verify the information that is generated, is accurate. Otherwise, you run the risk of allowing AI hallucination (perhaps that’s your goal?) into your content, and run the risk of ruining your credibility (Interestingly, this concept is oddly familiar to the often reality of our elders recalling the “glory days” with embellished details…), and contributing to the collective groan of content consumers of yet another AI-generated piece.
And hey, it’s not all that difficult?
Read the content that is being presented to you, and verify that it’s accurate. If you’re feeling equal parts “meh” and “meta” about your usage and transparency of AI, ask the AI to cite its source – and actually check it out. Let’s not make the statistic of AI generated content becoming larger and so much of the norm for our digital worlds, that we lose the element of human ingenuity and creativity on top of being false. It’s only adding insult to our injury, if the content that you’re creating is fictitious (unless of course, you’re making a fictional narrative?).
If you’re going to blog, write a story, or “generate” (in the previous sense of the word) content online, I challenge you to be authentic, and do it yourself. Use your words, not the directly generated content. And if you are going to directly use AI, utilize a disclaimer or reference in your content that says that you’re using AI to generate the content. And if you’re the sad soul or entity that wants to pretend that the generated content is your own and present it as your own – then shame on you. We’ve long had copyright and plagiarism laws across the world, and this should be no different.
Am I saying that AI content is all terrible? Absolutely not. Am I saying that you should never use AI generated content? No. AI is a great tool for creators to generate unique ideas fused with their personalities. Without this intricate pairing, I fear (and so should you) that our creativity will always be defined for us by the limitations of AI.
In a meta-analysis of this issue, I used ChatGPT to review Latin roots related to this concept, and constructed this bad boy with its help: “Plagiosynthelectescriptor“, meaning, “A person who plagiarizes synthesized intelligent writing”. Don’t be a plagiosynthelectescriptor. Because “plagiarist” apparently is too pointed of a concept for people to believe that that’s what’s happening when you utilize unaltered AI-generated content.
AI is magical. Like the honeymoon phase of any relationship, as we transition to having and seeing AI in our daily lives, we need to talk logistics, and draw lines in our relationship. One of those being that we agree that AI-generated content needs to be identified, if it is going to be presented by itself. AI-generated content should not be allowed to follow in the footsteps of photoshop technology and the fashion and beauty industry, and how it has decimated the spirit of young women across the globe with irreparable harm, and unattainable beauty.
We’ve learned this lesson already, right?
The corollary here is that AI, at least in the generative space, will make generative creativity appear to be unattainable – “Why would I write it myself, when I can just have AI write it for me?” With a few casts of characters, AI can generate within a few moments, what may be an arduous journey for the human writer (or artist). But because the AI cannot “feel”, how can it inject “feeling” into its words? Believe me, as a fallen and broken man reminiscing my own words of focusing on “logic” rather than “feelings” when having discussions with my wife, I must admit that feelings are necessary – especially when communicating with other humans. AI doesn’t care about feelings in its writing – it’s just as well that it makes up its own language. So why would we expect that it’s content would meet this important need of humans? (Then there’s also this thing called “Model Collapse“)
AI is a new technology, rife with opportunity. The world is no longer the same because of it, but let’s not be too quick to move towards a dystopian future mired by content and existence driven by AI. That is of course, why often people do not want to belong to a group anymore, because they don’t feel their voice is heard. Exclusively using AI generation without the intricate bond of human ingenuity and creativity will only result in this outcome – as we widen the gap between the “haves” and the “have nots” with the prevalence of AI, we must remember that we’re on this little planet as a spec of a quark in the larger universe, and we have to stick together. Without boundaries, it might be us versus AI. (You saw those movies, right?)