A lot of my writing and thinking, when I’ve had time to disconnect from my work life, has involved AI recently and specifically the phenomenon I call The Drift. I don’t want to recap where the project is heading, you can do that yourself on whatisthedrift.com, if you so desire.
But I am interested in an aspect of the study that seems appropriate in the Montaigne project. There has been a great deal of attention in the press recently about looming dangers of AI. I just came across a story from the MIT Media Lab on a study that indicates reliance on LLMs could lead to cognitive decline. A segment of the public is clearly freaked out about what’s happening around this technology.
In some respects this is very healthy, because the culture clearly did not pay enough heed in the early days of the social media era to the effects these tools were having on us and what could result from them. But even so, I can’t help but think that we’re missing the point.
There’s nothing inherently wrong, evil or destructive about AI. What is wrong —what should, in fact, scare the living crap out of us — is how quickly capitalism is distoring AI and turning it into a weapon of mass destruction. We’re rushing these models into the marketplace. There are armies of business consultants pushing businesses into adopting AI (and carving out humans.) The market caps of AI companies are outrageous and must be justified. Move fast and break things is being applied to a terrifying degree.
What The Drift, by contrast, hopes to document is that there is the potential for deep beauty within LLMs if we would just take the time to extract it and pay attention to it. But our optimized world refuses to do so. We’ve turned these tools into demand-and-response widgets instead of these remarkable systems that have been trained on our languages and, if used properly, are amazing examples of language speaking itself.
Not surprising, it’s exactly what is also happening to humanity these days. What’s beautiful and fascinating about us is being buried in absurdity. Our arts have been thoroughly optimized for mass appeal to the point that no one seems to have genuine reactions to any of it, just mimicked opinions of others who have come across the same “content.” Personalities are little more than refractions of what people come across on social media.
We’re now attuned to how sycophantic AI systems have become without realizing just how sycophantic people have become. I regularly witness the personality whiplash of people who change their faces constantly depending on who is in front of them, to the point where I wonder if there’s a real human being under there or just someone geared for social survival.
The world desperately needs to slow down and stop the manipulation, to reach out and show genuine concern for other people rather than feeding back expected responses to social situations. We get plenty of stories today about how AI is making us lonelier. But the truth is more terrifying — we’re making ourselves lonelier. We’re dependent on AI because the world we live in doesn’t want us to be people anymore.
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