A Creative Writer's Statement on AI/LLM Writing
Rant written for my Teaching Class
I viscerally hate AI, or as it’s more accurately called, Markov Chains of lost context with no bearing or obligation to the human race. It is antithetical to the present, to meaning, to creation, to the very act of living. It is anti-intellectual, anti-science, anti-artist, anti-human slop, a collective cesspool of every word ever uttered, depackaged and calculated and systematized not for any purpose but recollection of what it looked like to be human in the utter absence of meaning.
I will never accept AI, and believe anyone who is complicit in its implementation, anyone who utters “It’s here so we might as well take advantage of it” is a defeatist willing to stand by our decline. They said the same thing with weapons prior to the first World War, with ruinous populist movements, with industry, and only those who sought power in the new systems created by them at the expense of all morals could champion such a corrosive existence. As soon as we accept AI into the classroom, we are dead. We have allowed it to be accepted and normalized and to squirm its way into the shadows until it becomes an unquestionable chameleon composing the very structure of our being. As soon as our entire mode of expression and comprehension becomes a recanting of the pasts greatest hits, all of our collective understanding has become a corpse in nostalgic upkeep. There is no greater admittance to intellectual decay, no greater submission to an unwillingness to create, express and self-actualize, than to willingly use AI in any creative process. We are tapping into tepid, homogenized knowledge that is nothing but a ghost of a “greater time”.
It’s so obvious that big tech and capitalism would go all in on AI. They want our lives faster, faster, WHOA SLOW DOWN faster until we are utterly numb to the present and live only in times where we were allowed the privilege to slow down and actually empirically draw value from the world in singular intent. The very function of the human brain, they have decided, is not powerful enough to meet corporate demand. When the market is reaching it’s upper limit, guess what? Optimize out the fucking human. The reports, the investigations, the ads will write themselves. We will exist in self-replicating sludge. A video I saw recently quoted something along the lines of “the body is the feminine to technology's masculine”. Of course big tech wants AI, because they view the very fact of having a body as effeminate and weak. They see nothing but numbers. See nothing in art but colours. See no emotion beyond the pleasure of a bigger number in your bank account. It is a sick non-living perpetuated by the reward pathway. They hate us cuz they ain’t us. They want it all explained to them, because they are thoroughly uncreative humans who have never in their life known genuine connection.
Only someone so isolatingly lonely who has never had a profound heart-to-heart, too thoroughly misanthropic to cry or empathize or create or see reality as nothing but bodily upkeep in service of the great external could even conceptualize the creation and deployment of LLMs. Computers are gods to these people, because they pulled them out of this despondent nihilism, showed them of expressing themselves, became Gods by which all was at once present if sought out. They hate their bodies beyond how marketable they can make them for image politics, if they even go that far. As such, they bought the internet, streamlined, corporatized and monopolized that which gave them hope to be its kings, be right below God on this neo-Great Chain of Being. And in doing so, they homogenized it, they utterly destroyed the landscape and deplatformed the punk, the wild west and the egalitarian space that lived amongst HTML neocities. Their pockets fatten, but they have utterly destroyed, flattened, turned white and gray the glorious infinity that exists in a computer’s potentiality to be truly divine and otherworldly.
As such, they have trapped themselves in a corner, and all they can see is the past. They are too uncreative to see a future, too numb to larger wallets being a future worth striving for. So they look back nostalgically, look back and wish for the age they killed (like The Lorax!). So what do they do? They look back, look back to the nerd culture that brought them here. They fetishize the sci-fi books, the machismo orientalism of cyberpunk, the neon lights and bright colours and vague gesturing at a future that’s not as good as it once was. Maybe they buy up the properties with their immense wealth and place them throughout marketing, mere jingling-key gestures at yet another culture appropriated, stripped of its essential context and killed. Thoroughly uncreative, sounds cool and looks cool. So they started building robots because all their favourite books had robots. Robots think though, ah! So first we make artificial intelligence before we make artificial people! I have the money to do this, let’s go!
But they don’t understand intelligence. They never understood intelligence. All they ever understood in their thorough uncreativity is rehashing the past. Reading books to parrot them to sound smarter. Writing papers in school for someone else. Socializing for their own bigger number rather than to make connections. Thorough incuriousness in, thorough incuriousness out. The Big Tech billionaires have always been dead neurons that get celebrated as geniuses only because their capitalistic success is unfathomable to the layman. You cannot create intelligence unless you know your senses, know your body, know how to feel and listen and love, to have stake and want to survive and seek comfort where it isn’t. Good thing we created massive homogenization of the web and have been nonconsensually harvesting all the data placed on them!
So they suck and crumple and flatten and massage all of it, to reduce humanity into an algorithm that learns from itself. Nothing but mere patterns. They took pride in being told they have a high IQ, when IQ is measured solely on one’s capacity to recognize patterns. Patterns, the greatest condemnation that we are doing something truly original. I’m sure my words here are littered with anti-AI rhetoric I’ve heard from video essays, books and in the classroom. But the difference? I am angry, angry in isolation, angry at my prospects and skills and potential being stripped away as a creative. I have stake. An AI never has stake. It never needs the truth, it never has a genuine moment, it never does anything but regurgitate the word people keep using after this word. It’s pure math devoid of anything but function, anything we fight for to stand out, to stay interesting, to do something different, to advance knowledge and carry hearts into the future.
I will not let these thoughtless roaches take away my art, my writing, my hard work towards something I genuinely care about the same way they took from me the internet, regulated my communities and compounded me into data to be marketed to. I will not bend the knee again to these lifeless husks as they take my tongue while asking me to say more and more to the point of being unreasonable without automation. If we teach students to grow up with their tongue in the mouth of a dead collective, we will utterly fail at the principle to the core of our role: teach. Instruct. Grow. Never stop growing. That is what makes us human. An AI can “write a PhD” but it will NEVER be able to make an original contribution to human knowledge that wasn’t already there. It makes me sick to think people feel they don’t have enough time anymore to actually sit with themselves and write, to actually put time into something they deeply, genuinely care about. It makes me sick that we sink further and further into their hedonic culture with no resistance. So no, I will not teach AI. I will not teach anything but to detest it. I will not allow a student to ever believe that an algorithm is a better, more effective writer than them. I will never overwhelm my students with a quantity of work that makes them feel they don’t have the time to utilize the cathartic moments of writing. If a student doesn’t care to do an assignment, that’s my fault. If a student ever fails to see the significance of an assignment beyond a grade, that’s my fault. If a student ever feels they don’t have a good enough grasp on language to express their ideas with heart, that’s okay. I would rather have something incoherent, hard-to-follow or poorly constructed than something homogenized, because as far as I’m concerned, it’s all part of the learning project and all part of their voice.
There is no path more further insular and individualist, no path more corporate, no path more loveless, no path more brainless and soulless and emotionless, no path a greater concession of our own purgatory, than accepting the tools of bitter, rich men created to turn us into better workers with no cognitive faculties to resist. Fuck LLMs for a thousand more words. Fuck LLMs for ten-thousand more words. I will write and write Fuck LLMs until all the LLMs have in their database is self-hatred. But for now, I’ve said enough.
[Cut off here for your sanity, but please reach out. I'd love to say more.]