Large Language Muddle It’s OK to be a Luddite!

N+1: “…For those of us working in reading- and writing-heavy fields — chiefly media and academia, the US’s last two eroded islands of institutional intellectual life — the boom in sophistication of large language models over the past few years has struck alarm bells that were already chiming. Well before the inflection point of OpenAI’s 2022 debut of ChatGPT, freelance writers and adjunct instructors were already beset by declining web traffic, stagnant book sales, the steady siphoning of resources from the humanities, and what was hard not to interpret as a culture-wide devaluation of the written word. Then along came a swarm of free software that promised to produce, in seconds, passable approximations of term papers, literary reviews, lyric essays, Intellectual Situations…No topic — not the…war and famine in Gaza, not Trumpian authoritarianism — has magnetized bien-pensant attention this year in the way that AI has. Writing on AI thus comes in every mode: muckraking (“Inside the AI Prompts DOGE Used to ‘Munch’ Contracts Related to Veterans’ Health”), scholastic (“Deep Learning’s Governmentality”), polemical (“The Silicon-Tongued Devil”), besotted (“The AI Birthday Letter That Blew Me Away”). The AI-and-I essay, however, usefully registers a generalized intellectual anxiety. While spoken in the voice of an individual author, each piece in this emergent corpus stages a more collective drama. To read these writers writing about AI writing is to witness, almost in real time, intellectual laborers assimilating a threat to their own existence. The threat looms more distantly for some than for others. But whether or not one enjoys the near-extinct security and legacy prestige of a New Yorker staff job (to spend one’s days “focussing” on the rapid erosion of the life of the mind — the dream!), this work paints a persuasive picture of a world hollowed by machines — a world, the writers suggest, we will all have to learn to live in. Ironically, these essays about the fundamental iterability of prose can read like iterations of the same piece. Nearly all marshal similar data points about AI’s spread on university campuses. In this the essays seem at first only to repeat the pathological chattering-class fixation on elite colleges and the perpetual downslide of the American mind. But the numbers are scandalous. Forty-two percent of undergraduates use AI at least once a week; anywhere from 50 to 90 percent have used it to cheat on their schoolwork. AI’s observed effects on an already screen-addled and pandemic-frazzled student body are bleaker still. In a widely cited study by MIT researchers published in June, participants who wrote SAT-style essays with the assistance of ChatGPT engaged a narrower spectrum of neural networks while writing, struggled to accurately quote what they had just written, and — thanks to generative AI’s inbuilt tendency toward cliché — used the same handful of refried phrases over and over. The study’s authors warned that habitual AI use could lead to “cognitive debt,” a condition of LLM dependency whose long-term costs include “diminished critical inquiry,” “increased vulnerability to manipulation,” and “decreased creativity.” It turns out your brain, like love or money, can be given away. Onto these grim findings the AI-and-I writer heaps a dollop of anecdotal evidence. The writer’s friends and family, eager to live less administratively burdened lives, are all hooked on Gemini. Those who teach for a living notice that their students’ weekly response papers have become suspiciously competent (if marred by occasional citations of nonexistent books), even as those same students struggle to read more than a dozen pages in one go. The journalists and critics they know — people who learned to write the old-fashioned way, by typing out weekly response papers with their own hands! — find that Google’s useless “AI Mode” shoos readers away from their published work entirely…”