Like most folks, I can no longer complete the simplest written objective without some degenerate descendant of Clippy trying to butt in. Want to wish a friend a Happy Birthday on Facebook? There's already a draft completed. Did someone just email you? Here's a selection of replies you can send. Writing a document? Sure you don't want some help with that?
No, no, and no. In fact, now I'm going to craft a Happy Birthday wish that not only says "Happy Birthday," but also "I took the trouble to do more than just click on the pre-written wish."
Words matter, and how we use them matters. The deepest existential challenge of being human is that we are consciousness, ideas, feelings, memories and grasping comprehensions, all trapped in a singular isolated body with no way to directly communicate or share any of what we are to any of the other meat-trapped spirits in the world. Over millennia we have crafted art, music, movement and, most of all, language to try to bridge that unfathomable gulf between human beings.
So, yeah. Language is a big deal to me. It is how we are our best selves, how we are fully human in the world. It is how we access love and trust and the impossible beauty of connection with creation.
And like any powerful tool, it can be misused. A hammer can build a house or break a window. Language can be used to lie.
There are plenty of shades and shapes and definitions of lying (omission, commission, white, dark, etc) but for me, it comes down to this-- communicating things you don't believe are true in order to control somebody else's behavior. I like the
wikipedia definition of bullshit-- "
statements made by people concerned with the response of the audience rather than with truth and accuracy."
Our country is used to being awash in bullshit, from the casual lies of marketing to political lies-of-all-size. No, my congressperson did not personally send me an e-mail because they are alarmed and want to hear form me, and no, the US wasn't winning the Vietnam War, and no, Donald Trump did not win the 2020 election. No, that's not what that famous person really looks like.
The explosion of technology has given us whole new gushing rivers of communication, and that turns out to mean bullshit with an intensity, frequency, and quantity unlike anything ever seen before. Use tech to collect tons of data that reveals where peoples' buttons are, then craft some techno-bullshit to push those buttons. It looks like communication, like human beings trying to bridge the gap between them, but it is not. It is something else, something morally empty. It's a lie.
It becomes most obvious when we consider that most modern form of lying-- trolling.
Trolling is anti-communication. It is a simple observation-- when I say or do X, people jump. Somebody throws up a white power ok symbol or, hell, an actual Nazi salute, and a host of people mistake this for an attempt to communicate. Is this guy really a fascist? Is he not really a fascist? The question is beside the point--he's a guy who has figured out that if he makes this symbol, a whole bunch of folks freak out and react and he has some by God power over them. He can make the puppets dance, and feel powerful inside his sad little isolated meat sack.
It's an exhilarating lesson-- your words don't have to mean anything exactly in order to get reactions out of people. Or they can mean many things. Or they can mean what you decide they mean. Language isn't a means of bridging the gap between yourself and others; it's a tool for manipulating those others. It's a weapon for exerting control. Once you let go of the idea that words are supposed to mean something, that language is supposed to be anchored within you on your own truth and intention, you are ride the Nihilism Express all the way to the Land of Do As You Please.
Generative AI, chatbots, Large Language Models make excellent tools for bullshit. Where most humans have to work to disconnect their language from anything in their actual consciousness, LLMs arrive fully unmoored from any such baggage, making them excellent tools for creating language-shaped sticks with which to poke other humans. Computers and technology have a useful place, but it's up to humans to decide where to find the limits.
Language disconnected from a human intent or consciousness is a morally empty exercise. I don't mean to suggest that everyone who disconnects in this way is evil or even terrible, but I do think they've lost the plot. For people who have lost that plot, who have drifted over to thinking that language is mostly a tool one uses to prod other humans in a particular direction, LLMs will seem like a perfectly natural next step. If you're not using language for personal, conscious, intentional expression, then why not outsource the job?
For those who think our human task is not to communicate with other humans, but to dominate and subjugate them, language generated by algorithm must seem like the ultimate refinement of language-as-tool. When Mike Johnson excitedly tells us that Elon has "cracked the code" and algorithms will crawl through the data and "transform the way the federal government works," these must be exciting times. "Data," he says Elon told him, "doesn't lie." But automated language does, and easily, at that.
Automated language production is by its nature disconnected from human intent and consciousness, and as such is not a means of communication, but a tool for other things, like various forms of bullshittery, manipulation, and trolling. Maybe there's a non-zero number of times that this is okay. Maybe. At a point in our history when bad actors have shown a willingness to reduce language to a tool for separating rather than connecting humans, quick and easy morally empty mimicry of human communication is worrisome.
The undermining starts early. On social media, a teacher opined that since her students have trouble coming up with ideas, she just has them ask ChatGPT for essay ideas, as if the actual thinking part of writing is a minor feature barely worth considering. The calls to incorporate AI into the classroom is loud and relentless, a cacophony of marketing bullshit marketing marketing bullshit.
Maybe some of it is Not So Bad, like the miles of AI-generated marketing bullshit that is replacing and outpacing old fashioned human-generated marketing bullshit. Maybe there are social conventions that merely require an exchange of language-adjacent artifacts. maybe some folks really want to be governed by AI instead of other humans.
But it's both scary and sad. Here we are, vibrating spirits in our isolated fleshy vessels, trying so hard to connect with other humans because it helps us understand the world and it helps us understand ourselves and it fulfills a basic human need to see and be seen. How shitty to grab one of those bridges of language and discover at the other end... nothing. Not a consciousness to be seen and heard, nothing but dead empty eyes staring not at you, but at nothing, and no connection to make at all. I can't help thinking it is a misuse of a fundamental human feature.
I often describe education as the process of becoming your best self, discovering what it means to be fully human in the world. It seems, to me, to be the most foundational human activity, and yet so much of what surrounds us seems designed to thwart it, from authoritarian mock versions of leaders to empty technological mock humans.
What to do? Be human. Search for your truth and then put it out into the world, aimed at other humans. Make real connections. When you see bullshit, point and laugh. Try to stay true; I know that's not always easy, but as I used to tell my students, life is too short to sign your name to a lie. This is not woo-woo fuzzy advice, but a down-in-the-dirt practical goal-- more practical than believing in magical algorithms that create the illusion of human interaction with no humanity attached.
