So, the papers are flapping again, this time about a bunch of folks – writers, academics, the kind of people who still think words mean something more than just pixel arrangements – getting their backs up about this AI horse manure. Stumbled across a piece detailing their grievances. Took a drag from my cigarette, the smoke curling up like a dying man’s last wish, and figured, hell, might as well spill some ink on it. My head’s already pounding from last night’s poetry – the kind you find at the bottom of a bottle, not the kind that wins awards.
This novelist, Ewan Morrison, got a laugh out of me. Asked one of these “generative AI” clowns, ChatGPT, to list his novels. The thing spat out three fakes, including one titled Nine Inches Pleases a Lady. Stolen from a dirty Burns poem, apparently. Nine inches. Christ. Even when these digital brains try to be creative, they end up sounding like a drunk in a back alley scribbling on a bathroom wall. Morrison says, “I just distrust these systems when it comes to truth.” Smart man. Truth ain’t something you can code, it’s something you bleed. He hasn’t written that one, or its sequel, Eighteen Inches. Good. Some things are best left to the flawed, fumbling human imagination. His real new book is about AI brain-implant chips and the human cost. Sounds about right. Pour me another.
The article says there’s a growing number of these “refuseniks.” Some terrified, some just think the tech is crap, and some, god bless ’em, simply prefer humans to robots. Imagine that. Preferring a warm body, a real laugh, a genuine screw-up, to some cold, calculating string of ones and zeroes. The AI cheerleaders, those shiny-toothed grifters pushing this digital snake oil, call ’em “ignorant luddites” or “smug hipsters.” Luddites, huh? Smashing the machines that threaten to smash your life. Doesn’t sound so ignorant to me. Maybe just desperate. And if being a hipster means I’d rather listen to a dame sing off-key in a smoky bar than have a robot serenade me with perfect, soulless pitch, then sign me up. The writer of the piece even admits they wrote it the old-fashioned way, with “organic words” from their “artisanal writing studio (OK, I mean bed).” Bed. Now there’s an honest workspace. I’ve produced some of my finest gibberish from similar studios, usually with a hangover for a muse.
Morrison gets called a “decel” – a decelerationist. He laughs it off. “Hitting a brick wall is a good way to decelerate,” he says. And he’s right. These AI prophets promise superintelligence, a digital god born from venture capital gone “nuts.” Half a trillion, he says, sunk into this fantasy. Half a trillion that could’ve bought a lot of good whiskey and maybe housed a few poets. But no, we chase the silicon dream, even when it keeps tripping over its own feet, answering over 60% of queries wrong, according to one study. Sounds less like superintelligence and more like a particularly confident idiot at the end of the bar.
And the copyright crap. These things are trained on our stuff. My stuff, your stuff, everything ever written, painted, or sung by a human with a pulse. They hoover it all up and then regurgitate it as something “new.” It’s like a maggot claiming it wrote the corpse. Morrison’s wife is a screenwriter. He says the entertainment industry is already using AI to decide what gets made. “More of the same,” the algorithms demand, because “it’s all they can do.” So, get ready for endless sequels to movies you hated the first time, greenlit by a machine that wouldn’t know art if it bit it on its metallic ass.
The list of grievances keeps growing, like a bad debt. Job losses – Bill Gates dreaming of a two-day work week. Sure, Bill. For you, maybe. For the rest of us, it’ll be a no-day work week, scrounging for scraps while the bots hum contentedly. Tech addiction, ecological impact – yeah, apparently making these things think burns up the planet. Good to know. Then there’s education, with 92% of students supposedly using AI. So much for learning to think for yourself. Just plug into the hive mind and let it excrete your term paper. And the spying, the personalized AI. They want to know you so well they can sell you back to yourself, piece by piece. And AI-enabled weapons in Ukraine. “Ethically revolting,” Morrison calls it. He’s not wrong. We were doing a fine job killing each other with dumb weapons; now we’re making smart ones. Progress. Another cigarette. The bourbon’s starting to taste like regret, which means it’s working.
This audiobook narrator, April Doty, is pissed about the environmental cost too. And you can’t even turn off the AI summaries in Google searches. “Whenever you look anything up now you’re basically torching the planet.” Opting out is getting harder. Like trying to quit drinking in a town where every street corner has a liquor store. She’s worried about machines “reading” books. Amazon’s Audible is all for it. “I don’t know anybody who wants a robot to read them a story,” she says. Damn right. A story needs a human voice, with all its cracks and imperfections, its history of laughter and tears. “Narrators don’t just read words; they sense and express the feelings beneath the words. AI can never do this job because it requires decades of experience in being a human being.” Decades of pain, joy, love, loss, hangovers, and bad bets. That’s the curriculum. You can’t download that.
Then there’s Emily M. Bender, a linguistics professor. Her reason for not using Large Language Models? “I’m not interested in reading something that nobody wrote.” Simple. Profound. Like a good shot of cheap rye. “I read because I want to understand how somebody sees something, and there’s no ‘somebody’ inside the synthetic text-extruding machines.” It’s just a collage, she says. When folks say she’s being “left behind,” she just laughs and asks, “Where’s everybody going?” Probably nowhere good, darling. Probably nowhere good at all. She nails it: “When we turn to synthetic media rather than authentic media, we are losing out on human connection.” These tech companies, she suggests, want to isolate us, make sure all our interactions are “mediated through their products.” No thanks. I’ll take my human connection raw, messy, and preferably over a stained bar top. She’s even had students turn in AI-generated work. “Very sad,” she calls it. Sad indeed. Depriving themselves of the struggle, the actual learning.
And some poor bastard, Tom, working in government IT. He sees colleagues using ChatGPT for their annual appraisals. His manager, who wrote a killer appraisal, admitted he just spent 10 minutes with the bot. Now Tom feels like he has to cheat to compete. “I almost feel like I have no choice but to use it at this point. I might have to put morals aside.” That’s how they get you. Grind you down until you trade your soul for a slightly better performance review. The human spirit, folks, bartered away for bullet points.
Even the ones who use it, like Professor Steve Royle for coding “grunt work,” draw a line. He won’t let it generate text for his research papers. “In the process of writing, you formulate your ideas, and by rewriting and editing, it really crystallises what you want to say. Having a machine do that is not what it’s about.” Good man. The struggle is the point. The wrestling with words, with ideas. That’s where the magic, if there is any, happens.
Justine Bateman, filmmaker and writer, calls generative AI “one of the worst ideas society has ever come up with.” She despises how it incapacitates us, convinces us we can’t do things we’ve always done – write an email, a presentation, a goddamn bedtime story for your kid. “You will essentially become just a skin bag of organs and bones, nothing else,” she says, with a grim laugh. She’s not far off. People already outsourcing their decisions – where to go on vacation, who to date. Soon, you won’t even have to process grief; just upload mom’s voicemails and have an AI ghost talk to you. “Emotional hollowing-out.” That’s the phrase that sticks. Like a shard of glass in the gut. We’re already pretty hollow from the daily grind, the endless pursuit of a buck, the failed loves. Now they want to automate the last vestiges of our inner lives. As an artist, she sees it as a dead end. “Nothing original will come out of it, by the nature of what it is.” She’s right. It’s a blender, a Frankenstein machine. She’s hoping audiences will tire of AI-created junk, like they tire of junk food. “People,” she says, “will hunger for something raw, real and human.” God, I hope so. I’m starving already.
It’s not about being anti-tech. Bateman has a computer science degree. Bender is a computational linguist. Doty is “tech-forward.” These ain’t cavemen scared of fire. They’re people who understand the tools, and see them being misused, turned into weapons against our own humanity. Bender even says, “The Luddites were awesome! I would wear that badge with pride.” Morrison, too, likes the Luddites, “people standing up to protect the jobs that keep their families and their communities alive.”
So, what’s the takeaway from all this? Maybe that there’s still a flicker of defiance left in this species. A refusal to be entirely replaced by shiny, efficient, soul-dead algorithms. Maybe it’s the drunks, the poets, the heartbroken, the ones who’ve lived a little too hard, who understand that the mess is the message. You can’t simulate a lifetime of bad decisions and occasional, blinding beauty. You can’t code a soul. And thank Christ for that.
This bottle’s nearly empty, and the ashtray’s overflowing. The world keeps spinning, churning out new ways to make us obsolete. But as long as there are people willing to say “no,” to choose the difficult, flawed, human path, maybe there’s a sliver of hope. Or maybe that’s just the whiskey talking.
Alright, enough of this. My throat’s dry, and these words aren’t going to drink themselves.
Chinaski, out. Time for another poem, or another bottle. Whichever comes first.