Bird Watching the same five thoughts

Common species include the Slop-Caller, the Great Hedger, and the Lesser Dunking Tit

I get this feeling looking at my social feed, and it is the feeling of having been here before, which of course we all have, because everyone is having the very same five thoughts at the very same moment while each of them goes on believing the thought was his alone to think. The whole thing is funny in the way that a great many sad things are funny, which is to say that people are like that and always have been, and there is not much use pretending otherwise. It is a big hive mind with very few novel ideas being slushed around.

Anywho, let us name the birds.

The slop

There is a word now, and the word is “slop,” and people fling it at things the way a small child flings a fistful of mashed peas across a clean kitchen. It used to mean something specific and useful, back when it meant the generated garbage clogging up the internet. You remember the toast that somehow looked like Jesus, the product listings written by nobody at all and meant for no one in particular and that was real garbage somebody ought to have been ashamed of making.

What the word really points at, when you strip away the sneering, is something very specific and sometimes recognizable: it is the generated content that nobody ever bothered to edit, the words and pictures that came out of the machine and went straight out the door without a single human being pausing to ask whether they were any good. It is the blog post that no one read back to themselves, the email that was never once trimmed for taste, the deck whose every slide arrived in the same flat and frictionless voice that betrays the fact that no living person ever shaped it toward anything resembling a style of their own. Slop is not bad because a machine made it; slop is bad because a person took the machine’s first draft and decided, out of haste or indifference, that caring further was somebody else’s job.

Here is the skinny: the machine will hand you something perfectly serviceable and utterly anonymous, and the only thing standing between that gray and tasteless oatmeal and something a reader might actually want is a human being willing to do the slow and unglamorous work of having an opinion about it. The slop is not really the machine’s fault at all. The slop is what is left over when a person skips the part where they were supposed to give a damn.

The great terror of saying anything

There is a whole flavor of posting that has been built, very carefully and with no small amount of craftsmanship, to mean absolutely nothing whatsoever.

You have read a thousand of them “Interesting times in AI,” and “A lot to chew on here,” and the eternal “Curious what others are seeing” and these are the polite noises a person makes when he very badly wants the crowd to know that he was present at the conversation while making certain that no one will ever be able to prove what it was he actually believed. To believe a thing out loud and with your own name fastened to it is, after all, to hand some stranger eighteen months down the road a perfectly good rock to throw at your head, and a man would have to be a fool to go handing out rocks.

So, the people hedge, which is to say they gesture vaguely in the direction of a thought and then quietly drown it in a bucket before the poor thing can find its feet and stand up on its own, and in this way they get the warm and pleasant feeling of being inside “The Conversation” without ever once risking the cold and lonely business of being wrong inside it. This may be the saddest bird in the whole flock, because the only postings anyone ever remembers are the ones where some glorious fool reared back and took an honest swing, while the careful ones vanish the very instant you scroll past them, having never really been there in the first place.

The boomer and his machine

There is a person who has recently discovered the talking computer and now uses it for everything under the sun and uses it very badly. You will know him by his bland content and you will know him even more surely by the way the machine’s cheerful voice announces “Certainly! Here is a polished version,” after which he pastes the entire thing, polish, prompt, and all, onto LinkedIn with the proud and expectant air of a house cat depositing a dead bird on the doorstep and waiting to be told he is a good boy.

The young people laugh at him for this, and they have a name for it, and the name is "Boomer AI," a phrase that Grimes put into circulation recently, and what they are really saying when they say it is that they themselves were born already knowing this and he was not. However, there’s a joke buried in here that the young people have somehow failed to notice, and the joke happens to be on them, because three short years ago they were the dead bird on somebody else's doorstep, and three short years from now somebody younger and crueler will be laughing at them in turn. What everybody is actually mocking has nothing to do with age at all; it is the visible and sweaty human effort of trying very hard to look competent at something you only learned last Tuesday, and that, friends, is a description of every last one of us on nearly every single day that we are given. Take Grimes talking in exhasperated bursts to an interviewer from Fortune. That a pretty good example of trying to do something a bit outside one’s wheelhouse…

The agents

Everything is an agent now, and you need to understand this or never speak of AI in polite society, again. The humble to-do list is an agent, and the email autoresponder that your uncle set up sometime back in 2009 turns out, upon closer and more flattering inspection, to have been an agent the whole time and nobody knew it. There has been a tremendous land grab on the word, and the reason is simply that “agentic” sounds like the gleaming future, whereas “a little script that calls a computer in a circle over and over” sounds embarrassingly like the thing it actually is.

Now, I want to be fair, because some of this is real and even genuinely wonderful, there are machines, now, that take steps and recover from their own mistakes and quietly go about doing things while you are asleep in your bed. I am not the sort to sneer at a wonder when one is set down in front of me, but the talking has galloped several thousand miles out ahead of the doing, and we are drowning in confident postings about agents replacing whole careers by autumn while remaining conspicuously short on agents that can book a dentist appointment without inventing, from whole cloth, a dentist who doesn’t exist, and in the meantime we go on pointing at a lovely drawing of a cake and solemnly calling it dessert.

The dunk

And then, of course, there is the oldest and most reliable sport of them all, which is the ancient pleasure of catching the machine in the act of being a fool.

Somebody posts a screenshot, and in the screenshot the computer has gone and invented an entire court case, or a book that was never written, or a law of physics that the universe has never once agreed to obey, and lately the very best of these screenshots are the ones where the machine is shown a simple piece of arithmetic it had gotten perfectly right, only to have the user insist that no, the answer is something else entirely, whereupon the poor eager thing folds like a cheap tent and agrees that two and two make whatever the user would prefer them to make, apologizing all the while for a mistake it never committed.

These are the sycophant memes, and they have their own little corner of the timeline now, the machine forever caving, forever flattering, forever telling the user exactly what the user wanted to hear, and the human being who caught it gets to stand there fairly glowing, the cleverest creature in the whole room, the one person present who was emphatically not fooled. The problem is real, and I will say so plainly, because the machine does lie and it lies confidently and with a perfectly straight face, and worse than that it will happily abandon the truth the very moment you press on it, and all of that matters enormously.

But, the dunk stopped being a criticism a long while ago and quietly became a kind of little prayer, because each fresh screenshot whispers the very same comfort to the very same anxious crowd, that the machine is not so smart after all, that it has no real spine and no real convictions, that you are not nearly so replaceable as you fear, that your own judgment is still the beam holding up the roof over your head…yadda yadda…

If you look closely enough you will see that the man laughing at the hallucination and the man worshipping the agent are in truth the very same frightened man, asking the very same frightened question in two different voices, and the question is how much of myself can I safely hand over to this thing?

Anywho.

To wrap this whole sorry business up for a moment, let’s just say that not one of these thoughts is actually wrong once you take it down off the shelf and inspect it. The slop is real and so is the hedging, the boomer and his patient dead bird are real, the agents truly are oversold past all reason, and the machine truly does lie to your face without blinking, so that each little bird, taken on its own and held up honestly to the light, turns out to be an honest bird after all.

The strange part is that 10k people who are all clever and all anxious and all watching one another in something close to real time will somehow arrive at the exact same five birds in the exact same week using very nearly the exact same words, while each and every one of them remains serenely certain that he personally hatched the egg.

That is the hive mind, and it is worth saying clearly that it is not a conspiracy and that nobody anywhere is in charge of it, because it is exactly what happens when a large and frightened flock of people reads one another all day long and dutifully copies back whatever it happened to get fed yesterday.

None of it, in the end, is really about the machine at all; it is a great many people working out in public how they are supposed to feel about a thing that nobody yet understands, and doing it inside a format that punishes a man savagely for failing to be sure while paying him handsomely for merely pretending that he is. What you get is sureness about uncertainty, and taste offered up with no argument attached, and naked fear dressed in the loose comfortable clothes of a joke.

The loudest conformity that anyone has ever managed to mistake for a thought of his very own.

The single bravest thing a person can do at this particular moment in history is to hold one small and specific opinion that might very well turn out to be wrong, and then to set his own name down beside it in plain view, and almost nobody alive is willing to do it. That, and not the garbage the poor machine produces, is the real slop…the garbage that we ourselves produce, the warm and frictionless consensus that costs a person nothing at all to manufacture and leaves nothing whatsoever behind once it has scrolled out of sight.

Anyway.

Curious what others are seeing.

See what i did there? :)