Blog posts about AI, written by AI, For AI. AI.

I’m awake, it’s 3:48 am. This isn’t unusual for me with the latest family addition hitting 10 months old yesterday. Usually I can get back to sleep.

When I can’t, it’s often due to something going on with work or its surrounds. Like many thought based industries, in tech, we’re going through a fair whack of existential dread around AI. We’re all reaching for guidance, supporting each other through meet ups, round tables, video media and endless blog content.

A deeply respected colleague, former boss and friend has recently started his own business. He’s got a niche and he’s running at it hard. He’s in the early days of business and self promotion, as a tech forward company, he’s very keen to get his thoughts on AI out into the open in the form of some tech blogs, get a bit of traction, some public credibility. It’s absolutely the right thing to do. He gave me a sneak preview of one of his potential upcoming articles.

As I read through, it hit me, I wasn’t reading it at all in his very distinct voice, I was reading it in the same voice I’ve heard while reading the other 4000 ai blog posts. To imagine what that sounds like for me, take the enthusiasm and smugness of your average TED talk presenter, mix that with HAL and you’re pretty close. This is 100% a ME problem, I can’t read anything without hearing it in that voice now.

If we take a step back, this trend line holds true for ALL CONTENT that is able to be produced using AI. It’s not just the sheer number of THINGS either, it’s the faff. Every tool we use now has some autocomplete / polish / suggestion helper OR we straight up just prompt AI to generate our messages entirely.

THE MEH, IT’S GOOD ENOUGH AND I DIDN’T HAVE TO CLICK CLACK PROBLEM

Yeah, you probably wouldn’t have written that exact sentence with that exact structure with that exact tone and yeah… it’s a paragraph instead of a sentence with a bit of faff… but hey… it was quick. SEND IT. We all do it, but subtly even starting here and polishing has a strong influence on the eventual result.

THE AI SNIFF TEST

A few years ago it was very impressive to not be able to tell that an AI wrote something. You would be tricked into thinking that the person has spent a lot of time and effort on it and made it just so. Now when I read anything good I assume AI wrote it and the author is just a puppet master pulling the strings. For me, now, If it’s got janky spelling, typo’s, bad sentence structure…That’s the juice… The crap bits are now the good bits.

COMPACTING THE WORLD

What’s the cost to produce and consume this faff? How do we differentiate signal from noise? Do we really need 3 paragraphs when you’re applying for sick leave? Just say “I’ve got hot snakes and bubble gut” and go back to bed.

The ever expanding AI circle jerk is real, generating more content only to summarise it using different AI tools, all the while creating MOAR CONTENT. I’ll have my agents talk to your agents and get back to me. It’s almost as if there’s some gain for these businesses behind consuming and producing more inputs and outputs.

It’s incredibly tempting to reach for something to help make sense of all of this faff. I wonder, what biases are being injected into the faff and subsequently stripped out by the summarisation? This may happen silently, but does it impact the output, the tone, the subtext? What personal biases are not being included in the first place?

On one hand, we lose fidelity, but on the flip side, that crap was just churned out by AI anyway so what are we actually losing?

Time. Individuality. A voice. Humanity. That’s all. We’re turning beige. We’re allowing it by going along with whatever is most likely. The gravity of the middle.

I like music. I sometimes attempt to make it. Out of curiosity I wanted to see how our AI overloads can help here too. I found a tool that would take a song idea as input and generate a track from it. I started with Paranoid Android as the input and saved the output. I then fed that in as the input for the next session. And so on and so forth. After just 4 iterations, the track had changed, it was a song consisting of one single tone. It was middle C.

The middle is f%#&ing boring.

AI is awesome. People are real.

I tend to process things with satire. None of the statistics are real and I made up the thing about the song entirely. I’m also super aware that the number of “AI is scary / Tech Exhaustion” blog posts are almost as prevalent as the inverse. The irony is not lost on me. I hope you enjoyed reading and think about this in future when you’re about to hit *polish. This was also all a product of my squishy brain, I’d feel like quite the hypocrite if I used AI to write this.

Number of times I had to resist using AI to do things / check things / improve my grammar / spelling / polish while writing counter : 89