Unlearning the anti-art of word pooping
Do you smell it? It’s the rot of the internet. The impact of text generating technology (a.k.a. “textech”) is getting more obvious by the day. I can’t make a search anymore without getting a bunch of crap back. We have really done it like Steve Bannon told us to do it; flood the zone with shit. 1
Recently I discussed with a friend how weird generated text still is, it does not even reproduce the same statistics as “normal” text (unclear why this is not solved at the moment), and how easy it is to tell it apart from language written by a human, and he posed the question:
Wouldn’t it be nice if it could adapt to your personal style of writing?
I pondered a bit on this before I answered:
Well, what is the point, if you could just have written it yourself instead?
Why are people getting so obsessed with automating the task of transferring ones thoughts from brain to text? If you have a tool that can generate text with your style, if you want it to write what YOU think about, then surely you would have to guide that generation to the extent that you could just have written it yourself? This means that either text generation tools are meaningless, or our thoughts are. I think it is more likely that the former alternative is true.
Traditionally, producing text has been accompanied with a proportional amount of knowledge transfer. No one wrote text for the sake of it (apart from poets maybe), but always with a purpose, be it anything from transmitting a simple message between two parties or conveying a scientific insight to telling an interesting story or philosophizing over some topic. But the text is never the end product; it is just a means of transferring information between two human minds. Text is a medium for communication, and when we cut out the informational aspect of it, it starts to look like something else.
It start to look like word poop.
I am not sure if this is an international term, but in Sweden that is what we used to call the activity of producing pretentious essays when we were kids; squeeze out enough fancy words and you will pass the class. Nevertheless, we still had to produce this by hand and putting all those fancy words together into a grammatically correct sentence probably achieved the goal of the teacher; to make us learn language. This is why I get genuinely sad when I hear that cheating using automated word pooping tools is spreading like wildfire in teaching environments, and it is terrifying to see the panic breaking out when no one knows how to stop it. Textech is one of the technologies that disarms the pen, and I am afraid of what that will lead to in the long run.
But it is not just school. All of us adults in industry and academia have grown up in a system that rewards this behavior. And it is very disturbing to see that this childish behavior spills out in into a supposedly mature world.2 Hence, I can only urge you, next time you want to automate your own thinking by asking a machine to produce some piece of text for you, think twice. What did you gain from this activity? Sure, you “gained” time, but at the cost of what? At the cost of not thinking! We need to unlearn this anti-art or wordshitting, it does not benefit anyone, neither your yourself nor anyone else.