AI – A Possible Dystopia

A lot has been written about AI. It’s revolutionary. It’s changed/changing/it will change business and life as we know it. Maybe it’s all good and then again, maybe not. But maybe the AI threat isn’t anything we’re even thinking about at all.

A lot has been written about AI. It’s revolutionary. It’s changed/changing/it will change business and life as we know it.

We will all not have to work and receive some sort of Universal Basic Income.

or

We will all fall prey to some malevolent anti deus ex machina, and robo-Arnolds (or Cylons, or the bad guys from The Matrix) will enslave some of us and walk across the skulls of the rest.

But maybe the AI threat isn’t anything we’re even thinking about at all.

Before I begin my treatise here, I have to state two things. First, I feel a bit like a Greek mythological Cassandra here.1 Secondly, every time I write something now, I (like many of us) feel that I need to somehow be less AI-like, or else someone will label it with the modern scarlet letter of “AI slop.” So, for the record, I used no AI help in writing this, although I did use it on a few small things (that I’ll fully cite), like the main image above.

This isn’t a new thought for me at all, but as I was listening to The Briefing with Albert Mohler podcast (I highly recommend), it led to even more thoughts, and then to this article.

Click on each section, to read.

1. What AI is and isn’t

2. What humans are and aren’t

3. What we do, and what we ARE doing

4. There is a darker side to what we are teaching AI

5. What we are training AI to do

  1. look it up, if you need–I feel very literate for that reference. Just give me that one. I need it to feel special. ↩︎
  2. I did use AI to create most of these for convenience. I did verify the numbers were reasonably correct, although historians will heavily argue. ↩︎
  3. If you happen to read the Nazi 25 point plan, it is VERY clear that they are socialist. ↩︎
  4. I see the obvious incongruities and paradoxes that any honest observer notes too. ↩︎
  5. In this case, I responded with “No, I’m delayed, but my flight arrives tomorrow morning. I’ll see you then.” ↩︎
  6. Like asking people to hold up 3 fingers in front of their nose. It breaks the AI filter for a moment in those areas, making the fingers seem to disappear or slightly revealing the true face behind. ↩︎
  7. Jim Bowing’s video Unmasking the deepfake scammers ↩︎

Erwin McManus Quote

We created a religion using the name of Jesus Christ and convinced ourselves that God’s optimal desire for our lives was to insulate us in a spiritual bubble where we risk nothing, sacrifice nothing, lose nothing, worry about nothing. Yet Jesus’ death wasn’t to free us from dying, but to free us from the fear of death. Jesus came to liberate us so that we could die up front and then live. Jesus Christ wants to take us to places where only dead men and women can go. -Erwin McManus in the Barbarian Way

Jesus didn’t come to make us safe, but to make us dangerous. -Erwin MaManus sermon on “The Barbarian Tribe”

The Dark-Mirror, Language Virality, & How “AI slop” Resonates

Language works virally. You know the drill.  Someone coughs.  Little tiny bad guys travel across the room, just as your friend inhales.  Those viral particles set up shop in your friend’s body.

Unfortunately, the way viruses spread is something that we’ve all become quite aware of after having faced a pandemic that controlled all of our lives for a while.  You know the drill.  Someone coughs.  Little tiny bad guys travel across the room, just as your friend inhales.  Those viral particles set up shop in your friend’s body. Their business plan is very good and they start pumping out new models using their converted factories.  Pretty soon, your friend also coughs. The cycle goes on.

But have you noticed that the same situation repeats with many other things too?  A song will worm its way into the ears of everyone you know.  Memes make people laugh and go from cell phone to cell phone.  We even say that something like a popular video on YouTube has gone viral.

That also happens with words too, and not just new slang (like bro and 6-7) but even ordinary words.  In High School, my best friend instead of calling something a thingamajig when his brain was buffering, he would say puppy-dog, as in “Please hand me that…a…that puppy-dog.” Because of him, I say that too, even though he has long since abandoned the habit.

I’ve since heard other people say that, because I do.  They’ve never even met my HS friend.  Possibly, long after my death, some kid in Australia will say that, after the term moved on, just like a virus does. 

I’ve been thinking a lot about that over the last few years.  I’ve kind of been obsessed with this viral nature of language.  As a writer, I’ve studied how words and phrases move through the world.  As an avid user of AI tools now, I have to also be aware of how that writing is being perceived, the very words that I’m using, and how people are reading my very words through the filer of “is that human?”  This is even harder as words and phrases are carried along person to AI to person, just like viruses.

A lot of us are less aware of how this happens in the more sinister corners of the internet.  But rest assured, this affects you, even if you aren’t using the Dark Web.

The Dark-Mirror

Have you ever gotten one of those scam Nigerian prince emails? The first thing that you may have noticed was the improper grammar or spelling.  You’d laugh at the stupidity of the scammers.  But, did you know that was more of a feature than a bug in the message?

See, the scammers knew that if you are the type of person that would instantly notice that and scoff, then you wouldn’t fall for the scam anyway.  But maybe you would read the email as someone desperate for help, with English as their second language, and miraculously they were reaching out to you for help.[1]  The scam was meant to trick the uninitiated and those whose hearts were inclined to intercede when someone needed their help.

The arms-race between the vast public (mostly consisting of Westerners, who much of the rest of the world has deemed to have much more in dollars than sense) and the shadowy villains who want to scam them has gone up a level in recent days.  Now, the scammers are using better technology tools in their efforts.

Today, I got a text.  It said in summary that their investors had noticed me from my work with The Marketing Cowboy, then quoted something I’d said on LinkedIn, and said they might be interested in talking with me about how I might help with their project.[2]

I responded, “OK, tell me about your project.”  I was pretty sure that this was a scam, but I was game to play along.

They responded with an even longer message about the project, responding quite clearly to what I’d asked.  At the end was something like, “My bosses would love to discuss it with you.  Do you have another messaging tool, like WhatsApp?”[3]

First of all, I don’t have a WhatsApp.  I don’t want to have that.  Finally, they somehow (and no, my cell isn’t listed on LinkedIn) found me on my cell, so just keep talking to me on my cell.

I responded, “No.  We can keep messaging here.  I don’t need to talk on WhatsApp.  There are too many scammers who use that.”  A subtle dig, and I knew that I probably wasn’t talking to a human.  I just hope that I made someone laugh.  I couldn’t help myself.

They didn’t respond.

I also don’t care.  It was a scam.  I can’t stop it from happening.  The scammers don’t call me personally from call centers in Kolkata any more than Sam Altman is asking for my advice about Chat GPT.  I’m a nobody in the AI circle of life.

But that’s ok.  I’m fine with that.  What I’m not fine with is the increasing amounts of sophistication that they are using to try and separate me from my money.[4]

They are using legitimate AI Engagement tools under false pretenses.  They claim to represent real businesses and those running the tools don’t know any better.  They are also not really motivated to find out, when that investigation could result in the loss of a paying customer, no matter how bad they may be.

If they move you to WhatsApp, then the AI Engagement tool has no ability to monitor what happens after that.

The other option is to use in-house AI.  That is expensive, but will at some point become the norm.  At that point, my guess is that they will cease trying to get you to move to WhatsApp.  That just involves another layer that is out of the scammer’s control, and in some way opens them up to getting caught.

Why am I bringing this up in a conversation about language?  Good question.  The increasing use of details and good grammar will lead to more distrust of these details, and well-formed sentences.  When I see increasing levels of personal data and precise language, my distrust grows in proportion.

This is the leading edge, not the AI posts on LinkedIn.  I don’t know about you, but I’m already starting to ignore those detailed LinkedIn posts.  If you aren’t yet, you will.  I’ll bet on it.

AI Slop

A lot of hay is being made right now about “AI Slop.”

“It’s over-polished” someone says.

“I ignore all em dashes.”

You might hear someone say, “It just doesn’t resonate with me.”

That last one, I’ve actually heard.  It made me laugh out loud (a real LOL).  Nothing perks up my ears more than when I see the word “resonate.”

Google has a tool call Google Ngrams.  It tracks the usage of a word in printed literature over time.  It is hard to use in this instance, because it doesn’t track things as recent as AI is, but I’ve also used other tools in addition for this too.

Basically, though, the word resonate used to be almost completely restricted to its use as a musical term, as in, “The tuning-fork resonates”  In writing, people would seldom use it in any other way.  There was no law people were following, of course.  They just didn’t use it in a metaphorical sense.

But a few years ago, some clever writer thought that it would be a great idea to use it as something applied to a person (i.e. “That resonates with me.”).  Much like Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, it would make sweeping changes in the landscape.  It caught on.

Mind you, people were not using it a ton, but it was in common usage.  You probably saw it.  That’s why when you read it from AI you thought nothing of it.

See AI loves that word, because it is versatile.  It lacks both positive and negative judgement.[5]  When I say “That resonates with me,” you aren’t sure from that sentence alone whether I like the thing, or I hate it.  It just means that the stimulus is reactive.  It’s a word that a junior-higher would love.  It requires a whole other sentence or phrase just to determine the goodness or badness of a thing. It pads your word-count.

“Bud Light really resonates with me.  When I see that label, everything in me says get away, and fast.”  As a phrase, it might taste great, but it also is much more filling.  It really fills up the page.  It is a pretty thought, making a big impression on you, but it doesn’t actually tell the reader much.  But no matter it’s origins, people like the word.

So, when LLM’s found it, they latched on.  It has become a huge hallmark of AI writing, but no one noticed.  Don’t use it for AI detection, either.  You will fail at that task, because of what happened next.  That is a great case of the virality of language.

As people began reading AI and copy-pasting, then reading what others had copy-paste posted, we began to incorporate that into our everyday writing.  Now I see it all the time.  Congratulations. Now you will too.

And boy is it everywhere.  Now, resonates is used far more metaphorically than in musical use.  If you said, “The tuning-fork resonates,” someone might say, “Yeah.  It resonates with me too.”  Every time you see it, know that this word is an instance of how AI actually virally affected the words humanswe use.

Em dashes and chiasms

The case that you often hear about the em dash[6] is related, although because we humans decided to universally loathe it so much, you won’t see it make the jump from AI to humans.  It did jump from humans to AI, though.

Don’t believe me?  I’ll prove it.  Your word processor will often change the double-dash into an em dash automatically.  See—I just did it!  The reason that your Microsoft Word does that, is because you like it.  You used that a lot.  LLM’s didn’t create that on their own.  You used to do that.  You don’t anymore.  Now, like a bad light beer, it resonates[7] deep in your cerebellum.

But the reason that AI likes it is basically the same reason that it likes resonate.  It is both versatile and devoid of judgement.  It can function as a comma.  It can set apart independent clauses and lacks the weirdness that we’ve decided semi-colons carry.  It can also function like a parenthesis, but seems to be less…well…parenthetical.

The em dash is like grammatical duct-tape.  It does almost anything.  AI loves it.  We hate it.  For us, it’s the COVID mask of the grammar world.  It stops the spread cold, and using it makes all witnesses snicker.

Another known format of AI writing is the “It’s not X, but Y.”  Usually, you will see it in some LinkedIn post trying to be way more clever than it really is. 

“You might think that your struggling sales is the economy, but it’s actually your sales staff training.”

You thought that it was someone being clever.  Nope.  Most of it is AI now. 

This one is harder to pin down.  People have always tried to cleverly point out the genius behind their unique take on things.  It justifies their writing.  You might think that I’m doing the same here.  Maybe so, but to be fair, I’m not offering any unique take.  I’m just following the research.[8] And in case you are wondering, I used no AI at all in writing this.

The Greeks used to call this structure a chiasm, or at least half of one.  An actual chiasm was a bit more clever and complex.  This is really nothing new.  It is people using AI to try and do what they used to have to do real intellectual labor to achieve.

I guess my point in all of this is that much of what we consider as AI slop is nothing new at all.  It’s just language doing what language has always done, transmit person-to-person and evolve all along the way.  Your grandchildren will be skibidy-ing because AI told them to skibildy.  Their AI will skibidy because people skibidied a lot.[9]  Meanwhile, we will talk about how anyone using that word is just copy-pasting AI.

Maybe we are not that much different than the LLM’s, anyway.  I hope that thought resonates with you.

[1] I actually knew a kid in a church youth group years ago, who asked me for guidance. He was “about to come into a lot of money.”  He told me that he’d been contacted by a Nigerian prince…and you know the drill.  I tried to let him down easy, but I also wanted him to avoid falling for what I knew was obvious.

[2] Strikes #1 and 2— overly long and TED talk-type formal language is a giveaway, and I don’t know why scammer AI always loves the word “project.”

[3] Strike 3—You’re out.  A scam will always try to get you to another less secure app like Signal, Telegram, or WhatsApp (the most commonly suggested).

[4] If you are a scammer, please be aware that I don’t have much of that anyway.

[5] According to my research, this is one of the keys to AI writing.  It will come up later.

[6] If you don’t know, it is the double dash, that your computer word processor puts into a long dash automatically

[7] See what I did there?

[8] Well, and also like a good boy, what Claude tells me to do.

[9] If you are very confused, ask a 13 year old.

Transporters, AI Engagement, & the Future

A while back I was talking with a friend.  He said that it would be really cool if we actually developed working transporters, like in Star Trek where we could beam from one place to another instantly.

A while back I was talking with a friend.  He said that it would be really cool if we actually developed working transporters, like in Star Trek where we could beam from one place to another instantly.

I thought about it for a bit, and the more I thought about it the more that I realized that might solve the traffic jams on the freeway, but we’d be more harried than ever.  You actually say stuff like, “I’m sorry, I’ve got to go.  I have another meeting in 7 seconds.”

We’d be constantly watching the clock.  Sure, you might get in more meetings each day, but you’d be more transactional than ever…less human.

Let’s face it, all these communication tools haven’t gotten us closer together at all, they’ve trained us like lab rats to treat each other as NPCs in our game of business. 

I mean, I bet right now if I looked at your email inbox I’d see a large number of unopened emails.  Now before you think I’m attacking you, I deal with that too.  Or maybe you’ve achieved that magical Zero inbox…ah, the stuff of legend.  But if you have, that means that you’ve deleted thousands of “do you have a quick 15 minutes” emails…or Unsubscribed to countless things that you never subscribed to in the first place.

So, congratulations everyone (and once again, I point the finger at me too), we’ve all absolutely ruined this great communication medium.  Why, because we abandoned just treating people like we would want to be treated. 

And now, we’re doing it with AI too.  I’m not against AI at all, but I have to laugh as LinkedIn feels less and less personal as it fills up with more and more AI engagement bots asking ridiculously over-involved questions to people that we don’t care about, in order to expand our reach.

The future will belong to those who use AI, yes.  But maybe not in the way we think.  Maybe, just maybe in the middle of things moving in data streams at lightspeed, we can all slow down and treat each other like we all matter, even if that person isn’t the next big contract.

The Range Rover Sport, a lesson in how marketing should work

I don’t live in the UK, but I would venture to bet that there are many car commercials, and many of them might be astoundingly forgettable.  Even though you’ve seen them a hundred times, you still can’t remember the car they advertise or even anything remarkable about them.

I recently tried to interact with a LinkedIn post about a commercial for the Range Rove Sport (henceforth, RRS) that plays a lot in the UK.

I say “tried,” because like often happens, I will write a lengthy response, then someone will call me, I’ll switch tabs, and then LinkedIn will decide that all my work is for naught, and I’ll never even find the original post again.  It’s frustrating.

But, since the thoughts were significant (in my opinion) to marketing, I will try to recreate them here.

Before going further, if you haven’t watched the ad in question…you totally should.  Watch it twice, even.

Although the ad doesn’t play here in America, it is played a lot in the UK, apparently.  Commenters were not shy about all of the things in this ad that’s a bit non sequitur.  There are

  • Alpacas that the driver winks at
  • A giant chessboard
  • A woman riding a horse
  • Another woman watching it all with a telescope
  • An overly large mansion
  • And a big dog

What was amazing about all of this to me as I read it (and before I’d seen this commercial) was how meticulously all the commenters could pick apart this commercial.  It was universally declared a dismal failure by the commenters.

The initial poster had decried it and wondered what the original pitch was that got this thing green-lit. I’ll return to this momentarily.

First, please understand a general principle of marketing. 

It’s totally fundamental, but it’s one that people very often miss completely.

The way the human brain works is like a giant filing cabinet.  Anytime you encounter something, it builds a file folder on that thing. 

Picture this: You go to the beach and you see the sand, the waves, maybe even a bright red crab walking sideways into the water. Your brain builds a file folder on that, called “beach.”

Now imagine: You walk into your living room and you see a couch, a chair, a tv.  Everything is in its place. Your brain builds a folder, this time called “Living Room.”

If tomorrow, you go into your living room and you see a bright red crab walking sideways, across the floor, and behind your TV, you would do a double-take.

It’s not that the sight of a bright red crab is something new to you, but it’s out of place.  It isn’t what’s in the file folder.  Your brain says, “This is new.  Pay attention.”

That is the heart of good marketing.  It makes you pay attention.

I don’t live in the UK, but I would venture to bet that there are many car commercials, and many of them might be astoundingly forgettable.  Even though you’ve seen them a hundred times, you still can’t remember the car they advertise or even anything remarkable about them.

And yet, people remember ever single detail of that commercial, and the Range Rover Sport that it advertises.

So, you ask about the pitch.  Here’s how it might have gone:

“I have an idea for an ad.  It’s weird.  It’s very much NOT a standard car commercial.  People won’t get it.  They’ll laugh about it’s absurdity.  But they’ll take notice.  They’ll post about it on social media.  They’ll remember tiny details.  They’ll mock, but they will remember that it’s an ad for the Range Rover Sport.”

And that, my friends, is pretty good marketing.

AI Experiment #2 – Text Edition

The first thing that you get to experience with AI is just text-based. It kind of reminds me of the early days of computers, working with DOS (wow-I’m old).

Those in academia know that we’re in an arms race. Students want to use AI to get good grades. I guess we’ve completely abandoned the idea of learning.

Teachers/Professors are trying to make sure that students are actually doing their own writing, and not just coming up with good prompts for AI generators.

So, I thought that it was a fun little test to see which AI’s were the best at making an admittedly dry topic come to life, and at the same time, fool a commonly-used and respected AI checker.

Continue reading “AI Experiment #2 – Text Edition”

AI Experiment (Infographic Edition)

Everyone is talking about AI.  Is it going to make society into some Star Trek style utopia, or will we have to send Arnold Schwarzenegger back in time to save the world.  I dunno.   I’m kind of agnostic about it all.  What I do know, is that I need to be able to use it as a tool as effectively as possible. 

I’ve been spending much of my spare time learning about it and experimenting.  I’ve taken online classes and created lots of things.  Last weekend, I used AI tools to create some songs that I thought turned out really amazing.  You tell me.  I’m curious what you think. 

Continue reading “AI Experiment (Infographic Edition)”

Leaving Paradise

A life-long friend called me the other day and spoke about his family’s decision to leave the state of Washington, where they’d called home for over 2 decades.  It seems they’d had enough.  They’ve had enough of policies that make it harder for honest people to live and provide for their families, enough of political vitriol that separates neighbors and families while creating boogey-men out of anyone with a different opinion, and for them enough with new policies forcing them to make decisions about their children’s health.  I totally understand.  I’ve been in similar situations myself, as have countless people.  Two thousand six was the moment for me.  I’d had enough of California and moved to Dallas-Ft Worth Texas, where I’ve been ever since.  So, I know about moving to a state far away first hand.

Continue reading “Leaving Paradise”