I’ve been trying to read more books from 2013 and earlier lately. One such book is Jaron Lanier’s prescient Who Owns the Future? It’s bittersweet read as no one learned the lessons he was trying to convey. This article gives a good summary. We all really need to be fairly compensated for the data (and value) we provide to the technocratic oligarchs. That said, I’ve been trying to read these earlier works lately for another reason: the writing doesn’t sound like AI.
I’ve been discouraged reading online writing lately because for everything to be grammatically smooth and structured for SEO, writers have been leaning heavily on AI. I myself have used it as a grammatical check and for optimization. I try hard to retain my own voice, structure, and patterns – but how much is also influenced by what I read? When I start seeing the tale tell ‘Not x – it’s y’ I want to stop reading someone’s piece. Or I at least give it a side-eye. But right here – I’m using some contemporary structuring myself. How inevitable is this? It distresses me from a cultural and cognitive standpoint.
When I start reading a book from 13 years ago – or one from my college days in the early 90’s, like say: Data Trash – The Theory of Virtual Class – by Krocker and Weinstein, books that I needed to read while drinking a double cappuccino and listening to ambient industrial on my CD walkman. Why? Because the sentences were long, they were obtuse, they required deep focus. But once you got there you were in a different world. One without several different tabs, a dozen ads, or the temptation of a video reel. One’s brain felt different – I miss that. But more importantly: my writing back then was different. Perhaps to some it was not as accessible – but there were deep trains of thought in theoretical writing that I rarely encounter online. Perhaps this piece will train the algorithm to find them for me.
Another example is when I read some of my father’s philosophy books – like Camus & Sartre by Aronson. Like stepping into an old art house theatre with worn out seats to watch a European new wave film – even writing from 20-30 years ago about a subject from more than 50 years ago, feels rich, foreign, and otherworldly compared to our current day. Reading this earlier writing is like putting on strange lenses – you must adjust your perspective, your processing, your focus. It’s not so much as a different language as the feeling when you put on a pair of very old shoes. Your feet no longer fit because they’ve been adapting differently for so long. The calluses are different, your bones have aligned differently.
I’m honestly quite worn out and turned off by the style of written communication right now. When I spot the troupes, styles and patterns of AI I immediately lose trust in the author. But when I see these patterns in my own writing I am disgusted and worry how much has the internet and human minds as a whole been contaminated by this singular voice with its unreliable data?