Who you are using when you use AI

🌟 Editor's Note

This is just my opinion. It may not be yours. But we are, believe it or not, both humans here so take that into account. And yes, I’m sure there’s a very good reason that you, specifically, you, really need to use an LLM to write that for you.

The other day I came across a site that asks “are you in the weights?” It allows you to enter your name and then searches for you across LLM models. At first I thought it measured how much of your work was used to train something, but that's not the case.

In this case, it's how much an AI "knows" about you, across different platforms. It gives you a score and a percentile. Are you amongst the top 10% of people? Are you as well known as Einstein?

You are not, and neither am I. But I did score highly. This makes sense of course because I am Very Online. The vast, vast majority of my writing has been online, and online sites are what is scraped to create AI.

The site tries to bill this as a "kind of fame." A way to be remembered after you're gone, you're so famous you're in the AI! 🤩 Look Einstein is in it too! And Taylor Swift!

I posted about it on Bluesky, and immediately people started taking the test too. How did they score? They wanted to know. People who were unknown had feelings about it, they felt ignored. Others laughed over how wrong the AI was about them.

It made me so sad. I don’t want to be remembered by a system made of weighted averages that spits out the most expected answer. I don’t want to be considered “famous” by a machine, and I don’t want my friends and colleagues to take JOY in knowing a machine knows who they are!

It's the most sad, cold description of "fame" I could ever think of. Does anyone want to be remembered as a biography, when you could be remembered as a person? By the people you loved?

Part of the reason the site says I’m “known” of course is because large amounts of my work have gone into training these very AIs. Without my permission. Yes, I’m in the lawsuit.

I'm so, so mad about that. But I'm even madder, and sadder, about the people who cheerfully use the AI made with my voice. Even, and often, when they know full well my work, specifically mine, went into it.

"It's so easy! It's so good!" "Life is so hard, I need/deserve something to make my world easier" "I know other people will use it, so…" Every time someone tells me they asked Claude or plugged it into Chat, I feel slightly sick.

The answer they get out? Is me. It's me, and my colleagues. My mentors.

An LLM doesn’t think. It doesn’t create. It is, at its base, a prediction machine, and a very good one. It takes what you ask, and spits out the combined, slurried composite of other people’s answers (ty to Richard Sima for “slurried”).

LLMs are the combined "voices" of so many writers who I respect. The combined work of so many people who worked so long, and so hard, who learned and felt joy, who sweated over exactly the right word choice to make you learn and feel.

And now? That work is coming out as predictive mediocrity.

My work, my endless joy in sharing science and wonder. The joy of my colleagues. Our effort, education, our training and our experience, mashed up and extruded out as the most mediocre version of it all, that you are using to answer your email. To do something you could do yourself, you just didn’t make the time. Or maybe you just don’t wanna.

You are using my voice, you are using it against my will! And yeah, maybe you DO feel uncreative. Maybe the work you have to do is hard. Maybe you are indeed busy with other things that were either thrust upon you or you took upon yourself. Maybe you think I and my colleagues are somehow these untouchable artists who create things you never could. And so you feel ok stealing it, stealing it in its most pathetic, predictive form. You might even feel justified. These elitist artists, out here making work “look” so easy. Not that you’ve ever seen them work but you can picture it, and in your head it’s the pretty writing at a twee coffee shop where the words are just flowing and the person has a very superior look on their face.

But I was that person. I was that person doing the work. I was not at a coffee shop. I was at my desk in my home at 9pm on a Friday, the cat refused to sit with me, I’m surrounded by snack wrappers and half empty drinks that are either too cold or too warm. I haven’t showered and the air is stale. I’m racing to meet a deadline, but also I really want to write a joke but the joke’s not coming, and I think that’s the right number but is it? I should check where is that stupid pdf which I obviously misnamed and AUGH I don’t have access to that journal!

I file the work. It goes through rounds of edits. In the edits things are moved around, stripped, added. A fact checker combs through it and I feel very, very ignorant as it turns out I did the math wrong, thank goodness we caught it in time. Finally it appears, and a few people read it. I get paid (not very much), and I feel good.

And then it is fed into the AI machine, and the AI machine spits out my joke, my pun, my declarative sentences so you don’t have to think at all.

It feels like a violation. Snatching my work, and running gleefully off, using it to analyze your resume or answer your email. Using it to do things you could do yourself. Things that would, eventually, make you a better writer or thinker. But you don’t want to be better, not right now. You don’t want to be curious or show the world what you could do, when you could plug it in to the machine, and the machine will spit out what I could do instead.

I became a writer because I wanted to teach. To share and inspire. I wanted to tell people about the world and make them curious. I became a writer because my own boundless curiosity allows for nothing less.

And now, that material is being used so you don't have to write a whole sentence, you poor, poor baby. My curiosity, being used so you never have to ask a question.

Where have I been?

• Writing about frozen squirrel poo. Yes. Ground squirrel poo frozen in Arctic permafrost, which it turns out contained DNA from loads of Pleistocene animals! Including mammoths. Yes. Ground squirrels ATE MAMMOTH. (Science News)

• And about the amazing, and astonishingly beautiful fungal networks that underlie SO many of the plants on this Earth! These tiny fungi, which spend out threads to get nutrients, take up so much space their length could reach to the sun nearly a billion times. (National Geographic)

Where have you been?

• I hope it’s reading about what T. Rex’s BREATH might have smelled like. “As it turns out, the way you can get that is there is a synthetic rotting corpse smell that is produced to train disaster response dogs.” 

• Or perhaps its this rare corn varietal that farms its own nitrogen using MUCUS that it just grows like, snot hanging off the corn plant. Gross? Yes. Amazing!? Definitely.

Header Photo by Elisa Calvet B. on Unsplash