Generative AI steals the whole lot – so we made one thing it will probably’t perceive

Remember that tub scene half-way via Saltburn? Where Oliver (Barry Keoghan) spies on his mate having a little of ‘alone time’ within the tub, then sneaks in and slurps up the bathwater-and-bodily-fluids resolution from the drain.

From there, the movie takes a darker flip. We begin to take into account that, a long way from being the simple, blameless scholar mate, Oliver’s if truth be told a twisted, manipulative Ripley-esque nutter on a project to take over the Catton circle of relatives’s property.

I deliver this up to not traumatize you, however to posit a comparability.

In the parallel, ChatGPT is Oliver. Saltburn is the promoting, ingenious and communications industries. A apparently heat and useful persona has come into our lives, with a personality designed to earn our accept as true with. An entity that provides beef up and a sympathetic ear, agreeably and unassumingly. But whilst it will probably lend a hand us streamline the tactics we create, specific ourselves and keep up a correspondence, it has the prospective to grow to be one thing a lot darker and extra Black Mirror-esque.

The tragic demise of the em sprint

Let’s particularly consider writing. Joan Didion as soon as stated, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking.” But for those who take away the ‘thinking’ from writing, the place does that depart us? Who are we, as creatives, entrepreneurs, and people if our writing is disconnected from our pondering?

Every ingenious philosopher has a smartly they go back to of their head. A smartly of reports, learnings, ideas and emotions that they draw on to precise an concept, inform a tale, or make a persuasive argument. AI has redirected this passage in our minds clear of the smartly, to the suggested field of ChatGPT.

At least up to now, this heist on our thinking-brains hasn’t been with out incriminating proof. Early outputs of generative AI fashions had been simply simple unhealthy; extra just lately, they’ve stepped forward, however with sure giveaways.

To wit: ChatGPT will also be so liberal with em dashes that the latter – that venerable punctuation mark in the past easiest referred to as the favourite of Emily Dickinson – has unwittingly grow to be the ‘ChatGPT hyphen’. It’s a tell-tale signal that the phrases in entrance of you will have been generated, now not written.

Thus, the em sprint was, within the sweep of a thousand million traces of generated textual content, personality non grata within the punctuation international.

For generations, the em sprint has been a flexible bridge for hopping between ideas, feelings, and concepts. Dickens formed his morality stories with it, Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness flowed via it, Kerouac let it force his jazz-like prose. Today, Sally Rooney threads it via her quiet truths of the center.

I believe subsequently I’m (sprint)

If generative AI has killed the em sprint (for now), we’d like one thing else to hold its weight. And we want to know that AI was once by no means anyplace close to the works of the ones long term Dickinses, Woolfs and Rooneys.

So we created a fully new punctuation mark: the am sprint. It’s unusable through AI, so the usage of this is a transparent signal that your phrases had been written through a human.

Inspired through Descartes age-old maxim ‘cogito, ergo sum’ (I believe, subsequently I’m), the am sprint is a symbolic gesture of human over system. A decision for much less prompting and extra upsetting. A love letter to craft. A easy means we, as writers, can stamp our humanity throughout our phrases and make ourselves heard. It’s to be had for writers far and wide to obtain and use by way of two crafted fonts – Times New Human and Areal – at theamdash.com.

None of that is to shit on ChatGPT or to mention you’ll’t use AI for writing. But there’s writing and there’s writing. Banging out an inventory of product options for a file isn’t the similar as writing a letter for your mum; hanging in combination a shuttle itinerary to your upcoming weekend away is other to writing a get-it-all-off-my-chest observe for your ex; compiling a buying groceries record isn’t as nuanced as writing a headline for an Economist advert.

Keep the ones two varieties of writing – like Church and State – separate, and we’re golden. Blur the traces and we’re buggered. Like the Catton circle of relatives in Saltburn.

Because, within the quest for potency, we’ve by some means long gone from automating our timesheets to delivering the stuff that truly issues. The stuff that makes us human. As that Joanna Maciejewska quote that went viral on social media put it, “I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes.”

The fight for the soul of writing is in complete swing. The human fightback begins right here. Our ambition is for it to be embraced and utilized in writing of a wide variety. An emblem, a sign, a flag within the sand.

If we don’t get this apparently useful visitor underneath keep an eye on, it would finally end up (metaphorically!) dancing a crazed, bare jig in the course of the wreckage of our lives.