enuja

Ethical use of AI is a huge topic right now. Is there any ethical use of large language models (LLMs)? If so, which uses are ethical? Were all of the current models unethically sourced? Before LLMs, would you have paid a human writer to do this work? But even if none of above were a problem, when you have AI right for you, you have AI outputs. And I agree with whoever said "If you didn't bother to write it, I'm not going to bother to read it."

Nonetheless, I have accidentally read quite a lot of AI writing, because it's filled up my FB feed, and it all seems to be junk. Junk in the sense that it doesn't feel mentally healthy to read it.

There are quite a lot of different types of AI writing, and the one that my friends tend to share most often is the uplifting historical story. These stories are very formulaic, and are both very boring and quite painfully long. And of course, when you look up the real history, they all get at least a few details wrong. But, maybe more crucially, they flatten so many different personal stories into one story.

Don't get me wrong: I think it's crucial to tell positive stories. But I also think it's crucial to tell factual stories, and to tell diverse stories. Not all histories start in oppression, hinge on the brave actions of a single person, and end with triumph. History, and people, are way more complicated than that. Reality matters, and uplifting stories which are all the same story, told over and over again, flattens us as humans.

For about 24 hours, I forgot my phone PIN, resulting in me being locked out of my phone for about 30 hours (as a security feature, when you keep entering incorrect PINs, the phone starts locking you out from attempting for longer and longer periods of time, and my phone imposed a 12 hour lockout between my penultimate attempt and my successful attempt). This forgetting has me worried about possible cognitive decline, although a more important cause is probably better lotion application to my hands, resulting in fewer times I have to use (and therefore renew my memory of) my PIN. In addition to thinking about my memory, this 30 hour phone lockout has me thinking of muscle memory, pictures, and writing.

I mostly use muscle memory for PINs, and this causes trouble fairly often. Just this week, my workplace changed the PIN on the employee area doors, and I’m obviously entering the old one, and having to then enter the new one. (Having to think explicitly about the work door PIN is probably part of what shoved my own personal phone PIN out of my brain.) Last fall, I completely forgot my debit card PIN for about a week. And, then, suddenly, it came back to me.

Muscle memory is an older thing in humans than remembering numbers, and I’ve always been personally pretty terrible at memorization, especially memorizing numbers. I’m quite good at muscle memory, but numbers on a screen or a num pad are not a great application of muscle memory, especially because, for me, I do eventually forget the actual numbers, and then I fail to enter the correct number.

While I was locked out of my phone, I couldn’t take pictures. I normally take a lot of pictures. My picture taking habit is causing problems (I’ve nearly filled my paid google account storage, and don’t really want to pay more), but I think of humans as being inherently very visual, and I think that the ease of taking and sharing pictures is a kind of a return to more evolutionarily relevant way of sharing reality with others. In fact, I bought my mom and my sister their first smart phones in large part because I wanted them to take and send me pictures. The letter writing of the 1700s seems less natural for humans than the picture and video sharing of the modern era.

That said, while I value my pictures of snow and crocuses from a decade ago, I value my own writing, in particular the writing on my old LJ account, much more. I don’t have all of that saved anywhere, and it would take much less memory to save everything I’ve ever written than a week worth of pictures. Way back in middle school, I realized that writing is a very important part of thinking, for me. In the gap of time between LJ and this account, I didn’t do very much writing, and I also didn’t do very much reading. I read Thomas Princen’s The Logic of Sufficiency at least twice, but I didn’t ever get around to reviewing it, so I don’t actually know what I think about it. Right now I’m reading it yet again, and hopefully I’ll actually review it soon.

Muscle memory and images are very human things, but writing is something that I value even more. And, even if writing doesn’t end up pushing back the usual mental decline that eventually comes with aging, it will give me a lot of valuable ideas and opinions.