Robo call-outs

I started writing an essay last week about the indignity of proving our humanity in the face of increasingly human-like AI. I’d just read Jill Lepore’s New Yorker piece on the business of identifying yourself, and was particularly disturbed to learn about the Orb, created by Tools for Humanity (a company co-founded by Sam “AI Will End Us, Let’s Keep Going!” Altman) meant to “secure proof of humanity.”

But as Lepore writes, “The Orb is not a bot-detection device. It’s a human-capturing device.”

I couldn’t quite get at what, specifically, was crawling under my skin so much — aside from the obvious horrors of it all. But that quote kept sticking with me, the idea that it’s now trickier to spot humans in the sea of robots.

This evening I finally had a chance to spend time with Jenny Odell’s June piece for Longreads about human perception. The essay is centered on the idea of “soft eyes,” but I really like how she also defined its opposite — which, duh, she called “hard eyes.” Quoting a composer, Odell refers to hard eyes as the ability to quickly analyze and judge, whereas soft eyes allow something else to sneak in. Hard eyes gather facts for a decision; soft eyes happen upon an unexpected surprise. 

Maybe what has been getting my goat has been all the ways I can feel us becoming more like the robots, not the ways they’ve become more like us. So much of my own day is hard-eye tasks: Attaching PDFs, accepting track changes, agonizing over whether to replace the word “experiment” with either “test” or “research.” I have to assume this is why, when I take a break in the middle of the day or wrap up in the evening, I immediately turn to walking the dog or cooking. These are soft eye activities amid a frantic workday (I still don’t entirely understand what is going on with my career!). 

More robotic, hard-eye ways of living keep creeping into our humanity. Instead of doing our own basic research or forming our own opinions, people now just dump the question into ChatGPT. One recent example: Dave’s hosting an NFL draft party on Saturday (if you are a friend reading this: Can I please sleep over on Saturday?), and he let the fellas know his plans to get pizza. One person asked where Dave intends to order from, and proceeded to argue for another spot by screenshotting a ChatGPT comparison of the two restaurants. For the record, it only made Dave knuckle down harder on his first choice. Pizza arguments should be made from the gut!

Even beyond the direct copy-pasta of using AI, it’s now even indirectly influencing the way we write and talk. In May, Jason Koebler wrote in 404 Media that he caught himself using the AI-coded negative parallelism: “it’s not just x, it’s y.” This structure has become one of the biggest AI red flags. 

“Did I use that construction because I’ve been immersed on an internet full of generic AI writing on every platform all day everyday for years?” Koebler asks. “Or did I just happen to think that was the best way to phrase it at the time?”

Another AI red flag in writing is the em dash. I absolutely refuse to stop using it in my own writing, though, so any future accusations of bot use be damned. I would even bet that my fingers unconsciously twitch into [shift][option][-] formation in my sleep.

The way AI has influenced our writing is rough (and pathetic!) enough for adults, but it’s pretty freaky-scary for a younger generation: Have students even learned how to formulate school essays on their own before immediately turning to AI? Please add “horrified of raising a baby bot” to my list of why I won’t be having children (right behind “will probably inherit my worst traits” and “don’t want to take them to after-school activities”).

Despite AI’s ubiquity — real or imagined — there are little moments when we can welcome in more soft-eye activities and embrace our humanity. I love when I’m talking with someone and we can’t remember the name of a person or place, and neither of us bother looking it up. We let our soft eyes glaze over with the time-honored tradition of, “It’ll come to us.” It is the robotic instinct to know the answer that we must fight off. 

Soft eyes, smooth brains, can’t lose.