AI writing assistants shrink linguistic diversity and blur personal identity
Alarming! We’re limiting our language!
Judging by the non-paywalled abstract, the article is just dumb, not alarming. The study wasn’t looking at all human writing, it was looking at the output of people who were USING CHATGPT.
Constant: When you use a machine of any sort your output is shaped by what the machine wants.
Variable: Each machine shapes a different part of the verbal territory.
Writing with a pen or keyboard is more restrictive than talking in some ways, more liberating in others. Talking includes tone, facial expression and gestures, all absent in pen or keyboard. Writing with a pen includes drawings, diagrams and fanciful flourishes, impossible in speech and also impossible on a keyboard itself; but you can add drawings to a typed manuscript or JPGs and GIFs to a digital text.
Digital spellcheckers add another layer of restriction, parallel to the job formerly performed by secretaries. Scribes and secretaries always produced a standard style, following the rules of church or court or company.
ChatGPT does the same, which is normal and rational in business settings.
It’s not normal or rational for poets or novelists. They were expected to use their own unmediated words and styles, limited only by writing itself in cultures where writing itself is expected.
BIG BUT: All of this quibbling is a diversionary tactic. We’re arguing about the OUTPUT when we should be focusing on the INPUT.
Pens and typewriters and secretaries don’t vacuum up writing from everything in the world and osterize it into gray mush.
The problem with AI is the STOLEN INPUT, not the characteristics of the OUTPUT. The solution is SIMPLE. Enforce copyright laws instead of handing the entire economy to the fucking thieves.
Most of our current problems can be solved the same way. Too many spams and scams? Enforce fraud laws instead of making spams and scams costless. Drug overdoses? Enforce drug laws instead of providing free drugs. Too much immigration? Control the border instead of paying immigrants to take our jobs.
When crime is cheap you get more crime. When crime is expensive you get less crime. Natural Law.
