[blog] the enemy, and other stories

Photo credit goes to my partner, who photographs jellies while I'm busy crying over them.

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At work I peer over my cubicle wall to chat at my coworker, and she clicks hurriedly away from the tab where she’s opened ChatGPT.

You must know.

A disabled writer disclaims in his epilogue — only the last precious few sentences — that AI assisted him in editing and in word choice. 

You must know.

My fellow administrator comments on a graphic I’ve designed for my team. They have so many tools that make it easy nowadays, she says, and then ends the sentence as if amputating it.

You must know.

Is it wrong of me to hope that shame eats you alive? To hope you lay awake at night listening to the thousands of gallons of water pouring into endless wells of heat that churn and turn it into steam and snake oil? I must wonder what you think of me when I cite the study conducted by OpenAI that confirms large language models will always hallucinate. I hate the word hallucinate in these contexts. I hate words that attribute to coded pattern recognition what the human brain does in a messy, fleshy alchemy of neurons and chemical reactions.

Kalai, Nachum, Vempala, Zhang, you must know. You must feel some heat behind your ears or sting in your throat. I am unsure whether we can blame the computers when they have clearly taken after their creators; to perpetuate the squirming parasitic larvae of progress, they lie. 

When a tree contracts a disease, it can be lethal or merely unsightly.

I suppose the urgency of it depends on how much you breathe. We can always fell the trees we don’t like the look of. When the others die we will forget about them quickly. Humans do not have long memories except for buried in the silt beneath the alchemy, and we can always dismiss those as an unnatural stirring, a discomfort with the new, the advancing, the transforming world.

But you must know, right? That you have become a host for something growing. Even the unwilling — no, especially the unwilling. Even if I don’t pass judgment on someone who can’t stomach the work, I can tell you exactly how much water you have burned off the skin of the Earth. That will be true in twenty years, thirty, forty. By then it might siphon marginally less electricity from starving people, and that will be, too, because of you.

Oh, I hope it turns your stomach.

The Thing eating the world has a reproductive cycle of seconds. It propagates and spreads because of you. You have lived without it but it has never lived without you, and it clings and suckles awfully for something upheld as parahuman. I know you have lived without it. You say I can’t believe I was living without it! And all the while it grows.

I have lost words in my own mire. Put simply. There are days I cannot speak or think. I can’t lift a finger to opine on my own helplessness. I hate my body, curse it, boil in my own frustration. And it is mine, it is mine.

In its quest to make ChatGPT less toxic, OpenAI used outsourced Kenyan laborers earning less than $2 per hour.

A disabled writer disclaims in his epilogue that AI assisted him in word choice. I imagine the words in red and weeping sweat. I imagine cutting out your tongue for that of a colonizer. I imagine thousands of gallons of water.

You must know that being a host doesn’t make you any less human, but it does make you something else, too. No ethical consumption under capitalism — well, I wish we didn’t need food to live. Or joy. You know, the things we make each other. I understand we are all alone and lonely. I understand sometimes the words don’t come. I understand that some lives are so untenable that any convenience becomes another day promised. I don’t want you to leave.

But you must know that a mid-sized data center consumes as much water as a small town. That outwardly automated AI systems require constant human intervention. That subcontractors employ those living in poverty, refugee camps, and prisons. That the median earnings of these “microworkers” are, still, two U.S. dollars an hour. That this is a violation of human rights under Article 23 of the UDHR. That this is a violation of human rights. That AI violates our human rights. That your neighbors have suffered, are suffering, will suffer.

The anger will run out of me eventually. I don’t want to be petty; just real. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism. There are lots of untenable lives on this planet. I wish we loved each other a little more. I wish the structures that make us up weren’t trying to crush the love out of us. I want you to feel this shame and disgust and fear because it means you aren’t completely under the heel. I want you to choose a word today, just one, for yourself, even if it’s nothing but venom, even if it’s a total and complete condemnation of uppity art major freaks convinced that AI is the impending death of everything good. Tell me to die. I’ll do it like a human being. I’ll have a lot to say about it, too.

If you didn’t know, hopefully that’s changed.

So now I will ask you to choose a word. Do it by yourself.

Grow.

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This week in Tess’s poetry corner, I want to recommend For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper by Joseph Fasano.

Now I let it fall back

in the grasses.

I hear you. I know

this life is hard now.

I know your days are precious

on this earth.

But what are you trying

to be free of?

The living? The miraculous

task of it?

Love is for the ones who love the work.

– ♡