You Cannot Use One Bullshit Machine To Catch Another Bullshit Machine

I really fucking hate AI right now. I really fucking hated AI yesterday and the day before, too, though I think the hate is growing faster and hotter, like a sun about to explode and consume the galaxy it brightens and warms. I hate AI because it steals our books, and then then it pukes up and shits out all our books into one half-digested pile, and then everyone reads the shitpuke it pukeshitted up and then they see “AI tells” in it that they identify in human-written source material because of course they do, it stole that stuff from us, of course it’s going to replicate it, that’s literally it’s entire stupid fucking point is to sound like us, and they’re like “oh no you used this kind of analogy” and “oops I see an emdash, that’s AI,” and suddenly we’re forced to decide whether or not we’re going to change our writing, back on our defensive heel so nobody can accuse us of using AI, and it’s like oh shit should we be setting up timelapse videos of our writing sessions every day just so we don’t have a shitty Atlantic article accusing us of conspiring with the enemy, and they’ll use AI to “detect” AI and it doesn’t fucking work and it just adds to the confusion and chaos of information online now and it degrades the fidelity of trust and throws up plumes of misinformation and disinformation where anything is true and anything is false and fucking of course to do all this every part of AI drinks the water and burns the sky and requires more and more data centers that shriek digital cicada noise into the air and for some reason these data centers all need like, coal engines to run, like they’ve got some Victorian orphan or ICE captive shoveling coal into old furnaces to make the data centers churn and burn as if they were designed in Hell but built on Earth, and then somehow the literal worst people on this beautiful planet use it to add to their billions, while the rest of us can’t afford gas and food and clean air and clean water and fucking fuck what the fuck are we fucking doing here

OKAY I really was coming here to write a more cogent post than this. I promise. I swear. Fuck. Okay. Reset. Reboot. Deep breath. Fuck.

Where am I?

Okay.

The other day, the Atlantic posted an article that sorta kinda mostly accused the author of the new “romanscifi” (not a term, probably) Daggermouth, of using AI to write her book. And the evidence for this was that people ran the book through an AI detector called Pangram, which itself uses AI, and it came back pretty sure that the book was AI. The problem is, of course, that all of AI is a huge liar — it knows nothing, it can only regurgitate things, and it often lies about, say, me having a bunch of cats. Or it’ll gladly tell you, “yes, eating dog poop is safe.”

That dog poop video is recent, by the way, and the hilarity in it is compounded by the fact that the AI also lies about having seen a photo of dog poop in the first place. AI is a lying liar that lies. It tells you what you want to hear. It makes up stuff. It doesn’t know or care because it isn’t even alive. It’s never achieved the singularity. It didn’t go rogue and hack another AI and it didn’t leave secret messages for itself in the future (ahem ahem they stole that from Wanderers, you fuckers) and it didn’t talk to itself in some special secret language. Did the author who wrote Daggermouth use AI? I don’t know. I don’t know her. I do know that you can’t use AI to find AI, because it’ll always find AI, because it knows you want to find AI, that’s why you’re using it in the first place. So it does what you want to do. It tells you what you want to hear. The techbros will tell you any story they can to convince you that their awful software is nearing apotheosis.

It’s all a bunch of mythmaking efforts on behalf of the AI companies who really really want you to believe these systems are sentient in order to boost their stock prices. They build this myth, and then we intake the myth, spread it around, and it suddenly becomes the reason we decide to go on a witch-hunt against (in this case, a Black woman author) a writer for using AI, even though they had to use AI to even find if she used AI in the first place, which feels like a witch-hunt in the truest sense. “Ah, yes, we used evil deception to suggest that you are actually the evil deceiver, so please stand there while we set you on fire in the public square for all to see.”

Then there’s the response to this sort of thing where, reportedly, authors are trying to modify their writing so as to defensively not make it sound like AI. (Article here, in Wired.) Is this good strategy? I don’t know! Certainly I think you’re better-served in your writing life trying to write… you know, like you want to write instead of using some generic style or writing with bare-bone tropes that are easily replicable by systems, but at the same time, eventually it’s gonna scoop up whatever “new” style you choose and begin to mimic that, as well. It uses emdashes not because AI likes emdashes. AI doesn’t like anything. It’s just a super-chaotic aggro autocorrect. It’s a very-complicated lorum ipsum generator. It takes what we’ve done and it implements it into its own crass facsimile of our work.

I’m not changing shit about how I write. I like the way I write. Maybe you do, too. Maybe you don’t! Plenty of people think I write like shit, and that’s fine — that’s life in the big city, man. Hell, the fact I just wrote “life in the big city,” which is a cliche, could be used as proof that I used AI to generate this post, even though I haven’t used AI to generate a goddamn thing* and wouldn’t know how to do it even if you asked me to. Point is, I’m keeping the emdashes, I’m keeping my weird metaphors, I’m keeping the words I like to sometimes overuse because I like to sometimes overuse them. It’s not a strategy. It’s a style. A style you love, or hate, or don’t care about. But it’s mine, AI. Get your robot hands the fuck off it**.

The Bullshit Machine cannot detect, or catch, or understand The Bullshit Machine. They sold us snake oil, and then once we were like, “hey, this is snake oil,” they’re then selling us a different snake oil to detect and thwart the original snake oil.

Whatever. Fucking fuck. What a nightmare this is. What a weird dystopia these awful rich fucks have made for us to live in. Goddamnit.

Anyway, let me just reiterate this, in case you’re really new here: I don’t use AI for my work, not one bit. If I detect it in my software, I turn it off. I do not use it to generate ideas, generate text, to do research, to take notes, not even to transcribe notes. I think people who use AI in any capacity for writing are, at best, rubes fooling themselves, and at worst (and most common), are lazy unethical worms who care nothing for the craft or the end result or for other writers or for their readers or really any of it except the dopamine hit they get from hitting their little prompt buttons and screaming COMPUTER DADDY WRITE MY STORY FOR ME NNNNYGHHH as they spend the rest of the time gooning to Claude or whatever. In fact, it’s worse than not-caring — they are glad to help destroy the entire foundations of art and literature all so they can get their little kicks without having to do a single iota of actual work.

Fuck the AI users. Slop-slags. Word-stealers. Greasy leeches.

ANYWAY I AM SORRY I AM YELLING

Please preorder my book, The Calamities, which was written the old fashioned way, with my stupid regular-ass meat-brain and my fingers going type-type-type on an ergonomic keyboard.

* once upon a time I was glad to use Midjourney for the really weird shit it made, until I learned that Midjourney, like all AI, is just Soylent Green, grinding us all up to make its horrible Content, and then I also obviously have used it inadvertently in Google searches, because that Google Gemini shit is pervasive

** of course it’s not really AI “doing” any of this, is it — it’s not alive, it has no agency, it has no wants or thoughts or anything, it’s all the billionaire techbro class who don’t care about us and who are trapped in ketamine fantasies of living in a White Lotus version of Mars while the rest of us work the hamster wheels in the Infinite Data Center Dyson Sphere they turn Earth into