[first published 20.11.2024 on Substack ]
Had to buy a new washing machine. Could’ve gone back to the glory days of scrubbing denim jeans in the bathtub, wringing them out by hand (it made them nice and soft, and was good exercise though time-consuming), but because I live somewhere damp and misty (see no. 1!), I wasn’t going back to the glory days of handwashing. Jokingly, as M and I unpacked the shiny white cube and attached its hoses, I suggested it probably had “ugh! AI!” – oh how we laughed. But yes, supposedly the thing wants to learn our preferences and habits – our likes and dislikes – and needs to connect to our wifi so we can tell it what to do from afar. Will it give us a rating? A thumbs up or down? Some stars. Will it… like us?
According to Amy Castor and David Gerard, who write the succinct blog ‘Pivot to AI’ (fantastic subtitle: “It can’t be that stupid, you must be prompting it wrong”!), researchers claim that Substack and Medium have high percentages of AI-generated writing (https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/11/16/substack-readers-may-be-paying-for-ai-generated-newsletters-medium-full-of-slop-too/). I received Castor and Gerard’s post the day after I wrote my first post here on Substack, full of what now feels like naive hope that there was somewhere online that was just, you know, people writing because they liked writing. Oh how I laughed.
I’ve just been booted out of further employment from my local university (“no casuals will be hired next year” says management), so the long summer break I’ve become used to in the last seven years – watching my bank balance dwindle, dwindle, dwind… – will now be a very, very long break. But maybe it’s a good time to go: the last couple of years teaching creative writing have felt dogged by the AI sausage factory standing behind us, watching over our shoulders and whispering – get used to it! And there’s that dispiriting feeling of marking a student’s story or poem or script, wondering if I’m giving feedback on something not written by a student at all, but a piece of code. Most peculiar mama (as John Lennon said about his strange days).
Two commentators on the sausage factory (aka LLMs) I go to for information and a dire kind of comfort (alongside Castor and Gerard mentioned above) are Paris Marx (https://disconnect.blog and https://www.techwontsave.us) and Mark Hurst (https://creativegood.com/blog/ and https://techtonic.fm at wfmu fm). If you like dire comfort in these strange days, I recommend them. On the small bird front? The scrub wrens at the back door are busier than ever – wow that kid can eat! And while I’ve been writing this, a spotted turtle dove sat in the orange tree and watched me and the dog, then was replaced by a red-whiskered bulbul. Apparently they’re both ferals. Oh well, get used to it?