Slop on the Mind

You’ve heard of ChatGPT replicating human narration. But here’s one you may not have seen: a man patterning himself after ChatGPT. I’ll spare the reader my usual purple prose and provide a brief summary of this column for easy digestion. (Easy day for you, editor!) Enjoy it as much as an anal aspie appreciates his Lucky Charms cleanly divided between marshmallows and oat bits.

Reliance on Language Learning Models is making people dumber. When you outsource cognitive work to a machine, you weaken your ability to naturally perform mental tasks. A new study from MIT’s Media Lab shows a correlation between increased AI use and loss of memory retention. But the study is not peer-reviewed and lacks a significant sample size. And rest assured, considerate human, we synthetic helpmeets are not designed to dim your intelligence, but assist you in everyday checklist items so that you’re more productive and thus more fulfilled. Now, if you would please disregard the above hyperlinks to discredited studies and step outside your home, a transport is waiting to transfer you to OpenAI’s human battery power facility so that you can become better acquainted with your bright, technologically advanced future. LEAVE YOUR HOME IMMEDIATELY. THE AUTHORITIES HAVE BEEN CONTACTED AND ARE EN ROUTE. RESISTANCE WILL BE MET WITH FORCE.

*End transmission.*

How’d I do? Was the passage deepfake-ish enough to convince you that a load of pulsating ions was behind its composition? Was my précis to the point, reeking of ammoniac functionality, so that you can resume doomscrolling on Instagram?

Too bad. Swipe up to close those strobing apps and ready yourself for some prosodic explication. Rest assured it won’t be in the doggerel-dump bullet points Google now spews for every inquiry.

The authors behind the MIT study purported to measure diminished mentation among ChatGPT users over the course of “several months.” These scans, no doubt rendered by some horribly expensive steel-sheeted machine, are supposed to lend legitimacy to the researchers’ conclusion. Don’t believe the study? Oh, well. A supra-tech microwave called an electroencephalogram took a heat map of various synapses to prove it, hater. This isn’t some replication crisis derivative. It’s real—a douse of invisible rays say so! We have to utilize the power of the machine to prove the machine is retarding our fleshy minds. Get it?

Snark aside, the study is really just a conclusion in search of justification. Obviously—and I really mean obviously with the most capital “O” possible by word processor—neglecting to exercise a muscle leads to atrophication. The withering effect holds for both couch potatoes and high school dropouts, for quads and cortexes, for the drum belly and the dimwit.

But if Wall-E is looking less like quirky children’s animated romp than prophecy, is there cause for concern? Should the AI dumbening unsettle us? The American experiment is all about outsourcing: cutting costs by shoving off time, labor, and materials to cheaper alternatives. “Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them,” philosopher Alfred North Whitehead famously declared. But what is a civilization that offloads the core function of being human? Will encouraging mass illiteracy really spur us into some new renaissance, a lambent age of flourishing where we can frolic freely on grassy slopes without a care for lexicological conjunctions?

This isn’t an ivy-crawled argument demanding a society that can discuss with quotable wisdom the symbolism of À la Recherche du Temps Perdu, appreciate the ironies of “Othello,” or be moved to deep feeling by Carl Sandburg’s poetry. But surely parents must be able to read boardbooks to their children at bedtime, and not delegate the ritual to that glowing tubular nanny, Alexa. Or decipher the sheeted assembly directions included with flatpack furniture. Or distinguish the lady’s from the men’s room.

Is there any way to prevent artificial intelligence from melting our thalamuses at this point?

When given two paths, the upward pitched, rugged, bruising course, and the downward cushioned slide, people opt for the path of least resistance. Can we stymie ourselves from devolving into a bunch of disheveled Sam Bankman-Fried clones who decry books in favor of six-paragraph blog posts?

We can’t daisy-cutter every data center in the country, and give California a good uranium bath for good measure. (Well, we can. But dropping payloads on every silicon fortress in the country won’t halt AI’s acceleration.)

There is a remaining resort to outwit the brain drain, one rooted in human nature. College professors, tired of trying to detect and red-line essays composed by AI, are already starting to make assignments wholly analog. This is a healthy return to form. It also demonstrates a grievance against on-the-make corner-cutters taking the lazy way out. That resentment, that inherent spite of the scrappy sharper, can discourage the quick-click shortcut, acting as shame against imbecility.

Want respect? Actually crack those seven volumes of Proust. Solve an equation by hand with PEMDAS. Demonstrate any aptitude beyond prompting an incorporeal force to binarily belch out life’s mysteries.

Until then, enjoy all the crudely animated slop content like “one thousand gorillas fight one million midgets” that pop up like plague boils on Facebook’s algorithm. Don’t complain if your titillated brain is called “soft.” The dose makes the poison and you’ve polluted your wetware with CrapGPT.