Generative AI, Bullshit as a Service

AI can be awesome yet humans are using it to spam, fake, and cheat

AI is not getting to zero the cost of intelligence but of bullshit.

Sam Altman likes to claim that OpenAI, and by extension generative AI, is all about getting to zero the cost of intelligence. He wants anyone, anywhere to have access to humanity's backlog of knowledge, built up throughout millennia. OpenAI’s product, he says, is not ChatGPT but “magic intelligence in the sky.”

It’s rather ironic, then, that humans are using the awesome AI tools his company and others like Google or Meta are building to do stuff that hardly qualifies as smart: create spam farm sites, flood existing sites with fake ads, or replace them with AI-generated garbage; cheat by outsourcing homework; and the worst use case, generate fake people and fake porn with real people.

Twisting information in batches to saturate the channels of distribution is super cheap now. It’s possible to make deepfake media in a personalized way, at scale. Passing written exams—even those of elite universities—is trivial with GPT-4. Attacking someone’s public image, like an ex or a celebrity, is a few clicks away. The reputation of political figures and the capacity of our political system to handle the disinformation challenge will be heavily tested in the upcoming elections.

Allow me now to make the caveat you’re waiting for: That’s not all we do. I am sure you, like myself, aren’t one of them. We’re learning new things, teaching in new ways, building new tools, creating new artistic styles and techniques, and exploring new productivity-boosting practices for work. But we’re exceptions to the norm. The most common uses for this gift we’ve been given are spamming, cheating, and faking.

We are not them but they are part of us—of the AI community which the world sees as a monolith. Sadly, as the evidence I’ve provided suggests, a majoritarian part indeed—if not in number in the level of noise. Ignoring this fact is to put a blindfold on your eyes. You decide. The rest of the world already has.

It’s not the fault of the tools or the companies spearheading ChatGPT-like products; our use is our responsibility. The culprit is the human condition, which explains the prevalence of these use cases but doesn’t excuse them at all. We pride ourselves as the most intelligent species but our simplest, dumbest instincts drive us still.

As a result, AI is taking to zero not the cost of intelligence but the cost of transforming those instincts into bullshit. Generative AI is the first technology ever to be used primarily for BaaS: Bullshit as a Service.

A gift for the undeserving

In October I published an essay against elitism and in defense of the “democratization of creative freedom,” as Vauhini Vara referred to the possibility that everyone had access to the wonders of writing well through AI.

It was a hard piece for me; I experienced an inner struggle between what I thought was right—that everyone should be able to write well—and what I wanted to be right—that good writing deserves a singular place in the Museum of Human Genius and then should be a reward, not a gift.

Providing people with the means to write “the book of their dreams,” as Elizabeth Ann West says, is a pursuit so genuinely noble that I can’t see how anyone would stand against it. I still stand by that part. But I can’t agree with the rest of my thesis.

The reason is not that I’m an elitist gatekeeper—that I want the ability to write well to remain exclusive to a few brilliant authors—but that the democratization of creative freedom, although nice-sounding on paper, is the delusion of an idealist. At least for now.

The world is not prepared for it. I dare to say we’re not made for it.

Those who truly, deeply want creative freedom just go for it. They put no excuses. They don’t let resistance get in their way. Those who want to write the book of their dreams will try their hardest to get it done.

Those who are given the gift of creative freedom without wanting it—unwilling to fight to achieve it—will use it for other much less laudable purposes.

I wrote that essay from a “how the world should be” bubble without attending to how it is. How many people want to write the book of their dreams actually? A few people, like West argues, probably want that freedom genuinely but can’t achieve it despite trying hard. Such cases are not unheard of. But fully outsourcing the effort and the experience of writing your dream book to an AI is a maddening oxymoron.

I don’t need to resort to arguments about how these tools are created by stealing the non-credited and non-compensated work of others (which is true), or the limitations of ChatGPT to write novels (which is true), I just have to look at the world as it is.

Even if AI writing tools were created ethically and people could input a sentence and obtain a whole novel in return, most wouldn’t use that superpower to write the book of their dreams. This realization is powerful once you internalize it. We’re just not like that. The majority would use it to earn money quickly or minimize the effort it takes to do their job.

The democratization of creative freedom is an honorable goal. But the people who respect that—who care about democracy and creativity and freedom are those who want to develop the skills themselves—are those willing to fight for them. The main beneficiaries of that gift, it seems, are precisely the ones who don’t respect it.

It’s a gift for the undeserving.

Should we still pursue our ideals in a far-from-ideal world filled with people who don’t respect them? Perhaps it’s a matter of adapting to the new technology and learning to combine it with our love for creativity.

For now, however, I’m not willing to keep defending the eroding of creative mastery—and the effort and work it takes—to give an undeserved gift to those who are not willing to acknowledge the giants on whose shoulders they stand.

The ape who understood the universe

Technology and innovation prompt us to imagine worrying future scenarios. It’s our nature. We are not afraid of AI, we are afraid of everything. Not because everything is dangerous but because if we can think of it, and can’t disregard it as impossible, then uncertainty will capture our minds.

That’s where AI risk narratives are born. However, as it’s apparent from the more common applications of generative AI, reality tells a different story: the distribution of possibilities converges on the mundane.

AI, at the extremes, is either a vector for a post-scarcity world or a vector of catastrophic destruction yet the primary use we’re giving it seems to be for the most prosaic, simplistic, and dumb stuff. AI, Apocalypse of doomers; Promethean fire of boosters… no, it’s just BaaS.

What I see here is the reflection of a tragic tale—the curse and blessing of humanity.

We are a species of intelligent beings capable of bending the laws of nature to our will and transforming energy to propel ourselves through the universe both figuratively and literally.

We believe ourselves to be so complex yet are actually so simple. We are the apes who understood the universe—from an invisible prison. We keep extending our arms high up in the air, reaching ever further, but our feet won’t leave the ground.

We remain, despite our prowess, unable to escape the most primal, basic drives that inevitably remind us that although we may be able to witness the stars from afar—and see that magic intelligence in the sky—we were not made to touch them.