It’s the thought that counts
I recently read a great blog post from Alex Martsinovich. It expressed a concept that I’ve been feeling, too: proof-of-thought.
For the longest time, writing was more expensive than reading. If you encountered a body of written text, you could be sure that at the very least, a human spent some time writing it down. The text used to have an innate proof-of-thought, a basic token of humanity.
Now, AI has made text very, very, very cheap. Not only text, in fact. Code, images, video. All kinds of media. We can’t rely on proof-of-thought anymore. Any text can be AI slop. If you read it, you’re injured in this war. You engaged and replied – you’re as good as dead. The dead internet is not just dead it’s poisoned. So what do we do?
Luckily for us, AI only talks in response. Unlike Earth, AI does not emit comedy sketches into outer space on its own. To get AI slop, somebody needs to ask for it. To send it further, someone needs to retransmit it. Our problem is other humans, really.
There’s nothing wrong with using AI. When you do, you know what you’re getting. The transaction is fully consensual. But whenever you propagate AI output, you’re at risk of intentionally or unintentionally legitimizing it with your good name, providing it with a fake proof-of-thought. In some cases, it’s fine, because you did think it through and adopted the AI output as your own. But in other cases, it is not, and our scrambler brain feels violated.
He goes on to propose a simple new sense of etiquette: AI output can only be relayed if it’s either adopted as your own or there is explicit consent from the receiving party, otherwise, it is horribly rude. I’d add that essentially, you either are providing proof-of-thought, or, you’re explicitly acknowledging the lack of it.
This resonates.
Another way to put this is: if you are requesting human attention, demonstrate human effort.
Relatable example in the wild
It reminds me of Neven Mrgan’s reflection on how it feels to get an AI email from a friend.
Recently I received an AI-written email from a friend. It wasn’t sent to test AI, or to show it off, as in “ha ha check this out”; my friend had a question to ask me, and the email asked it over the course of a few paragraphs. It then disclosed that, oh by the way, I used AI to write this. My reaction to this surprised me: I was repelled, as if digital anthrax had poured out of the app. I’m trying to figure out why.
He then really breaks down how it did and didn’t feel as a recipient. For example, it didn’t feel like they were using it as an autocorrect to type better. It did feel like a family fridge decorated with printed stock art of children’s drawings.
Years from now, could an AI that was trained on all of my friend’s emails and texts and personal documents sound convincingly like them? Could it be so advanced that I wouldn’t even be able to tell that my friend hadn’t written to me at all? Possibly. And that idea saddens me the most.
Another is the bleakly entertaining rant by Bryan Cantrill: Your intellectual fly is open.
When you use an LLM to author a post, you may think you are generating plausible writing, but you aren’t: to anyone who has seen even a modicum of LLM-generated content (a rapidly expanding demographic!), the LLM tells are impossible to ignore. Bluntly, your intellectual fly is open: lots of people notice — but no one is pointing it out. And the problem isn’t merely embarrassment: when you — person whose perspective I want to hear! — are obviously using an LLM to write posts for you, I don’t know what’s real and what is in fact generated fanfic. You definitely don’t sound like you, so…is the actual content real? I mean, maybe? But also maybe not. Regardless, I stop reading — and so do lots of others.
My pledge
The words on this blog have been and will always be, manually and intentionally typed by me (on a keyboard that I find delightful). Yes, I am a big em dash (and en dash!) user—I even have macros in my editor to make the substitutions. No, that’s not AI. Yes, you’ll find typos and grammar errors in my posts; I’m human (but if you do, please send me a note so I can fix it). Still, I find writing a good way to clarify my own thoughts and, while I primarily write for myself, occasionally someone else benefits, too.
While we have no formal way to provide proof-of-thought, my pledge to both you and myself is that this place will remain a place for human thought, and more specifically, my personal ramblings.