I read cheating in your post as people stealing space, stealing meaning for themselves. Stealing a little too much of the story for themselves perhaps - jumping the gun and taking the best lines without having learned them.
Horseshit is 100% compostable. Just give it a little time. Composting feelings takes longer because they need to resist the decay for as long as they can. Like pride. Long enough to keep getting back on a horse.
When I think about cheating I think about fidelity. AI promises us ever greater fidelity in its outputs. The new model will be smoother, slicker and less glitchy; will render the world with ever greater fidelity, in ever greater pixel and token counts. But our problems will be real and will be the same, no matter how clear they become to us. Our faith in them will be here long after the non-stop fidelity of AI.
These uncomposted thoughts took a long time to compose on two thumbs on a phone in a time spent cheating on social obligations and on all my many writing commitments to whom I am meticulously unfaithful!
I love this lyrical response. Thanks, Eamon. Yes, agreed, cheating is about fidelity. But also fidelity means different things to different people.
I feel fidelity to my own creative practice, my own integrity, and also my desire to be irreverent. mess with conventions, genres, technologies, and processes to find ways of expressing and understanding my/our weird (post)humanity. I hear you there is the worry that we jump the gun, skip the work, take the best lines for nothing. But I hope I have demonstrated that I have not done that here! That I still have “normal physical fitness” in terms of writing anyway. I worked a totally inadvisably long time on this essay!! Haha! In our fast-paced social media moment, I put more time in with AI then many do without. I truly care about writing and words and thought. I am sharing my craft, my voice. Not much has really changed - before and after my engagement with these system. I’ve become a better writer and a better thinker.. Anyhow I know you’re not accusing me and I am grateful for this conversation about fidelity, horseshit, compost, and what it means to be write, which is to create. To earn one’s sentences. I earn mine. Many will say I am a cheater, without even reading the essay. Knowing I’ve used AI automatically disqualifies my writing. - I think that’s weird. (I had a big argument with a person this morning who I had reached out to, to read the essay, knowing she’s anti-AI but to read it anyway. To give me her creative assessment of it, as an essay. She refused to read it, out of principle. I think that’s weird and sad. I’m a digital literacy scholar and teach in Ed tech, teachers in the world teaching kids who use these tools, so I feel it is part of my work to understand them. And I can only understand them by being creative with them. I also think these systems are fucking amazing, to be honest. Hellishly implicated with avaricious men and all the terrible environmental impacts and colonial history, agreed. We can do this technology far far better. That is a big part of my creative practice. Anyhow, I can’t wait for more conversations about all of this ☺️
Ironically, this post is so authentic! The exceptions make the rule.
I couldn't resist asking ChatGPT about the horseshit in composting, which it misunderstood twice. So I asked it "what's 20% wrong with the compositing of our food waste we all do":
- What’s wrong with everyday food-waste composting
1. We over-compost water, not nutrients
2. Nutrient leakage → pollution
3. We break nutrient loops instead of closing them
4. Compost quality is inconsistent and often contaminated
5. Food waste might be better used before composting
It expanded on each list item, in case anyone's curious 😊.
Haha! I love that you explored the particulars of what is, exactly, the horseshit in composting. This is exactly what she was talking about. She also wondered about the infrastructure necessary to process the compost and whether much of the compost was getting landfilled (like recycling often is). For this essay, I didn’t want to get lost in the specifics or do research into composting in addition to cheating, but this read is excellent! Thanks Luc and ChatGPT 🥰
A fabulous and provocative read. If there was horseshit, I couldn't smell it.
I read cheating in your post as people stealing space, stealing meaning for themselves. Stealing a little too much of the story for themselves perhaps - jumping the gun and taking the best lines without having learned them.
Horseshit is 100% compostable. Just give it a little time. Composting feelings takes longer because they need to resist the decay for as long as they can. Like pride. Long enough to keep getting back on a horse.
When I think about cheating I think about fidelity. AI promises us ever greater fidelity in its outputs. The new model will be smoother, slicker and less glitchy; will render the world with ever greater fidelity, in ever greater pixel and token counts. But our problems will be real and will be the same, no matter how clear they become to us. Our faith in them will be here long after the non-stop fidelity of AI.
These uncomposted thoughts took a long time to compose on two thumbs on a phone in a time spent cheating on social obligations and on all my many writing commitments to whom I am meticulously unfaithful!
I love this lyrical response. Thanks, Eamon. Yes, agreed, cheating is about fidelity. But also fidelity means different things to different people.
I feel fidelity to my own creative practice, my own integrity, and also my desire to be irreverent. mess with conventions, genres, technologies, and processes to find ways of expressing and understanding my/our weird (post)humanity. I hear you there is the worry that we jump the gun, skip the work, take the best lines for nothing. But I hope I have demonstrated that I have not done that here! That I still have “normal physical fitness” in terms of writing anyway. I worked a totally inadvisably long time on this essay!! Haha! In our fast-paced social media moment, I put more time in with AI then many do without. I truly care about writing and words and thought. I am sharing my craft, my voice. Not much has really changed - before and after my engagement with these system. I’ve become a better writer and a better thinker.. Anyhow I know you’re not accusing me and I am grateful for this conversation about fidelity, horseshit, compost, and what it means to be write, which is to create. To earn one’s sentences. I earn mine. Many will say I am a cheater, without even reading the essay. Knowing I’ve used AI automatically disqualifies my writing. - I think that’s weird. (I had a big argument with a person this morning who I had reached out to, to read the essay, knowing she’s anti-AI but to read it anyway. To give me her creative assessment of it, as an essay. She refused to read it, out of principle. I think that’s weird and sad. I’m a digital literacy scholar and teach in Ed tech, teachers in the world teaching kids who use these tools, so I feel it is part of my work to understand them. And I can only understand them by being creative with them. I also think these systems are fucking amazing, to be honest. Hellishly implicated with avaricious men and all the terrible environmental impacts and colonial history, agreed. We can do this technology far far better. That is a big part of my creative practice. Anyhow, I can’t wait for more conversations about all of this ☺️
Ironically, this post is so authentic! The exceptions make the rule.
I couldn't resist asking ChatGPT about the horseshit in composting, which it misunderstood twice. So I asked it "what's 20% wrong with the compositing of our food waste we all do":
- What’s wrong with everyday food-waste composting
1. We over-compost water, not nutrients
2. Nutrient leakage → pollution
3. We break nutrient loops instead of closing them
4. Compost quality is inconsistent and often contaminated
5. Food waste might be better used before composting
It expanded on each list item, in case anyone's curious 😊.
Haha! I love that you explored the particulars of what is, exactly, the horseshit in composting. This is exactly what she was talking about. She also wondered about the infrastructure necessary to process the compost and whether much of the compost was getting landfilled (like recycling often is). For this essay, I didn’t want to get lost in the specifics or do research into composting in addition to cheating, but this read is excellent! Thanks Luc and ChatGPT 🥰