Sentences that no one wrote
Today Keith Plocek, who teaches journalism at the University of Southern California, writes about Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, solipsism, and the permission structure "AI" gives us to doubt and devalue one another's humanity.
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Read this one by me about "A.I." if you haven't.
Luke O’Neil
Sentences that no one wrote
by Keith Plocek
Dwayne Hoover goes berserk. He is a car dealer. A local celebrity in Midland City, Ohio. A regular successful guy. Then he comes across an idea so dangerous that it breaks his brain:
“Everybody on Earth was a robot, with one exception — Dwayne Hoover.”
Hoover was already suffering from hallucinations, but the idea that he was the only thinking and feeling person on the planet was just too much, and so he started punching.
Hoover, it should be said, is a fictional character in the Kurt Vonnegut novel Breakfast of Champions, but Hoover doesn’t know that, which is good, because he already has enough problems. Hoover’s main delusion — that he is the only real person in a world full of automatons — is called solipsism, and it has a long philosophical history, going back at a minimum to Rene Descartes, who tried to doubt everything but eventually came around to the idea that he at least existed. (Descartes also tortured dogs and cats, so sure he was that they didn’t have emotions. Real great guy.)
I do not suffer from solipsism. I care, for better and worse, what other people think.
Lately I have found myself wondering more and more, however, if I’m talking to a machine, particularly when dealing with the written word. I teach journalism at the University of Southern California, and I enjoy working with students on their writing, but I get a pain in my gut, and my heart, imagining how much time I have spent in the past couple years, and will continue spending, on suggesting edits for sentences my students did not write. Sentences that, in fact, no one wrote.
Many of my students love to write (in as much as anyone loves to write), and I saw reflections of them in the recent story about the college student who pulled out of the running for a job at the Cleveland Plain Dealer because they disagreed with how the paper used AI to write stories. But not all journalism students are so into the process, and many in other majors care even less. I learned this when helping another department with grading final projects, where I found among their work quotes from Bloomberg, Forbes and the Wall Street Journal that fit the essays in question perfectly, but could not be sourced to anywhere else online.
I had to send those projects back so the machines could try again.
I am starting to ask the question, “Human or bot?” more and more. I know I am not alone. (Like I said, solipsism isn’t my thing.)