$%^&! AI is making us sound dumber every day.
Or at least we sound that way.
Hear me out.
One, AI is combing the universe for what exists.
Two, AI doesn’t naturally expand the frontier. It optimizes for what already exists.
Three, if we rely on AI to generate our communication from what already exists, we start to sound like everything else that already exists.
Our world of words starts closing in on us.
Sunday afternoon, I’m working with AI on something and I say, Holy $%^&…I think you’re getting worse at this.
Crikey. This thing has access to everything we’ve ever written. All the weird, human ways we express ourselves.
And now we’re feeding it a growing pile of its own completely average, AI-generated content… built by the master recycler of thought.
AI talking to itself.
Say it ain’t so.
Are we narrowing the field?
Language is how we think. It shapes what we see, what we question, what we create.
If everything starts to sound the same… what happens to how we think?
Call it observations of a word nerd, but I see it everywhere now. The same phrasing, the same patterns, and ideas that feel insightful, but most of the time just sound the same.
Patterns serve us in so many productive and efficient ways. The exceptions are equally important, if not more.
Your immune system depends on variation. It needs to recognize what’s different… or it can’t respond.
In evolution, without genetic variation, a species can’t adapt when conditions change. No adaptation. Nothing survives.
In science, patterns help us make sense of the world. But the breakthroughs come from the anomalies… like the contaminated petri dish that led to penicillin.
Or…how about bananas. The ones we eat today are genetically identical. One disease could wipe out the world’s crop. Holy bananas, so much for my mom’s banana bread?
In music. Sure autotune makes things sound better. In jazz, the magic is in all the seemingly disparate parts coming together.
I went to a Diana Krall concert last night. She hit a wrong chord, laughed, said she forgot what came next because she was so excited to be there…and it was the best part of the night.
AI Diana Krall wouldn’t have done that.
There are 8 billion people on this planet. Not one of us sees the world the same way.
If we all start to say the same things… we’ll start to think the same.
Is that the future you want?
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