There’s a show on Netflix premised on the world being taken over by an alien lifeform that infects human hosts and turns nearly everyone into a hive mind. They don’t start wars, they share everything, and all known human knowledge is at the disposal of every other human. On a popular short form blogging platform, someone admitted that they found themselves rooting for this new entity. They reasoned that the main character, who had escaped this infection, was so unlikable that maybe it would be better if she joined them.
She is unquestionably a messy alcoholic with a traumatic past, talks to others in a barking tone, and does not possess traditionally soft feminine disposition, all things that reliably alienate her from potential allies and the show’s audience. Even with a past inviting empathy, it was overshadowed by a need for a protagonist who acts as a flattering mirror for qualities we’d like in ourselves.
The series offers up a question: if there is no friction, if everyone is understood perfectly by everyone else, and if no being is ever harmed within our control, then is there a problem?
These are the questions we’ve rehearsed for years as we’ve begun habituated in pushing a button to order our toilet paper instead of shuffling to the corner store. It’s straightforward to swipe for dates, and we’ve forgotten how to flirt with cute barista at the coffee shop that we definitely don’t visit just to chat. The hour that we spend driving our friend to the airport and see them off seems inefficient when weighed against $35 and quality time looking at reels on the toilet.
It comes as no surprise that in this next iteration of the internet, where we don’t just retrieve data but can generate it instantly, we offload the mental burden of being understood. When you have the answer in front of you, what is the harm of editing it down, removing a few em-dashes, and instructing it to use a few different words?
The advent of Google search did something similar. We were able to look up any information we wanted, making the Encyclopedia a laborious and outdated system when finding the capital of Turkmenistan. Companies wanted to be found faster on the web, so how exactly how to be found became the profession of SEO Engineer, and also gave rise to web ads being one of the most lucrative industries. In an attempt to be legible to many, we become virtually indistinguishable from one another. There are specific neurons in the human brain that react when we do the same thing as another person. While we crave sameness and revel in receiving exactly what we’re expecting, we also crave novelty. Something we recognize and doesn’t activate our nervous system, but also just different enough to release the dopamine of finding something new.
It’s a fair question whether the friction of writing in one’s own voice is worth the statistical likelihood that this particular voice will resonate at the scale we demand from our messaging. Scroll through instagram, and you’ll start seeing patterns. Posts say “it’s not x. it’s y!”. Speeches start out seeming to be saying something, but after a few sentences it’s hard explain to someone else what exactly they were talking about. Thought leaders are becoming excellent at zooming in and out on a given issue. It’s all pleasant, and doesn’t impede the reader from understanding, because the words are plain on the page. Except when reading over the words, you notice that you’re numb to whatever it is that they’re saying. They’re no longer words, but perfectly agreeable input to be digested.
In German, there’s a phrase “die Leerstelle”. It means “empty spot” or “gap” where you knew something once was, but you can’t quite name what it was.
This is the sensation when consuming content written by AI. Statistics are used to pick a token based on a set of weighted probabilities. If I had used AI to write this section, the German phrase wouldn’t be there. A fondness for German phrases that take a sentence to say in English is not ubiquitous across training data.
And maybe you didn’t like that I included it, but at least you felt something.