We’re All Content Creators for Machines

Nicholas Carr, one of my favorite technology writers, has been blogging over on Rough Type since [checks archives] 2005. As of late his writing has gone quiet, but he’s got a new book due out early next year and I think he’s starting up blogging again to help drum up interest.

However, he’s not blogging on Rough Type anymore. He has a new blog called New Cartographies. If you’ve not already subscribed, this is a public service announcement to do so.

(Also, interesting meta conversation here: he’s a NYTimes best-selling author, he’s had a long-running blog built on WordPress, but now he’s switching to Substack — I wanna know all the deets, who can report on this? ha.)

His first article, titled “Dead Labor, Dead Speech”, is a good ’un:

LLMs...feed “vampire-like” on human culture. Without our words and pictures and songs, they would cease to function. They would become as silent as a corpse in a casket.

It’s interesting how the advent of social media made it easy for people to create content, and the media platforms turned all that speech into content for humans (a complete mass of user-generated content tailored for relevancy to you).

Now LLMs are taking all that speech and turning it into content for machines:

They use living speech not as content for consumer consumption but as content for machine consumption

But it’s even more than just consumption. Previously, plagiarizing the speech of others on social platforms required effort on your part to obfuscate individual voice as well as sources. But now you can pass the speech of others through an LLM and let the machine do all that work for you! A form of knowledge laundering if you will.

But, as Carr is always quick to point out, we shape our tools and then they shape us:

The mind of the LLM is purely pornographic. It excels at the shallow, formulaic crafts of summary and mimicry. The tactile and the sensual are beyond its ken. The only meaning it knows is that which can be rendered explicitly. For a machine, such narrow-mindedness is a strength, essential to the efficient production of practical outputs. One looks to an LLM to pierce the veils, not linger on them. But when we substitute the LLM’s dead speech for our own living speech, we also adopt its point of view. Our mind becomes pornographic in its desire for naked information.

Can’t wait for his new book!