As Claude Fable is released into the world, I think we have hit a critical point that has made me reflect and recognize that being a human in the AI age… Is just flat out weird.
Look at the world around us now.
You open emails, and they’re written with ChatGPT – you look at comments on Facebook, and they are AI slop made to prove a sloppy point.
Once upon a time, “art” was human – you could confidently look around the internet and say that the pictures, the artworks, the memes were all made by other humans.
What does it mean to live in an era where to create is not to prompt ourselves inward, but to prompt ChatGPT?
In a world where we are told that we can produce anything that we want (whether blog posts, reflections, videos, or ideas), perhaps we are either forgetting or never learning that we discover new things through the act of creation. Ideas do not just form spontaneously, and they are not taken out of the box that is our mind. If it were so, then we could think of the mind as a series of tiny workers unloading cartons inside a warehouse, as opposed to a conveyor belt system to unload the very same. In reality, it is not so.
As humans, we do not just unload things. Instead, we polish the products that we create, none of which is just a box but the small work of art, the fruit of our consciousness, to ripen and to grow – something alive yet imperfect.
We are like centaurs, say the critics – only now instead of humans atop horse bodies, we sit atop technological marvels built upon the most sophisticated computers in the world; but what happens when we steadily move from prompting ourselves to prompting the computers into prompting the computers to prompt themselves, and eventually abandon the very idea of prompting itself in leaving our minds to their own devices?
We appreciate that which is human, that is true – we seek authenticity and we laugh when Ronnie Chieng says “Fuck AI” repeatedly at the pulpit that is the Harvard University graduation dais; it feels that there is something intrinsic, true, and immutable about that wish for human connection and want that can never be replaced by the machines…
…Then you realize that you could very well produce a Ronnie Chieng diatribe of your own with ChatGPT and Claude and begin to ask yourself what being human actually means.
Granted, it is true that even the fact that you can see this right now is the fruit of a technological collaboration. If not for the internet, which would not have been possible 40 years ago, you would not have seen your first bulletin board posts without connectivity. You would have never seen your best mate’s drunk texts or been able to browse funny cat videos on TikTok.
All of this that we look to when we remember a so-called human age is and has been nothing more than a single blip, a technical aberration in the technological history of mankind, but I will say this.
In our era of AI slop, it feels a bit like these are some of our last days watching that unique historical moment in that technological history; it feels like the last days of seeing humans create for humans on the internet.
But our feelings can also sometimes lie to us – as the fact that this blog post was entirely human written after my morning coffee attests.
This was my human attempt to manage some of these thoughts, and it is necessarily incomplete; the slop is evolving, and it will not be disappearing anytime soon – it is the going concern of our era, and if this internet isn’t dead and you live and breathe and think as well, it is one that I, you, and everyone else who’s still human will continually engage with.
