(Front Porch Republic) – One does not need too much imagination to understand how Leopold’s critique of over-mechanized hunting is generalizable to the relationship between technology and all facets of life. In the case of large language models and their rise, the local knowledge being threatened is writing, rhetoric, and cognition itself. There is something crucial but ineffable about the role these processes play in our society, the latter activity being such a fundamental part of ourselves that we named ourselves Homo sapiens: “man thinking.” To avoid a complete identity crisis, we have to contend with how we integrate artificial intelligence into our society, likely in a more thoughtful way than laissez-faire adoption at the individual level. This, ultimately, requires a reframing of how we conceptualize technology itself, with values primarily geared towards forbearance, moderation, and the prioritization of local communities.

The consequences if we fail to do this are dire: even with the technology we have today, it is not too difficult to envision a collapse in rhetoric. I mean this not in terms of persuasion or its relationship to truth, as the poststructuralists once held, but in terms of the limits of human cognition, of swimming through a vast sea of AI-generated slop disconnected from human intention and responsibility. (Read More)