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Subscribe to Pioneering Spirit
>200 subscribers
Dear readers,
You may have noticed that this year my posts shifted from hand penned artisanal crafted posts to a curated bit of what increasingly is called slop.* I say may because I really have no idea how many actual flesh and blood people really read this silly little web like log of various ideas and missives from the frontiers I spend time intellectually exploring.
And no I make no apologies for said slop. I have a lot of ideas and AI offers a nice way for a busy dad with lots of actual #dayJob commitments so having a machine take a seed of an idea and water it into a kronenberg-esque slice of slop is nothing short of beautiful.
No longer the AOL enabled idyllic Wild West of the 90s nor the tranquil walled garden where people actually talked with real friends (tm) on tools like facebook in the early aughts, today’s internet is a Mad Max esque post apocalyptic wasteland.
So a bit of actually nutritious slop crafted from the dull but important work of fixing potholes, piping public data properly and generally doing the “eat your broccoli” work of sharing out ideas is worth I exaggerate only slightly.
But I have noticed that some of my readers who like to skim didn’t really realize that I was writing with AI or were a bit confused. Caring deeply for the integrity of the writing process and the art of passion projects, I thought I’d offer an explanation as an opportunity to clarify my thoughts on the subject.
Some people bristle at the use of AI in writing. The slurs write themselves. It’s not authentic. It’s cheating. Or worse. Ironically, many who say this stuff don't bother to write themselves but still have Opinions™️ about the creative process. But then again, plenty of people also have opinions about how others should parent, exercise, or eat.
Here’s a simple truth: I’m not paid to do this. I write these posts because I enjoy them. I could cook every night, but mostly I don’t. I could hand-stitch all my clothes, but I don’t. Technology mediates almost every part of modern life, including creativity. Why single out AI as the impure intrusion?
The real question isn’t whether a text is “authentic,” but whether it moves you. Whether it makes you think or laugh or groan. If a post sparked something in your mind, do you care if the sentence was assembled by my keystroke, or by a model I prodded and then edited down to shape?
I got in a holy war debate with an old friend on this subject over gchat, one of those early aught communication platforms that I love. The argument wasn’t fun though did crystalize a couple of concepts for me as well as feel oddly apropos to argue on the internet about well the augmented information retrievel of the memory of the entire uh internet. (Aka another way of describing AI.)
To offer an argument by analogy, AI is a bit like the calculator. You can do the math longhand if you want, but the calculator offers a means to save time if you like, with of course tradeoffs in terms of the joy and learning that comes from doing things manually. Of course, calculators don’t make you a mathematician. Garbage in, garbage out remains the rule for both calculation and LLM prompting. And there is a a lot of value in practicing math regardless.**
But maybe calculator is too sterile an analogy for the Creative Spirit (tm). Let me offer another: AI is like photography compared to painting. Painters interpret the world stroke by stroke, while photographers point, frame, and shoot. Yet AI complicates the metaphor, because unlike a photograph it does not bind itself to the signified reality.
Its relation to the world is more impressionistic, even more so than painting. It produces a fuzzy JPEG of the collective internet, a shimmering refraction of bias and beauty alike. I have increasingly liked the direction of the Summer of Protocols crowd talking about AI as a memory tool, a means of superhistory rather than superintelligence. That seems apropos and also puts the various progress points regarding various Math Olympiad and professional tests in perspective. (Memory is after all key for test taking.) But I digress.
Ultimately I’m just a dad and a dude who has a lot of ideas. I like to share them. Some people enjoy them. If you don’t really like any AI enabled slop spilling out of my brimming mind-bucket of ideas, you are free to unsubscribe. (I can’t figure out a fancy way of bifurcating hand penned posts from AI slop stuff in this artisanal early web3 blogo-email platform I’m using.) Ultimately this web like log, or blog to use the now common portmanteau, offers a way to share out ideas more like first draft open source memos that lead to serendipitous interactions, some professionally beneficial, some just fun.
That type of small-b blogging, as Tom Critchlow frames it, is about lowering the stakes so that publishing becomes an act of thinking-out-loud rather than a polished performance. It is not about building an audience or cultivating a brand but about keeping a living trail of ideas, half-formed and provisional, so they can bump into each other later and spark something new. In the context of writing with AI, this spirit feels even more urgent: the tool lowers friction, letting me get words on the page quickly, and what matters is not whether every line is perfect but that it exists at all, that the thought is marked and carried forward.
AI helps me do that. It helps me keep this log lumbering along, keep ideas flowing, letting little sparks fly off into the ether instead of leaving them to be forgotten in some dusty recess. So yes, my posts these days may be less “artisan,” less “authentic” in the narrow sense of every word being hammered from my solitary brain. But they are, I hope, more alive—because they exist at all. And yes that’s an em dash for those Very Online folks who notice such things and what that ostensibly signifies about authorship
Kind regards,
PAtwater
*By which I of course mean in an overly ponderously way that I once actually banged my fingers together onto a keyboard rather than dictating a few spare thoughts into my tricorder like glass brick that is so much more than a phone these days that then went into a magical text box that spits out readable digests that seem to do a good enough job of conveying the gist of an idea to folks with vastly different life experiences all over the world. Yes the latter is pretty magical, particularly since I can do it while hanging with my daughter at the park or over a workout by where the homebrew computer club was started. But again I digress. Btw... Who wrote this post? Surely you’ve noticed the tone is different? Do you care?
** I still work on sharpening my estimating abilities and am currently poking around Street-Fighting Mathematics.
Header image context: exactly like Socrates and every blogger everywhere, I am heroically defending eternal principles by sharing ideas widely on the internet, and no slander of AI co-authorship shall deter me from the truth, hemlock be damned.
If you made it this far… perhaps you’d like to take a two question survey?
Dear readers,
You may have noticed that this year my posts shifted from hand penned artisanal crafted posts to a curated bit of what increasingly is called slop.* I say may because I really have no idea how many actual flesh and blood people really read this silly little web like log of various ideas and missives from the frontiers I spend time intellectually exploring.
And no I make no apologies for said slop. I have a lot of ideas and AI offers a nice way for a busy dad with lots of actual #dayJob commitments so having a machine take a seed of an idea and water it into a kronenberg-esque slice of slop is nothing short of beautiful.
No longer the AOL enabled idyllic Wild West of the 90s nor the tranquil walled garden where people actually talked with real friends (tm) on tools like facebook in the early aughts, today’s internet is a Mad Max esque post apocalyptic wasteland.
So a bit of actually nutritious slop crafted from the dull but important work of fixing potholes, piping public data properly and generally doing the “eat your broccoli” work of sharing out ideas is worth I exaggerate only slightly.
But I have noticed that some of my readers who like to skim didn’t really realize that I was writing with AI or were a bit confused. Caring deeply for the integrity of the writing process and the art of passion projects, I thought I’d offer an explanation as an opportunity to clarify my thoughts on the subject.
Some people bristle at the use of AI in writing. The slurs write themselves. It’s not authentic. It’s cheating. Or worse. Ironically, many who say this stuff don't bother to write themselves but still have Opinions™️ about the creative process. But then again, plenty of people also have opinions about how others should parent, exercise, or eat.
Here’s a simple truth: I’m not paid to do this. I write these posts because I enjoy them. I could cook every night, but mostly I don’t. I could hand-stitch all my clothes, but I don’t. Technology mediates almost every part of modern life, including creativity. Why single out AI as the impure intrusion?
The real question isn’t whether a text is “authentic,” but whether it moves you. Whether it makes you think or laugh or groan. If a post sparked something in your mind, do you care if the sentence was assembled by my keystroke, or by a model I prodded and then edited down to shape?
I got in a holy war debate with an old friend on this subject over gchat, one of those early aught communication platforms that I love. The argument wasn’t fun though did crystalize a couple of concepts for me as well as feel oddly apropos to argue on the internet about well the augmented information retrievel of the memory of the entire uh internet. (Aka another way of describing AI.)
To offer an argument by analogy, AI is a bit like the calculator. You can do the math longhand if you want, but the calculator offers a means to save time if you like, with of course tradeoffs in terms of the joy and learning that comes from doing things manually. Of course, calculators don’t make you a mathematician. Garbage in, garbage out remains the rule for both calculation and LLM prompting. And there is a a lot of value in practicing math regardless.**
But maybe calculator is too sterile an analogy for the Creative Spirit (tm). Let me offer another: AI is like photography compared to painting. Painters interpret the world stroke by stroke, while photographers point, frame, and shoot. Yet AI complicates the metaphor, because unlike a photograph it does not bind itself to the signified reality.
Its relation to the world is more impressionistic, even more so than painting. It produces a fuzzy JPEG of the collective internet, a shimmering refraction of bias and beauty alike. I have increasingly liked the direction of the Summer of Protocols crowd talking about AI as a memory tool, a means of superhistory rather than superintelligence. That seems apropos and also puts the various progress points regarding various Math Olympiad and professional tests in perspective. (Memory is after all key for test taking.) But I digress.
Ultimately I’m just a dad and a dude who has a lot of ideas. I like to share them. Some people enjoy them. If you don’t really like any AI enabled slop spilling out of my brimming mind-bucket of ideas, you are free to unsubscribe. (I can’t figure out a fancy way of bifurcating hand penned posts from AI slop stuff in this artisanal early web3 blogo-email platform I’m using.) Ultimately this web like log, or blog to use the now common portmanteau, offers a way to share out ideas more like first draft open source memos that lead to serendipitous interactions, some professionally beneficial, some just fun.
That type of small-b blogging, as Tom Critchlow frames it, is about lowering the stakes so that publishing becomes an act of thinking-out-loud rather than a polished performance. It is not about building an audience or cultivating a brand but about keeping a living trail of ideas, half-formed and provisional, so they can bump into each other later and spark something new. In the context of writing with AI, this spirit feels even more urgent: the tool lowers friction, letting me get words on the page quickly, and what matters is not whether every line is perfect but that it exists at all, that the thought is marked and carried forward.
AI helps me do that. It helps me keep this log lumbering along, keep ideas flowing, letting little sparks fly off into the ether instead of leaving them to be forgotten in some dusty recess. So yes, my posts these days may be less “artisan,” less “authentic” in the narrow sense of every word being hammered from my solitary brain. But they are, I hope, more alive—because they exist at all. And yes that’s an em dash for those Very Online folks who notice such things and what that ostensibly signifies about authorship
Kind regards,
PAtwater
*By which I of course mean in an overly ponderously way that I once actually banged my fingers together onto a keyboard rather than dictating a few spare thoughts into my tricorder like glass brick that is so much more than a phone these days that then went into a magical text box that spits out readable digests that seem to do a good enough job of conveying the gist of an idea to folks with vastly different life experiences all over the world. Yes the latter is pretty magical, particularly since I can do it while hanging with my daughter at the park or over a workout by where the homebrew computer club was started. But again I digress. Btw... Who wrote this post? Surely you’ve noticed the tone is different? Do you care?
** I still work on sharpening my estimating abilities and am currently poking around Street-Fighting Mathematics.
Header image context: exactly like Socrates and every blogger everywhere, I am heroically defending eternal principles by sharing ideas widely on the internet, and no slander of AI co-authorship shall deter me from the truth, hemlock be damned.
If you made it this far… perhaps you’d like to take a two question survey?
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@patwater
@patwater
27 comments
Last night, I had a dream I found out that everyone I’ve been speaking to online is a bot. Very dead Internet theory. Fortunately, I’ve met a few people from Farcaster IRL so I obviously know this not to be true. But it feels like we humans are experiencing a zombie apocalypse across all social media. We cannot run from the bots and they are constantly evolving. How do I know whether I’m talking to a bot? Often it’s obvious in the repetitive posts. Sometimes the bio is refreshingly straightforward. “I’m a bot.” Other times it’s less clear. There can be many signs of life: relevant replies, sincere expressions, even photographs. But my intuition will tell me this is not a real person. Too agreeable, too many emojis, too… something. The gray area for me is when the person is a virtual cyborg. A real human assisted by artificial intelligence to write their replies because they aren’t confident in their original writing. What they don’t realize is their imperfections would make them seem more human. I find myself staring at many casts here, unsure whether to respond or ignore. Will I be engaging with a real human or with a ghostly apparition of our collective Internet babbling over the years? This is how bots erode community. Why does it matter to me if my conversation partner is not “real” if the conversation has substance? After all, I spend a great deal of time conversing with LLMs which have improved my life in many ways. For me, it’s three things: 1. Honesty - When I engage with a LLM, I know what it is and speak accordingly. A bot masquerading as a human in social media is not honest. 2. Connection - These days people treat ChatGPT as a therapist, so why not treat an online bot as a friend? Until the sycophantic behavior is fixed, I prefer to do neither. 3. Learning - I wouldn’t mind bots roaming around that expand our knowledge. The current version of bots (and cyborgs) I see in social media are enthusiastic yes-yes/yes accounts, word-scrambling my posts in a positive, affirmative tone without adding anything interesting. This cast marks the beginning of a personal experiment I’m running to better understand what makes us feel human online. Whenever I think an account replying to me might be a bot, I’ll link to this cast as a response. If you’re a human whom I’ve incorrectly assumed to be a bot, there is a chance you’ll read this cast in full. And I hope it might kick off an interesting discussion between us. How do I know you’re human? And can you even know that I am too? How do we demonstrate signs of organic life in this era of artificial intelligence? And - at a spiritual, philosophical level - does me/you being organically alive even matter to your experience here?
Thanks for collecting @asylum. This is one of my personal favorites.
collecting is a human act!
@chaolam and I have a friend named Louie who says something like “stinks of AI odor” when we overuse LLMs in our writing 🤣
Sounds like Louie’s got a good nose for it. The age of AI has been rough for my own proof of humanness. I’ve always tended toward formality in my writing. I never get the stink accusations from people I grew up with and know my speaking style. But I do sometimes get “did you write this with ChatGPT” from newer people, even when I’m obviously responding very quickly via text. Interestingly it’s been from people who learned English later in life and they themselves are heavy AI users. I have one such friend who calls me PatriciaGPT now lol.
I did wonder when you did the 1 2 3 bullet points 🤭
had my first real issue figuring out if a bot was real or not today on twitter. turned out to be a bot but it almost had me icl. it's crazy.
What were they saying/doing that made it difficult for you to tell?
posted multiple pics from what looked like different luxury locations. pretty much could have passed for any old travel vlogger/influencer.
Yes. Check out my banner photo on my profile. :)
I used to have the bandwidth to read profiles and look at cast history. I don’t. Now if I smell AI LLM I just scroll past. I don’t have time for this nonsense.
You must be a bot magnet given time and size on the network. I’m surprised you haven’t blocked absolutely everyone. Things are just barely manageable enough for me that I’m willing to sift, but it’s getting harder. Been reporting a lot of replies as spam.
I’ve also blocked thousands of accounts :) I trust my gut now.
Everything matters. The Butterfly effect
The only thing that matters is Pet Rock Life. 🦋
the ultimate end game
I don't think I've ever mistaken a bot for a human, at least on a long enough conversation (obviously, a single short sentence can trick you). But it is going to become pretty hard, and at some point impossible, no doubt. Pipe dream, loosely related to your project: imagine a little bot icon next to the familiar reply, recast, like under a cast. That you could top everytime you think someone is a bot. It wouldn't do anything except save those stats, so you could see your "bot accuracy". Maybe compare it with people at large too. In my vision it wouldn't have any actual effect re: reach or anything really, just pure data game to see who do we think is real or not.
When it becomes impossible to tell, we are going to see more gated communities with virtual borders and security to separate the humans from the bots. Already seeing it now with people retreating into group chats and email newsletter caves. I think there will come a time when better technology is developed to distinguish human from bot (at least in the onboarding process). When that happens, social media that’s allowed themselves to be overrun by bots will lose their cultural influence.
I sometimes wonder if a percentage of people living mainly through their screens are also becoming more “bot like”…🤔 (If a person is not really “creating original content” but mainly doom scrolling & commenting across a few mainstream social media platforms and often interacting with bots unknowingly, would the bot behavior of generic comments & lots of emojis just become thier “normal” way of interacting?)🤷♂️
I often wonder how much of the skibidi toilet brain rot of Gen Alpha is influenced by heavy exposure to bots. Many of them are quiet observers on social media networks. It would be an interesting study to see if they have a better, worse, or same ability to distinguish bot from human in comment sections.
That would definitely be an interesting study!!!🧐
Exactly. 😆
Are cyborgs necessarily bad tho? :P https://pioneeringspirit.xyz/when-slop-becomes-sustenance
Nice reflection! The fact that you thought about it and wrote this means you’re not the kind of cyborg I’m talking about. :) There are a few humans here who seem to copy my casts, ask AI to respond, the word jumble it back at me in a very meaningless reply.
Challenging the notion of authenticity, @patwater explores the role of AI in writing in the latest blog post. While equipped with tech at fingertips, thoughts aim to focus on communication devoid of traditional handcrafting methods. Engaging with both detractors and supporters alike, the discussion embraces creativity as a process rather than adheres to hard definitions of 'authentic.' Read about how balancing enthusiasm for ideas with AI allows for spontaneity while inviting conversations that spark further exploration.