Get Real: Seeing, Making, and Resisting AI Slop

Science confirms what I have come to feel in my bones in the last two years: LLMs are making my students less creative.  

A piece in the New York Times last week clocks the decline in “substance” in student writing (specifically, the notorious college essay) even as the use of ChatGPT and other slop-generators increases superficial “linguistic diversity.”  

Alas, the stylistic footwork seems to have dazzled most readers. According to one of the studies, AI extrusion reads as “more creative” than human writing, because readers tend to mistake big vocabularies with big ideas.

It’s not the size that matters. Which, I think, reveals the main deception behind the LLM hype: this is so big, and there’s so much money being dumped into it, that it must be an evolutionary change on the planetary scale.

Let’s build gigantic, resource-sucking, uncancelably noisy, nuclear-powered faceless Borg collectives all over the world. Let’s pump up this economic bubble to an unthinkable scale. Let’s plop a “get help from AI” button, just like that absurd talking paper clip that popped up in the old versions of MS word, into nearly every tool and application that could possibly be used by a creative human being.  Let’s flood the zone with apocalyptic predictions about the coming of The Singularity, which is the as-yet-imaginary all-powerful Oz/Skynet/The Matrix. 

Because of all this, the teaching business is getting pretty exhausting. In school we're told that the barbarians are already inside the gates, you can't put the toothpaste back into the tube, we'd better embrace the technology and not just bury our heads in the sand, because the kids are using it anyway.

How could they not, given how it's being shoved down their throats at every turn?

Last month, I assigned my students to use a topic and idea that they had written about earlier in the semester, and create a video that recast the idea to appeal to an audience of their peers. The task was to adapt their language to suit a different audience.

I thought, this will be fun. They can take a thing they worked hard to write in class, in a lockdown browser situation, and play with it.  They can write in their own memeified voices. They can make fresh analogies. They can be themselves.

I ended up listening to script after script full of the linguistic “creative” bullshit so emblematic of LLM-slop.  “It’s not just ______, it’s _______.” The rule of three. Delving and amplifying. “Honestly” as a transition word. A consistent tone that was both “breezy and grandiose,” as Eve Fairbanks so eloquently puts it in the Atlantic.

Enough of the fake. Get real.

The Times piece got me thinking about some basics of philosophy. What, after all, is an “idea?” When do we deem ideas to be “creative?”

I always like to approach these questions etymologically, of course. 

The word idea can be traced back to the Greek verb idein, meaning “to see.”  An idea is a perception of the mind, connected to image and form, but intangible.  We have long (always?) connected the concept of thought with the language of the body. Even today, if you say you understand something, you can just say, “I see.” Even “I get it” evokes picking up something with your hands.

Creativity, meanwhile, comes from the Latin creare, “to make.” This becomes a judgment or evaluation when what we make from our mental perceptions is worth being seen by others.

As a writing teacher for most of my adult life, I’ve coached my students to think of creativity not as a freedom from limitations, but as a response to them.  Grammar rules, genre boundaries, and received forms represent what a reader will expect, remember, and predict.  You have to show your readers that you live in the same world that they do.  That our sensory experiences, in some ways, are the same, but that what they mean, and what they represent, are subjective.  

Now, more and more young people are outsourcing the one way that they can let other people into their unique perspectives. 

Back when I was in high school, I heard again and again that there was no such thing as an original thought, that all the stories have already been told, that you can’t teach creativity.  Getting into writing in the late ‘80s was a fool’s errand because, culturally, we were all tapped out, and writing (not to mention art) was just recycling.

Of course, that’s a very high school way of looking at things. It begs the question of the value of art.  Striving to be “original” or “novel” by hoping that “nobody has ever done this before” was misreading the idea of originality. The author as lone genius. 

I suppose that the hope I’m discovering as I write this is that all this LLM hype will actually reveal the value that I’ve been seeking to articulate all along: that memory and emotion are inextricably tied to the body and the passage of time, and for a reader to really see what you’re writing about, they must also have experienced the body and the passage of time.  

Therefore, all the stories have not already been told.

Or, as Hamlet revealed to us more than 500 years ago, "There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." As teachers, our job must be to convince our students that their voices are worth hearing because no one has ever lived the lives that they have, and no one ever will again.

The only way for them to make something out of their ideas is to speak them out loud. Sometimes, to write them.

And each once-now-and-never-again voice, simply, is something that no model will ever be able to convincingly fake.