Scraping the scriptorium

The Erfurt Latrine Disaster as inverted allegory

I recently ran a little experiment to see just how aggressively the tech giants are fucking over independent creatives, and the outcome was galling in the extreme. I had heard that Google and Microsoft, the companies with the most widely used word processors in the Western world, were using private documents to train their flagship AI models, Gemini and Copilot. Turns out, the paranoid ones were right. I asked Gemini to write an essay in my style. The results of my little experiment were far from perfect, and predictably, the citations were a mess, but it captured my tone and diction with alarming, asymptotic accuracy. For context, I have publicly, properly published nothing of note in my entire life, notwithstanding the usual detritus concealed beneath a thin veneer of digital anonymity.

As a person who reads for enrichment, writes for pleasure, and teaches academic writing for a living, this development is foul beyond description. Every document I’ve written over the course of my academic career, stretching back to my first year of undergrad, notwithstanding blue book exams, was a Google Doc at some point in its life cycle. Most of my current students also use Docs for their own word processing. Even most faculty throughout my education have used Docs to draft and share their work informally. In hindsight, trusting these bloodsucking corporate vampires with my intellectual property was a rookie mistake, one that I will never make again.

Automated forgery and ascendant global fascism make a profoundly dangerous cocktail. In the same way that just about anyone with Internet access can now direct Grok AI to create deepfake child pornography, it is now possible for nefarious political actors to “create” content that almost perfectly approximates our individual creative voices with minimal effort. Challenging ChatGPT to write horny sonnets was cute and all, but now the technofascist kleptocracy is coming for us: all of us. For all Sam Altman’s promises of a halcyon post-singularity future free from want and suffering, what seems far more likely is that those of us without access to the levers of technological power will be condemned to a lifetime of economic marginality, professional precarity, and cultural irrelevance, barring revolutionary change which does not appear to be forthcoming.

Soon we will all inhabit a world where educating yourself is a waste of time because an authentic voice is impossible to hear amid the cacophony of chatterbots. Those who challenge the status quo will be digitally cloned and coopted. Any creator who refuses to toe the line will wind up duplicated and delegitimized. In the process, creativity itself is cheapened, commoditized, and sold back to us as a freemium service.

Couple all this with reactionary efforts to foreclose every single one of our First-Amendment liberties, and it becomes transparently obvious that Americans, and by extension the world, are in deep shit: Erfurt-Latrine-Disaster-level heaps of steamy shit. The main difference between Erfurt and now is that, at present, the nobility are clean, safe, and sound in their multimillion-dollar survivalist compounds rather than stuck at the bottom of a pool of septic grease, while we peasants choke on effluent and sink powerlessly deeper into the mire rather than laugh uproariously from above. History repeats itself: first as farce, then as tragedy.