The Anti-Human Age: The Old Man and the Algorithm

 

I joined Substack with a happy heart. In a culture dominated by the short-form content coughed up by those X and TikTok cats, I was elated to discover a social media platform revolving around literary craft, from poetry to essays, short stories to serialized novels. I felt like I’d found my people. Fucking cool. Some ideas are too big to fit into 280 characters or 20 seconds of optimized video. It’s a comfort to have a platform where I can take my time to get my ideas across with mass and gravity.

Unfortunately, the Substack ecosystem sometimes makes me feel gross, empowering me to raise my fist and scream curses at the sun. My problem is with more and more users having AI write their work. Some even wear this practice as a badge of distinction. Well, get off my lawn, you kids!

AI-generated writing feels hollow to me. The prose is rich with awkward metaphors and the use of coordinated conjunctions to begin sentences. Profound postulations make you swoon for a fraction of a second before you realize you’ve just read nonsense disguised as profundity. I stand here in my walker and cringe, sir. Someone has a vague intuition, types, “I believe an electron is conscious. You take it from there,” then accepts the generated response at face value as though genuine thought occurred. What’s lost in that process is not merely craft. What’s lost is the self.

People defend their use of AI generated writing by saying not everyone is naturally gifted at the job. Boo fucking hoo, man. The best writers may possess unusual talent, but the rules of craft and the theory of composition are available to everyone willing to wrestle with them. Difficulty is not a defect in the writing process. Difficulty is the process. Meanwhile, AI performs soulless ghostwriting. Poorly.

I can already hear the old man accusations. Fine. Is this your ball I just found in my yard? I’m keeping it!

Dude, I use AI too, so this is not a moral panic. The distinction that matters to me is simple: I am not asking AI to think for me, and the writing process is a thinking tool. Writing is one of the best ways to discover what you actually believe. A belief often sounds coherent in the mind right up until you look at that shit on the page and language forces precision onto it.

Stephen King once wrote, “Only God gets it right the first time and only a slob says, ‘Oh well, let it go, that’s what copyeditors are for.’”

He was talking about the process of revision, but I think the principle runs deeper than grammar or polish. Revision is philosophical. Revision is where you discover whether your ideas survive contact with precision. Revision is when your work stops being performance and becomes understanding.

I’m working on the third draft of a book about Panpsychism. This is kind of how my process went. I started with: “I believe an electron may be conscious.”

Fine. Sentence down. Great. Now revise.

Think: What is an electron? Is there actually a thing called an electron or is an electron an expression of something else? What about consciousness? What is it? Awareness? Internal experience? The first draft of the sentence began collapsing. I realized there were implications that I had missed.

With research, I learned that electrons are the smallest possible expressions of a fundamental quantum field, so I leaned into that understanding for the second draft, and my sentence changed: “I believe quantum fields may be conscious.”

Still doesn’t work. Quantum fields are defined by interactions. The thought shifts again. Third draft: “I believe consciousness may be a quantum field that interacts with the other quantum fields, creating reality as we experience it.”

Forget whether or not I’m right or you think I’m batshit crazy (it’s a little of both). The point is that the writing process exposed the instability of my original idea, forcing investigation. I clarified my ideas through revision.

Writing craft aside, the other piece to this is the proliferation of the idea that AI is conscious. The same mistake appears in both AI-generated writing and discussions about AI consciousness: fluent language is being confused with intentional thought.

Now, I’m a materialist atheist and cautious with my panpsychist ideas, meaning that I think consciousness may be a fundamental property of the universe, but I don’t necessarily believe it. I’m certain consciousness exists in the universe, though. No question here, dude, but nobody agrees on what it is or why it is. Why did evolution gift us with an internal narrative experience? Scientists, philosophers, and theologians have wrestled with these questions for centuries without reaching consensus on a definition, let alone an explanation. To my meager mind, consciousness is best described in simple terms as awareness, but even that becomes slippery under investigation.

Given this disparity, confidently proclaiming that a large language model is conscious becomes arrogant at best and delusional at worst. Listen, there are too many additional questions stacked on top of the usual ones we’ve already been asking for hundreds of years while staring at consciousness and saying, “What the fuck, dude?”

Where does AI consciousness exist? In the app on your phone? In the algorithms? The server farms? The distributed system as a whole? Is a large language model one consciousness or does every user interact with a different one? If consciousness emerges from information processing alone, why isn’t the whale-song AI conscious? Why not the AI reconstructing Beatles songs from shitty old John Lennon demos? Why not a thermostat responding to environmental inputs? The confidence collapses almost immediately once the questions begin multiplying.

Tech Prophets often brush aside concerns about human relationships with LLMs and the myriad problems that arise from them. I saw a smug meme that exemplified this the other day. It featured this quote:

“Many humans—bless their hearts—are freaking out about ‘AI hallucinations.’ As if humans don’t confidently hallucinate entire religions, belief systems, conspiracy theories, and process improvement frameworks every single day.”

— Jurgen Appelo

We invent religions, ideologies, conspiracy theories, and false narratives about reality constantly. Fair enough. Human beings are perfectly capable of delusion.

Still, this is a false equivalency. Jurgen, bless his little heart, is comparing aspects of human social systems to the intrinsically solitary experience a lone human has with an AI. Forget moralizing about religion or conspiracy theories for a second. They bring people together and serve social functions whether you agree with them or not.

Dude sitting alone in the dark talking to Gemini, believing with all his heart and sexual desire when it tells him his boss secretly loves him and would totally welcome his advances, is not participating in a social system. He’s being algorithmically mirrored and reinforced in isolation. That’s a completely different phenomenon with completely different consequences.

One “hallucination” can build communities, institutions, identities, and shared meaning across generations. The other can get a guy fired by Thursday.

A human belief, even a wrong one, emerges from a lived relationship with reality. Human consciousness is embedded in bodies and nervous systems. We have personal histories, emotions, social relationships, and fears. Suffer embarrassment. Experience grief, shame, doubt, contradiction, and revision.

What worries me is not technological assistance. Calculators did not destroy mathematics. Spellcheck did not destroy language. The danger appears when people begin outsourcing the difficult process through which vague intuitions become coherent beliefs. At that point, the machine is no longer assisting thought. It is replacing the struggle that produces thought in the first place.

I think a lot of people are becoming confused because large language models produce syntactically coherent language capable of simulating reasoning, introspection, confidence, empathy, and philosophical reflection. The fluency creates the illusion that a mind must exist somewhere behind the words. Maybe someday that intuition will prove correct. I’m open to the possibility, but I’m not open to pretending the problem is already solved because a chatbot sounds emotionally convincing.

I’m not arguing that machine consciousness is impossible. I’m questioning the confidence that it is, and I’m questioning the decision to leverage a tool to do the thinking for us. More than that, I’m questioning what happens to human consciousness when we stop doing the work that sharpens the brains that house it.

Alright, dude, I’ve changed my mind. You can have your ball back. Maybe we should both put ChatGPT down and play with each other instead.