What is the major problem of AI? Well, life is full of metaphors. Who would have thought that there’s a connection between nutrition and AI? I was listening to a podcast about healthy eating when, suddenly, I had an aha moment. The speaker didn’t say anything new. He simply repeated what we’ve heard time and time again — avoid processed, fortified, and enriched foods and opt for whole foods.
Processed foods are foods that have been altered from their natural state one way or another. Simply put, people have learned to break food down into its constituent elements and “reassemble” it like a puzzle. The nutritionist’s message was simple — you can’t consistently put artificial food in your stomach and expect to be healthy. When food has been tampered with it’s not real food. It creates satiety but doesn’t nourish.
Then, a thought struck me like a ten-ton truck: how ironic that we have spent centuries developing technologies to break down nature into its constituent elements only to find out that it kills us in the end. Now, we are increasingly opting for “whole foods.” Food companies advertise their produce as “all-natural,” “non-GMO,” “pasture-raised,” “organic” — to assure customers they aren’t consuming anything “synthetic.”
Suddenly, humanity realized that altering nature is not in our best interests. Nature is too mysterious to be tampered with. It is whole. And the Whole, as Aristotle put it, is always more than the sum of its parts. Once broken, it cannot be reassembled. It doesn’t nourish. Broken foods belie the holistic nature of reality.
As I hopped off this interesting train of thought, I checked my email, and realized God wasn’t through with me. The fourth client in a row wrapped up their job offer with an adage: “Never-ever-ever use AI in your writing. If we detect any sign of AI — and we will — your work will be rejected.” Then, they explained almost apologetically:
“Please understand that our clients DO NOT want to see AI-generated content on their websites. They will reject us if we send them anything that smells like AI. All AI can do is recreate a low-level, tier-1 grammar and syntax that no one is interested in reading. Even if you don’t use AI but sound like AI, we are sorry, but your work won’t be accepted.”
I couldn’t help but smile. We have spent decades learning how to break language down into its constituent elements and reassemble it like a puzzle only to realize that we don’t want to read it. It doesn’t nourish. It looks like language, but it isn’t. It’s processed language. The more we consume it, the more “malnourished” we are.
What is the major problem with AI? Soon, we will see companies advertising their language-related products as “all-human,” “non-AI,” “created by real, flesh-and-blood writers,” “authentic, natural text,” “organically written, “language with a touch of human imperfection,” etc.
It’s coming. It’s already here. The more we are fed the artificial, the more we crave the real. We are starting to wake up. At least, some of us.
Let’s create something together!
