The volume of chatter in recent online musings about the hydra headed peril of AI dominance, is becoming ear piercing. These piercings will likely support even more garish burbles of thought to dangle decoratively in front of both the curious and accidental victims.
A brief diversion - it seems one of the more remarked upon "tells" of the presence of AI in a piece of writing at the moment, is what I now know to call the "Em Dash" (_). Thank you NYT of 18 Sept 2025. I'll keep an eye out for them. And I'll need to, if I'm to live up to the pleas of the balance of this post.
The main subject of this post has been prompted by yet another article that Arts & Letters Daily has pointed me to recently. It's entitled "Large Language Muddle" and is an editors article from an online magazine called "n+1" published in the Fall of 2025.
The central proposition of this muddle piece seems to be that we human authors need to fight back against AI,by identifying it for what it is and not succumbing to its enchantments. It's Man v Machine. The article identifies the preponderance recently of what it calls the "AI and I" essay, which both laments simultaneously how artificial this intelligence is and how credible and clever it is in producing the text it is instructed to produce. Apparently between April and July of 2025 the New Yorker published over 12 such articles about AI and the perils it creates for our culture.
The article even cross references Emily Bender's campaign against Large Language Models where she characterizes it as a "stochastic parrot" and as a synthetic text extruding machine". On this website we have already been to and discussed Ms Bender's war against the anthropomorphization of AI by engendering it with consciousness.
So how do we humans fight back against the bot beast?
Emily Bender would have us recognise explicitly that it is AI that is narrow and crude, not we humans.
We all now need to develop and ear for the AI tells. We must try to distinguish between the work of humans and the work of bots. We need to recognise the stylistic shoddiness of the bot, the empty substance, platitudes and cliches that these simulacrums of the bots disgorge.
Above all we should stop using AI. It produces slop,even is it is highly plausible slop.
Humans are fallible. They surprise us. They display the charm of the real.
We need above all to learn how to detect bullshit. Machine bullshit. It's different from human bullshit.
The humanities courses of tomorrow need to train students to distinguish the artificial from the real.
That requires wisdom and experience. Universities and schools need to again define themselves as the distillers of human wisdom.
To use AI to write is to consent to the theft of our IP by data scraping bots. Don't use it. But do learn to see it. It's crap. We must call it for what it is.
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