THE POINT OF MAINTAINING a blog is a fundamentally personal and political one, shared with almost all writing that matters. Now, certainly, this blog will never ever matter; but that infinite irrelevance is even more reason I feel to think out the politics of maintaining it.

Here is my policy: I don't like AI, and will never use it for writing. That's for me less a position held on the grounds of its known environmental wastefulness, or its intellectual property theft from other, better creators, than simply on the aesthetic grounds that I know I write my own voice better than a statistical model. The writing that I want to read is that put to words by other humans, who've thought about what they mean, and interpolating processes of production like AI add little except to distance writers from readers. If large language models have any use it is certainly not to supplant creative acts.

I reject the notion that language models are simply tools in the same order as other creative ones (the camera, the synthesiser). Technologies are tools most useful when they're known, and when they're subject to human creative control; those are not qualities that language models enjoy.

Large language models hallucinate, by nature and inevitably, because they're agnostic to meaning. We will never be able to fully trust one to be right, or to be true. Now, humans do this too: we get things wrong by accident or deliberately, we fail and we trick and we lie. But here's my promise, all the errors and propaganda you'll read here are mine.

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