Our Instincts Can't Handle AI

"Fake it 'till you make it," has been a phrase I've heard repeated all my life. When I was writing this missive I went to look for its origin and the wikipedia entry for the phrase is disappointing. It may have come from remixing the words of a song, maybe. Regardless of it's origin it was a truth that seemed to be internalized and accepted in the 90s and got taught to everyone since then.

It gave tacit approval for attempting to do things without knowledge or experience, as long as what you did would look acceptable to a casual observer. The idea–as it was taught, understood, and internalized by younger me–is that if you faked it by doing something that approximated the thing you should be doing, you'd also learn the actual skill you needed. Eventually, you'd have the knowledge and experience you needed.

You can almost view this as a twisted perspective on even older adages: "learn by doing" or "picking it up as you go along." The added twist of this new iteration was the "faking it." Don't admit you don't know what you're doing, but be persuasive and deceitful about your skills until you can work your way into the confidence being justified. Ironically, a lot of people who do have skills become convinced they're faking (through impostor syndrome) in this society we've created.

It seems the fake-it-till-you-make-it of it all has also led to increasingly more senior and powerful people suffering from the Peter Principle (where in the corporate world everyone seems to be prompted to the point they are incompetent in their role). I cringe at the number of tech executives and CEOs who, when interviewed, show that they have no working theory of how the products their trillion-dollar companies produce work. Perhaps they've just faked it to the point that they've convinced themselves.

Enter AI, Stage Left

Into this mess, we are then dropped a tool that is mediocre at best at many things except one thing. It's a communication tool that has massive examples of how humans talk and communicate, and based on that, it can assemble words and phrases in ways that sound the way the humans who hear it like best.

AI (or specifically LLMs, which have become the only AI that people seem to mean when they say AI these days) is the ultimate fake-it tool. You can fake being anything. Like this:

Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign can be likened to the Empire State Building in that both loom large as symbols of change and progress—but their strength lies as much in the people who build upon them as in their own stature. The Empire State Building rose from gritty ambition to iconic prominence, reshaping New York’s skyline; similarly, Mamdani’s insurgent run, powered by youthful energy, grassroots organizing, and progressive vision, has redefined the political horizon in NYC

(the output of a prompt for "Write one tight and punchy paragraph on how the empire state building can be compared to the current mayoral run of Zohran Mamdani.")

I don't know shit about the Empire State building (save having visited it twice and that it had a great German restaurant nearby, at least pre-pandemic), and I don't know shit about Mamdani, but I could use the fake-it machine to write something thoughtful I could put on LinkedIn. Lots of folks are using this same approach to "vibe"; vibe-coding, vibe-psychiatry, vibe-writing.

Doing? Or having done?

There's a distinction between wanting to do something and wanting to have done something. People often want to have changed but don't want to put the effort into changing. You can want to have lost weight and get the benefits from that but don't really want to lose weight and make the lifestyle changes needed for that to happen. We often blur the want to vs. want to have done in how we communicate and think about goals.

LLMs are tools for those who want to have done something; but don't want to do it. If you write a book with an AI service, you can say you've written a bit, but you don't have the skills or knowledge to speak from the position of an author. The book will also share this flaw, most likely. There's a reason AI-generated work is primarily compared to slop (the leftover offal you feed pigs).

The gulf between wanting to do something and wanting to have done something fits directly in the gulf between fake it and make it. AI is faking it without any of the growth, learning, or human experiences that make doing anything worth doing.

As a child, watching WALL-E, I couldn't fathom a world where everyone was so disconnected and oblivious as to be unaware of their horrifying predicament. Seeing how people are talking about all human intelligence being replaced by AI has created the first world where I can totally see that future happening.

We're not defining why it matters to learn and do and understand; and, instead we're doing the mental equivalent of encouraging obesity through low-value, hyper-processed food. With society being OK with lying about skills as long as you "make it" in the end, we're setting ourselves up for a catastrophe.

So What Do?

I mean, I'm just a Wolf-Dolphin/Chakat/Gryphon-thing, that's a lot of pressure. The solution to me though seems two-fold.

First, value things outside of productivity. Doing things for maximum profit and collecting all the badges of success is a pretty terrible way to live. Figure out things that you actually want to do, that you take joy in doing, and do those things. Get good at them, learn about them, and learn about yourself. I struggle with this a lot as I naturally want to have accomplished many things, and from a young age, I was indoctrinated into the gospel of being a busy hard worker.

One beneficial thing AI has been able to show is just how many tasks and meetings were pointless. Companies took no time at all to try to replace interviews and performance reviews with AI nonsense. This tells me those things never actually had value or mattered to begin with, since they know it's nonsense and don't care. Take a page from this and don't waste your life working on garbage. If your work is trying to force you to use AI tools, use them, create the most incredible garbage you've ever seen, and find other ways to nourish your inner self outside of your unfulfilling job.

Second, value slow learning. Learn about the world, learn about yourself. I've been re-establishing habits of meditation and journaling for myself and figuring out what sort of spiritual (not religious) practices make the most sense for me. The book No Nonsense Spirituality has been useful, and helped me begin to map out what rituals I find benefit from after my own (ongoing?) deconstruction.

In the end, recognize the human fallacies that have been turned into societal tropes; and think about how to maintain your own humanity in the doing.