Scourge, Thy Name is ChatGPT
Why join an app focused on exchanging letters if you can’t even write one on your own?
Unlike most people, I see bots like ChatGPT and Bard more as hindrance than assistance, mainly because you shouldn’t leave the work you can — and should — do yourself to a freaking AI. Besides, these bots provide answers based on content crawled from publicly available sources, which also opens the door to amplifying misinformation, baseless conspiracies, and outright bigotry. Perhaps the worst consequence of Web 2.0 and anti-social media was giving a voice to people — if we can even call them that — who never deserved one in the first place. As Umberto Eco stated so eloquently:
Social media gives legions of idiots the right to speak when they once only spoke at a bar after a glass of wine, without harming the community…but now they have the same right to speak as a Nobel Prize winner. It’s the invasion of the idiots.
It’s one thing to use AI technology to optimize certain menial/repetitive tasks in the production chain that a human wouldn’t be able to pull off with such consistency. Think of manufacturing parts that must follow precise specifications and assembled in exactly the right order, for example. A completely different thing, however, is making these AI-powered bots a substitute for our natural intellectual capacity.
You might be tempted to say, “Hey, A.I., aren’t you being kind of two-faced? Your opinion sounds like something taken out of the Luddite playbook.” Far from it, my little Padawan. My relationship with technology has always been up-close and personal, from the time I fixed the BIOS of my very first computer while in elementary school until I started using password managers and multi-factor authentication to protect my accounts. That also led me to embrace privacy as a permanent fixture rather than something you can turn on/off for the sake of alleged convenience. Case in point, the browser I’m using to compose this article is Ungoogled Chromium, which is basically Google Chrome with all connections to Google, no matter how subtle, purged from its source code.
So how does this anti-excessive-dependence-on-AIs rant link with SLOWLY, you might ask? For starters, it’s based on the fact that it’s always better to do the right thing than a good thing. That’s why I’m fully dependent on my own knowledge and abilities to earn my paycheck every month, and I’ll continue as long as my mind remains sound, my health remains stable, and all the cute little doggies keep walking the neighborhood where I currently reside. Unfortunately for people both in and out of SLOWLY, more and more are surrendering whatever talent or motivation they had before the foul altar of ChatGPT et al. Take a look at this letter I got two days ago from the other side of the world.
Although the text itself is written decently and lacks any spelling/grammar mistakes, I could see right off the bat this nimrod simply copied and pasted my profile on the text box, asked the bot for an answer, and merely sent it my way without even checking if it matched! ChatGPT’s outputs are high on verbose and grandeur, which makes them look and feel smarter than they really are and easily impresses those on the below-average side of the scale. Sadly for “glovsh” and all other morons who are now defiling SLOWLY with letters they didn’t even write themselves — because apparently asking for genuine human interaction is too much nowadays — they are terrible at covering their tracks. In this specific case, the sender’s profile busted him instantly.
Someone merely “interested” in English could never write a text with this level of fluency and complexity — hence they stop thinking and become slaves to ChatGPT. By the way, why would you be merely “interested” in English if you’re from the Philippines, where it’s an OFFICIAL language alongside Tagalog?! Are you freaking kidding me?! It’s as preposterous as saying I, as a native Chilean, were merely “interested” in Spanish. By the way, a Snorlax who lives around the corner passed by to say hello and said, “Not even I am this lazy!”
There’s absolutely no excuse to allow AI-generated content on SLOWLY. None whatsoever. If the Overlords™ want to make sure the app stays active in the long run, an anti-AI stance is a must among the measures they need to implement pronto. SLOWLY is made for interactions between people, not between people and bots. Introducing a reporting option for these specific cases will help the powers that be flag offenders more easily, permanently ban them, and block their devices so they can never register another account — for this a MAC address blacklist can suffice since dynamic IPs are now the rule.
For now, I reported “glovsh” under the option set for other cases, filling the text box with my suspicions and other relevant information. Let’s hope the mighty banhammer hits him quickly and with extreme violence. Should you ever get a letter that feels like written by a damn bot instead of a person, report it ASAP and tell your other penpals. Together we can purge the scourge!