The Visual8

Walk the aisles of a grocery store. You’ll see signs for “organic.”

Or “all natural.” Or “hormone-free.” Or “free-range.”

They are all indicators of quality and sustainability. But they are really appeals to our value system.

When we reach for organic products, we reach into our past. Long before food production became industrialized.

We look for those vendors that share our respect for Mother Nature. Respect can be centered on the field or the family. It is a desire for the natural world without technological intervention.

This is going to happen to what we read.

Generative AI has captured our attention because it composes, it summarizes, it cites. Like an alchemist, gold emerges from ordinary lead.

It removes the hard labor of writing. And it does so in the blink of an eye. Or the length of a yawn.

And when we find ways to skip past labor, we apply those methods in as many places as possible.

However, when we reach a certain level of saturation, another domino will tip over.

Like our food system, there will be an ache for the original.

Not in spite of blemishes, but because of them.

AI is a smooth talker. Too smooth. Even when we program anomalies, the overall effect still leave a metallic taste in our mouth.

That’s because it is a derivative process. The models are trained from human language. The domain it fetches comes from documents written by humans.

The works of Generative AI are photographs of paintings. Close enough to look like the original, but side-by-side not as vibrant. Not as gritty.

That’s because the output from these Large Language Models are devoid of the human experience.

ChatGBT admits that it can sound like a human, but it does not have the human experience.

But this post is not condemnation of the technology.

This post is a prediction that we will ache for authenticity.

Carl Jung explored our relationship with ourselves. He wrote extensively about archetypes, dreams, and individuation. He defined a part of us just out of reach, called the subconscious. He argued that human experiences carried over from generation to generation with the collective unconscious.

In a sense, he argued for a natural system of symbols and meaning. We are born with it.

AI does not have such a relationship with a subconscious. It was never born.

Nor does it have access to the collective unconscious of the human race. It does not inherit stories biologically. It consumes the written accounts of stories. Then regurgitates another version that sounds like us, but is not us.

Despite the significant effort put into artificial sweeteners, cookies made from them do not taste the same. They simply cannot match the taste of those made from real sugar. 

The same is true for content generated by authors who reach into the well of the collective unconscious. Poet David Whyte refers to this as writing below the horizon. A place where Coleridge and Keats describe as the primary imagination.

AI cannot draw on this mysterious, non-physical entity. It can only draw on content written by people who access this mysterious, non-physical entity.

Roy Williams challenged AI to an ad-writing contest.

He created an experiment that invited prompt-whisperers to write an ad for a diamond necklace. His summary of the results was that AI cannot describe jewelry with symbolic language. It will always fail that test.

In a similar way, it is impossible for AI to invent language that never existed. One that still tugs at our heart.

Consider the creative genius of Dr. Suess.

Green Eggs and Ham, The Lorax, and Horton Hears a Who are spiked with new words that still make sense even if we cannot say how.

So when the GenAI hype runs out its course there will be a pregnant pause. It will be when AI generated content is more abundant than human generated content.

It is then we will feel that ache for authenticity.

And slowly the signs will emerge.

On all forms of writing.

This post is 100% organic. The author’s imagination was free-range. And these sentences are algorithm-free.

Mark my word.