The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI

This leaves us with some low-hanging fruit for humanness. We can tell richly detailed stories grounded in our specific contexts and cultures: place names, sensual descriptions, local knowledge, and, well the  je ne sais quoi  of being alive. Language models can decently mimic this style of writing but most don't without extensive prompt e

As the forest grows darker, noisier, and less human, I expect to invest more time in in-person relationships and communities. And while I love meatspace, this still feels like a loss.

Every time you find a new favourite blog or Twitter account or Tiktok personality online, you'll have to ask: Is this really a whole human with a rich and complex life like mine? Is there a  being  on the other end of this web interface I can form a relationship with?

You thought the first page of Google was bunk before? You haven't seen Google where SEO optimizer bros pump out billions of perfectly coherent but predictably dull informational articles for every longtail keyword combination under the sun.

The  dark forest theory  of the web points to the increasingly life-like but life-less state of being online. Most open and publicly available spaces on the web are overrun with bots, advertisers, trolls, data scrapers, clickbait, keyword-stuffing “content creators,” and algorithmically manipulated junk.

There's a swirl of optimism around how these models will save us from a suite of boring busywork: writing formal emails, internal memos, technical documentation, marketing copy, product announcement, advertisements, cover letters, and even negotiating with medical 

insurance companies.But we'll also need to reckon with the trade-offs of making

Humans who want to engage in informal, unoptimised, personal interactions have to hide in closed spaces like invite-only Slack channels, Discord groups, email newsletters, small-scale blogs, and 

digital gardens. Or make themselvesillegibleand algorithmically incoherent in public venues.

In a world of automated intelligence, our goalposts for intelligence will shift. We'll raise our quality bar for what we expect from humans. When a machine can pump out a great literature review or summary of existing work, there's no value in a person doing it.