The last poem I wrote, 15 years ago, was this:
There are too many words.
Too many poems.
Too many words
In most poems.
It’s called “Token-type”, because in the poem there are 14 tokens of words, but only 8 unique word types. I thought it was a pretty neat way to embody the distinction made in analytical philosophy between “tokens” (instances) and “types” (the general, uninstantiated kind of thing).
It’s also an attempt at being maximally parsimonious with words — in-keeping with the theme.
With the advent of AI, words are being usefully reduced to a different kind of “token”. A token of meaning. Miraculously, this allows LLMs to “speak” (process and create coherent bundles of words) in no single human language, but all of them at once, symbolically. This is indeed incredible.
However, it’s also led to a great many more words. There were already more words than could ever be humanly read before LLMs. Now the number of words has exploded. Is exploding. But what is being said?
In the before times, all words had been thought by another human. As the exponential output of LLMs continues, the ratio of human-thought written words will tend towards 0. Of course, all words – qua word types – have been thought at some point. But any instance (token) of an LLM-generated word has, by definition, not been thought by a human.
I think we can all agree that ChatGPT decided on the lower-effort option.
And who is reading all these words?
Children now will grow up reading more words from LLMs than people-words. This is sure to change the collective brains of humanity.
Then again — who is reading these enormous reams of words right now?
Likely another AI, to be frank. “Summarise this document”. Probably one of the most common requests, if I were to hazard a guess. A plausible-sounding summary of a statistically plausible-sounding output to what was once a human prompt.
Perhaps we will start requesting other people just give us their inputs, instead of the outputs?
“Just give me the prompt, I’ll do the rest”
Then we can run that ourselves, on our preferred model, with our CLAUDE.md preferences already built-in.
Perhaps we’ll all start talking natively in caveman (“Respond terse like smart caveman. All technical substance stay. Only fluff die“). I mean, it has a certain appeal.
When I re-read the poem I wrote 15 years ago, just before I hung up my writing pen, there is a palpable sense of something between despair, disillusionment, and defeatism. It is an ode to my own weariness with odes.
I suppose that is what this short essay is, too. A moment’s reprieve — not just from AI slop, but from all AI-generated words. A quick “time out” where I try to remember what it is like to think in full sentences, not structured prompts. I read my writing now as I type and wonder — is even my own writing style being influenced? Did I always use the em-dash so much? Did I always use this rhetorical flourish of “this, not that”? If so, did I never think through how many false dichotomies I might be creating?
Maybe it’s time to write more. Keep some semblance of an ability to think in my own human words. To hold on to a voice of my own.
If only there weren’t so many damn words.