Editorial: Kicking the Latest Habit
“I found my spirit animal!” My daughter, satisfied. “It’s a horse.”
“How did you figure that?” She doesn’t strike me as horse-like, and unlike some girls, isn’t even interested in horses.
“I looked it up.” Certain.
Looked it up used to mean Encyclopedia Britannica. We had that distinguished, gilt-spredged set, and I would often select a volume at random to see what I could learn about some A’s or I’s. Was Encyclopedia Britannica too Westernized to have a reliable description of indigenous “vision quests” (admittedly, a non-specific umbrella term)? Without a doubt, but it wouldn’t be so presumptuous as to tell me my personal spirit animal.
Looked it up used to mean Googling something, used to mean finding it on Wikipedia. Looked it up used to mean Buzzfeed quizzes. Which Hogwarts house? What’s your enneagram? What’s your Myers-Briggs? Certainty meant sharing results on Facebook. It meant finding a meme of a capybara or a baby hippo, and deciding that you’re so overworked and underpaid that this will have to represent the soul searching required to understand the world around you.
Today, looked it up means asking your favorite LLM bot. Our latest plastic shaman, ChatGPT, will absolutely provide a spirit animal quiz, complete with 🐾 and 🔮emojis. It will follow up with a summary of your animal represented in various traditions, and helpful tips for adjusting your daily life to better represent your animal. You can take a second quiz to find your “shadow animal.”
Looking over the results of my daughter’s search, the needle of my moral compass trembled mightily, resisting its prompts for more and more and more. It wants to help. It’s ready.
For research purposes, I asked it to create a story about finding my spirit animal. Sure enough, I saw a lot of the tics that I’ve been noticing in recent suspected AI-generated submissions in our slush pile. And that was distrubing enough for me to close out the window.
In this last quarter, FFO has seen an uptick in AI stories despite our instructions not to send us this material. To be wasting time trying to figure out who is a real person is infuriating and depressing. It’s left a bad taste in my mouth for anything claiming to be AI. I used to think old people hated the internet because they had unreasonably high expectations for technology. I’m now old; I now feel the same.
I want AI to cure cancer, but not ruin the environment. I want it to stop hackers, not artists. I want it to open doors, not turn off our ability to think for ourselves. Above all, I want AI companies who use copyrighted material to pay large sums of money to artists and authors because actual humans need to eat in order to create. What does ChatGPT eat except fossil fuels?
I am concerned that using LLMs is already too much of a habit for us hapless humans. We’ve never been great at kicking bad habits. We’ve never excelled at putting aside the fun and easy to have a good, old-fashioned think about the hard stuff.
* * *
For this month’s issue, I’ve tried to take a holistic view of this overarching theme of habits and cycles. Some characters struggle to break them. Such is the case in “Things Elan Reacquainted Himself with After Being Broken Out of His Single-Day Time Loop” by D. A. Straith. In this story, the main character wants to move past his parents’ emotional neglect.
Comparatively, Madeline White’s heroine in “The Seal Wife” thinks fondly on her selkie family, and it’s her childhood memories that keep her going back to caress the skin she used to wear.
Some habits lead to unfortunate consequences, as in Elou Carroll’s “It’s Become a Bit of a Habit.” Some can be destructive to a character’s psyche like the teenage protagonist who obsessively swallows her loved ones’ emotions in Julia LaFond’s “The Aftertaste.”
I book-ended this issue with stories about technology specifically. In Zeke Jarvis’ “The Skinfluencer,” we get an extreme take on the use of social media to sell products. In Jennifer Lesh Fleck’s “This Island Toward Which I Row and Row, Yet Cannot Reach Alone,” technology is the means through which a disabled woman finds friendship.
If you’re familiar with sci-fi tropes, you’ll of course see what I’m going for: tech is neutral in both cases. It’s the tool, the means for carrying out the best or worst in us. With luck, we might, just barely, strike a balance.
* * *
Ⓒ Rebecca Halsey