AI is average because it is an average; or, Why your business should swerve plagiarised words.

We allow ourselves to not see how cheap fast fashion is made and cheap battery chicken grown, and we now also la-la-la about where AI’s cheap creativity comes from. It’s plagiarism. Plagiarised bits mashed with other plagiarised bits and served up so disfigured that not even their original creators would recognise them.

It’s not like I never buy cheap clothes and cheap chicken, but I wouldn’t wear or serve either if I was trying to impress.

Me versus Claude

Putting plagiarism to one side, a bit on AI’s editorial quality and what it means for a business wishing to set itself apart.

The LLM machines generate slurry. Mechanically recovered words for sentence sausages. Individuality is stripped out.

Here’s my intro to this Independent article:

The most popular bar in Uyuni is Extreme Fun Pub. It offers “llama sperm” shots and phallic drinking vessels. Spend an hour in this 1km-by-2km town and you can understand why merrymaking has found such awkward, overeager expression. Fun feels far away here, a forgotten concept to be guessed at. Step down from the first-floor bar to street level – albeit a 3,668m-above-sea-level street level – and the town’s dusty, congestion-free boulevards, sickly and pallid in colour, are as functional as ducting, petering out into flat Altiplano badlands of scrub and rubble. The streets’ unusual width affords glimpses of this landscape from many points in town, as if daring you take it on. Occasionally, a fine dust whips up, so that people squint their eyes and raise hoods. Electricity lines stretch in great sagging lengths. One popular internet café advertises high-speed connections, though the owner admits to every customer that it is in fact muy lento. Very slow – that’s Uyuni all over.

Here’s Claude’s, following my prompt:

My problem, of course, is that Claude’s is passable. It’s specious: superficially plausible. You might even prefer it. To me it’s middle-of-the-road. Any edginess from the gazillion sources trawled by the LLM has been sanded down, lest we detect an author’s unique tone of voice. It’s laundered creativity.

There’s going to be more and more speciousness floating about. An ever-growing AI slopberg. So (by this time next year, Rodney, I swear) having really good human words in your marketing and on your website is going to be an increasingly potent differentiator.