Alan Marshall Milner
2 min readFeb 19, 2024

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Sorry, but I will not be clapping for this one. I agree with most of the tip-offs you've tipped us off to, but I deeply disagree with any use of AI systems in content creation...and I was working on AI development projects in the mid-eighties myself.

My objection stems from the loss of communication acuity across the spectrum of verbal and written communications. Use it or lose it....and we are losing it.

I even have problems with Grammarly. I have deliberately not purchased the advanced version of Grammarly because I already disagree quite strongly with many of the grammatical suggestions that Grammarly makes in an attempt to lure me into purchasing their paid version.

I write the way I write because the feedback I received over a sixty-year career as a writer has taught me how to communicate the way I want to communicate...and I often find that changing the way I communicate often changes the content of the communications.

No machine system can ever replicate that experience but I see obvious mind-traps stemming from the use of these technologies.

Examples:

My extensive use of keyboards has resulted in no longer be able to write longhand because my handwriting has atrophied to the extent that I can't decipher my own scribbles. I can no longer print (and I was trained as a draftsman so I know, er, knew, how to print correctly) for the same reason. I have become completely dependent upon keyboard solutions.

(I have also found when circumstances required me to write longhand or print, that I am so dependent upon spelling and grammar checkers that I am crippled by their absence.)

I have also become hypercritical of the increasingly prevalent trend toward dictation, eschewing the entire mind-body interaction between the human hands and the human brain.

These "innovations" will accelerate the atrophy of our conscious reasoning capacity while at the same time vastly increasing the amount of increasingly questionable data that we are forced to consume whenever we seek out the information we actually want and need.

There's no AI in existence that could possibly have written this screed. It wouldn't even be able to use the word "screed."

PS: My son is a systems architect for an aerospace company and HE uses ChatGPT to write code for him because, while he is a great software designer, he freely admits that he sucks at coding and that the AI does it better...but he can tell at a glance if the AI fucked up or not because he spent a couple of decades writing code before the AIs showed up.

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Alan Marshall Milner
Alan Marshall Milner

Written by Alan Marshall Milner

Alan is a poet, journalist, short story writer, editor, website developer, and political activist. He is the executive editor of BindleSnitch.com.

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