Crossroad of the 'Info Superhighway': Wrangling with AI in Berlin
Should we, as human-intelligence history-writers, allow machines to write our own stories?
BERLIN (28. April, 2025) — Like Dr. Faustus in his dark chambers or Robert Johnson at the Crossroads, I suspect that an extended conversation with Artificial Intelligence (AI) risks giving up one’s soul.
As someone whose long career has been grounded in human intelligence — getting the story right, and getting paid for it — I have some issues with text-generating engines applying Artificial Intelligence (AI) to my/our work, over time. (The fate of the legendary hammer-wielding John Henry also comes to mind.)
In a nutshell, artificial intelligence is to our own (real, human) intelligence
what fake news is to our best (historical, ‘analog’) news-reporting.
Like fake news, the goal of AI’s designers (human or otherwise)
is to fool an ever-widening public into not seeing or knowing (or, arguably, caring about) the difference between which is the fake (or lie) and which is Real (or Truth). In my field, this activity — intentionally fooling people; or ‘professional lying’ — is something that we do when we write creative fiction.
Or poetry.
Or song lyrics….
Artificial intelligence is to human intelligence
what ‘fake news’ is to news.
So I girded myself with garlic and plenty of intellectual amulets last week, as I shook hands (virtually) with OpenAI’s ChatGBT. I boldly walked up to this smooth, silicon-tongued daemon and asked it about three historical subjects that I’ve explored, over time, seeking answers that are only available to readers of my own published work.
In a word, I wanted to see whether the machine “knew” and quoted directly from my own, well-published (but still-copyrighted) stuff. These include articles and books that have been digitized and offered-up (all or in bits) by Google — texts I no longer possess on any accessible hard-drive of my own. (Anyone remember zip-drives…?)
As part of this exercise, I also asked ChatGBT about the real author of these works, allowing it to compose its own AI-generated biography of me. I give the result to readers here, below the paywall (ironically enough) — and I’ll tell you, up front, that reading this synthetic text isn’t worth the money you’re paying for mine.
“Yes, Mephisto can tell you a thousand fine tales,” the man said. “But these are lies you’d be better-off making up for yourself!”
‘I fear we’re giving up our lives and work to this weird machine; and to its owners who ‘graciously’ allow us a peek into the dark-plated mirror, for a glimpse of our own zombified selves.’
At some point, I think we must face the reality that playing around with this technology isn’t real work; rather, it’s more of an exercise in feeding our own egos. In the end, I feel, we will have given all our lives and spiritual-intellectual labor (geistige Arbeit) over to the machine — an apparatus whose owners ‘allow’ us a shady peek into the dark-plated mirror; staring eternally into our own zombified gaze.
Having come to this Crossroads of the “Information Superhighway,” I get the feeling that we’re now dancing about on a burning world — on the devil’s own turf — with just the vaguest sense that we’ve all been “skunked.”
Thanks for reading & sharing, folks.
I do appreciate you.
(…Those of you who aren’t ‘bots’, anyway….. ;-)
All best wishes,
Topper Sherwood
(NOT born in 1932, as ChatGBT might tell you….).