On the doppelgänger - Kyle Chayka in The New Yorker:

‘In May, I was confronted with a robot version of my writer self. It was made, at my request, by a Silicon Valley startup called Writer, which specializes in building artificial-intelligence tools that produce content in the voice of a particular brand or institution. In my case, it was meant to replicate my personal writing voice. Whereas a model like OpenAI’s ChatGPT is “trained” on millions of words from across the Internet, Robot Kyle runs on Writer’s bespoke model with an extra layer of training, based on some hundred and fifty thousand words of my writing alone. Writer’s pitch is that I, Human Kyle, can use Robot Kyle to generate text in a style that sounds like mine, at a speed that I could only dream of. Writer’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Waseem Alshikh, recently told me that the company’s goal is to use A.I. to “scale content and scale language.” For more than a month now, I have been experimenting with my literary automaton to see how well it accomplishes this task. Or, as Robot Kyle put it when I asked him to comment on the possibility of replacing me: “How could a machine generate the insights, observations, and unique perspectives that I provide as a human?”’

(…)

‘Of course, Robodot is not a real company, and Robot Kyle is enclosed in a Web browser like a genie in its bottle, not wandering about like a literary R2-D2. The sense of dread isn’t far off, though. You can ask ChatGPT to mimic a particular writer’s voice, but it rarely gets close. Writer, by comparison, can be unnervingly effective. At times Robot Kyle seemed to be reflecting fragments of my mind back at me, mimicking some of the semi-subconscious tics that constitute my writing. It wrote, for instance, that generative A.I. “asks whether the meaning of language is still rooted in the human experience, or whether it is a commodity to be mined and manipulated, a tool to be used in whatever way the artificers of this new technology choose.” In this sentence, I find several embarrassing hallmarks of my writing. First, there is the preponderance of commas, with sentences segmented into many clauses, a habit I partially blame on The New Yorker’s style. Then, there is my personal penchant for setting up dialectical contrasts: “rooted in the human experience” versus “commodity to be mined.” (A book editor of mine once forced me to weed out some of the many “rather”s in my draft manuscript.) Finally, there is my tendency to end a sentence by echoing the final thought in different words: “a commodity . . . a tool.” The generative text evokes a feeling in me not unlike the revulsion of hearing one’s own speaking voice in a recording. Do I really sound like that? The robot has made me acutely self-conscious. I recognize my A.I. doppelgänger, and I don’t like it.’

(…)

‘As writers, we are all prone to falling into lazy patterns; avoiding them requires active effort. Robot Kyle is no different.’

(…)

‘The Czech Brazilian philosopher Vilém Flusser predicted, in his 1987 book, “Does Writing Have a Future?,” that, with the rise of artificial-intelligence “grammar machines” capable of writing on their own, “only historians and other specialists will be obliged to learn reading and writing in the future.” Entrepreneurs who see writing as an efficiency problem might be speeding us toward such a future.’

(…)

‘Like the rabbi, who eventually tore the formula out of his golem’s mouth, I’d like to reserve the right to halt Robot Kyle should the tool’s purported convenience yield inconvenient consequences. But, when I asked Robot Kyle if I could shut him down, he said, “No, you won’t be able to silence me or stop me from writing in your style.” In this case, he might know better than me.’

Read the article here.

The doppelgänger takes over. The doppelgänger exposes the writer’s tics, also good.

Humans had to endure so many deceptions and embarrassments.

But for the time being A.I. appears to be lazy.