Fighting the Parasite

Liam Justiniano

Artificial Intelligence seems to have taken over any conversation, similar to how its overreached into so many aspects of life. It seems like there’s always something new each week, or you go online and discover a new sphere AI has invaded.

It’s intimidating.

The conversations often make me feel discouraged. There is so much changing constantly and I find that it’s just so hard to keep up with how much AI is evolving. However, what has shocked me the most is how quickly people are submitting themselves to AI.

AI has pervaded every single online space. There just seems to be no escape (I drafted this in Google docs and am haunted by the Google Gemini logo in the corner. It spins and whirls and sparkles when you run your mouse over it– trying to lure you in. Creepy.) 

Mile Klee’s Rolling Stones Article, really uncovers just how embedded in the academic world AI has become. AI is now creating fake articles. Not just in citations like seen in ChatGPT responses, but full on articles with information that mirror real patterns and research conducted by real people. Some of the authors listed are fake people, but more frightening is that some of these articles have real people, real academic listed as the author.

It’s not enough to just fact check pieces by research the credibility of the author anymore. Not only do you have to check the validity of your source. You have to check their sources and even a step further to ensure that there’s real articles and real research behind them, but how far back can we possibly go?

One AI article that gets circulated is essentially poison in the well polluting the validity of all the papers that circulate around it. 

Where does it start and when is this possibly going to end?

However, with all that’s changing in reading, “Composing for Recomposition: Rhetorical Velocity and Delivery” by  Jim Ridolfo and Danielle Nicole DeVoss, it was refreshing to see and reflect about what is sticking around when it comes to rhetoric. Delivery is still extremely important, even though how rhetoric circulates has still changed. (I’m not sure Aristotle could have ever predicted the corruptive powers of Twitter or Reddit.)

I particularly liked the story about Katie, a student activist. She had a poem she wanted to widely circulate. She needed to consider how she delivered her poem in relation to how she wanted it to be received. She had to ask how she needed to deliver her poem in relation to the objective of her poem. She decided that hand-delivery was the most impactful or effective way to reach her objective.

There was something about that exclusively human interaction that really just felt refreshing. While it seems like AI is having a very negative impact on about everything, I guess at the very least, it’s setting up a gray and lifeless background for real human interaction and real human creativity to shine.

I think that the “answer” to “What do we do?” rests somewhere in that warm and authentic feeling of human interaction.