AI is meaningless and human. That’s why his bland voice fits this political moment Nesrine Malik

HHere is a nightmare scenario for you. You are writing a book about how AI is changing reality. You begin using it as a research partner, confident that you are practicing proper hygiene by not allowing it to actually write a sentence of the book. You think you will be careful and check everything again. And then your book comes out and it appears to contain more than half a dozen misattributed or fake citations. Steven Rosenbaum, the unfortunate author, acknowledged that the AI’s results were sometimes “astonishingly wrong,” but errors still crept in.

There are others. A Commonwealth Prize-winning short story claimed it bore the hallmarks of AI. And every time I see the story of a journalist caught researching by fake AI quotes, I cross myself – until the grace of God I go there. But to make sure it’s not left to grace alone, I never touch the matter. When AI results show up as a standard in a search engine, I reject them, rebuke them,…