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mostlysignssomeportents · 8 months

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How plausible sentence generators are changing the bullshit wars

This Friday (September 8) at 10hPT/17hUK, I'm livestreaming "How To Dismantle the Internet" with Intelligence Squared.

On September 12 at 7pm, I'll be at Toronto's Another Story Bookshop with my new book The Internet Con: How to Seize the Means of Computation.

In my latest Locus Magazine column, "Plausible Sentence Generators," I describe how I unwittingly came to use – and even be impressed by – an AI chatbot – and what this means for a specialized, highly salient form of writing, namely, "bullshit":

https://locusmag.com/2023/09/commentary-by-cory-doctorow-plausible-sentence-generators/

Here's what happened: I got stranded at JFK due to heavy weather and an air-traffic control tower fire that locked down every westbound flight on the east coast. The American Airlines agent told me to try going standby the next morning, and advised that if I booked a hotel and saved my taxi receipts, I would get reimbursed when I got home to LA.

But when I got home, the airline's reps told me they would absolutely not reimburse me, that this was their policy, and they didn't care that their representative had promised they'd make me whole. This was so frustrating that I decided to take the airline to small claims court: I'm no lawyer, but I know that a contract takes place when an offer is made and accepted, and so I had a contract, and AA was violating it, and stiffing me for over $400.

The problem was that I didn't know anything about filing a small claim. I've been ripped off by lots of large American businesses, but none had pissed me off enough to sue – until American broke its contract with me.

So I googled it. I found a website that gave step-by-step instructions, starting with sending a "final demand" letter to the airline's business office. They offered to help me write the letter, and so I clicked and I typed and I wrote a pretty stern legal letter.

Now, I'm not a lawyer, but I have worked for a campaigning law-firm for over 20 years, and I've spent the same amount of time writing about the sins of the rich and powerful. I've seen a lot of threats, both those received by our clients and sent to me.

I've been threatened by everyone from Gwyneth Paltrow to Ralph Lauren to the Sacklers. I've been threatened by lawyers representing the billionaire who owned NSOG roup, the notoroious cyber arms-dealer. I even got a series of vicious, baseless threats from lawyers representing LAX's private terminal.

So I know a thing or two about writing a legal threat! I gave it a good effort and then submitted the form, and got a message asking me to wait for a minute or two. A couple minutes later, the form returned a new version of my letter, expanded and augmented. Now, my letter was a little scary – but this version was bowel-looseningly terrifying.

I had unwittingly used a chatbot. The website had fed my letter to a Large Language Model, likely ChatGPT, with a prompt like, "Make this into an aggressive, bullying legal threat." The chatbot obliged.

I don't think much of LLMs. After you get past the initial party trick of getting something like, "instructions for removing a grilled-cheese sandwich from a VCR in the style of the King James Bible," the novelty wears thin:

https://www.emergentmind.com/posts/write-a-biblical-verse-in-the-style-of-the-king-james

Yes, science fiction magazines are inundated with LLM-written short stories, but the problem there isn't merely the overwhelming quantity of machine-generated stories – it's also that they suck. They're bad stories:

https://www.npr.org/2023/02/24/1159286436/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-magazine-clarkesworld-artificial-intelligence

LLMs generate naturalistic prose. This is an impressive technical feat, and the details are genuinely fascinating. This series by Ben Levinstein is a must-read peek under the hood:

https://benlevinstein.substack.com/p/how-to-think-about-large-language

But "naturalistic prose" isn't necessarily good prose. A lot of naturalistic language is awful. In particular, legal documents are fucking terrible. Lawyers affect a stilted, stylized language that is both officious and obfuscated.

The LLM I accidentally used to rewrite my legal threat transmuted my own prose into something that reads like it was written by a $600/hour paralegal working for a $1500/hour partner at a white-show law-firm. As such, it sends a signal: "The person who commissioned this letter is so angry at you that they are willing to spend $600 to get you to cough up the $400 you owe them. Moreover, they are so well-resourced that they can afford to pursue this claim beyond any rational economic basis."

Let's be clear here: these kinds of lawyer letters aren't good writing; they're a highly specific form of bad writing. The point of this letter isn't to parse the text, it's to send a signal. If the letter was well-written, it wouldn't send the right signal. For the letter to work, it has to read like it was written by someone whose prose-sense was irreparably damaged by a legal education.

Here's the thing: the fact that an LLM can manufacture this once-expensive signal for free means that the signal's meaning will shortly change, forever. Once companies realize that this kind of letter can be generated on demand, it will cease to mean, "You are dealing with a furious, vindictive rich person." It will come to mean, "You are dealing with someone who knows how to type 'generate legal threat' into a search box."

Legal threat letters are in a class of language formally called "bullshit":

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691122946/on-bullshit

LLMs may not be good at generating science fiction short stories, but they're excellent at generating bullshit. For example, a university prof friend of mine admits that they and all their colleagues are now writing grad student recommendation letters by feeding a few bullet points to an LLM, which inflates them with bullshit, adding puffery to swell those bullet points into lengthy paragraphs.

Naturally, the next stage is that profs on the receiving end of these recommendation letters will ask another LLM to summarize them by reducing them to a few bullet points. This is next-level bullshit: a few easily-grasped points are turned into a florid sheet of nonsense, which is then reconverted into a few bullet-points again, though these may only be tangentially related to the original.

What comes next? The reference letter becomes a useless signal. It goes from being a thing that a prof has to really believe in you to produce, whose mere existence is thus significant, to a thing that can be produced with the click of a button, and then it signifies nothing.

We've been through this before. It used to be that sending a letter to your legislative representative meant a lot. Then, automated internet forms produced by activists like me made it far easier to send those letters and lawmakers stopped taking them so seriously. So we created automatic dialers to let you phone your lawmakers, this being another once-powerful signal. Lowering the cost of making the phone call inevitably made the phone call mean less.

Today, we are in a war over signals. The actors and writers who've trudged through the heat-dome up and down the sidewalks in front of the studios in my neighborhood are sending a very powerful signal. The fact that they're fighting to prevent their industry from being enshittified by plausible sentence generators that can produce bullshit on demand makes their fight especially important.

Chatbots are the nuclear weapons of the bullshit wars. Want to generate 2,000 words of nonsense about "the first time I ate an egg," to run overtop of an omelet recipe you're hoping to make the number one Google result? ChatGPT has you covered. Want to generate fake complaints or fake positive reviews? The Stochastic Parrot will produce 'em all day long.

As I wrote for Locus: "None of this prose is good, none of it is really socially useful, but there’s demand for it. Ironically, the more bullshit there is, the more bullshit filters there are, and this requires still more bullshit to overcome it."

Meanwhile, AA still hasn't answered my letter, and to be honest, I'm so sick of bullshit I can't be bothered to sue them anymore. I suppose that's what they were counting on.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/07/govern-yourself-accordingly/#robolawyers

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

#pluralistic #chatbots #plausible sentence generators #robot lawyers #robolawyers #ai #ml #machine learning #artificial intelligence #stochastic parrots #bullshit #bullshit generators #the bullshit wars #llms #large language models #writing #Ben Levinstein

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jimmyspades · 2 months

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If I ever say a word about Ultron on this blog I need one of you to put me down like a sick old dog. I have to draw the line somewhere NEVER let me speak about that robot. Stupid movie

#unfortunately his big speech is a trending tiktok sound right now #so every day I’m randomly exposed to james going ‘I was meant to be beautiful..’ while a nostalgic shoegaze song plays in the background #and it’s making me crazy actually. my lawyer bf from tumblr is also a robot on tiktok……

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pcktknife · 1 year

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none of you told me blackquill has an insane older sister ...

#who almost definitely killed this kid shes the 3rd other person in this case and the captain is way too easy #like its gotta be her #an interesting family for sure lawyer whos super into samurai stuff and a space robot technician alright #kae.txt

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commanderfreddy · 8 months

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my toxic trait is that i dont block bot followers because it inflates my ego to see my follower number go up

#idk why i said toxic trait singular im a human being theres plenty of things wrong with me #fred says a thing #anyway i hope all the scantily clad robots in my notes enjoy seeing star trek jokes and overly ornate fanart of lawyer video game

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decompose1 · 2 years

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Hiii this is the paper ramble ask

I wanna hear literally everything u think abt him do NOT hold bamk

GOSH WHERE DO I BEGIN. Paper is such an interesting character, it's a huge shame that we hardly see him after s1 :o(.

Paper is definitely one of those characters who has this super common mischaracterization problem, creating a less interesting fanon version of him, and that's Also a huge shame to me. I think people often water him down to ONLY being this meek sweetheart baby character.

He definitely struggles a lot with anxiety, that's provably true as Justin has mentioned this several times. He's generally a kind, gentle, friendly person. BUT. There's more to him than that!

He's nice, but he can be a little bit self centered. He's sort of a doormat (literally at one point, if you consider that scene where OJ is standing on him), but he's also... Not super aware of other people sometimes? He tends to worry about himself, and often forgets the needs of others. He's DEFINITELY petty- Paper has a tendency to cling to grudges, which is honestly a pretty funny consistent part of his character i've noticed. This guy talks like he's going to have a heart attack if one more stressful thing happens, but lord can he be SALTY.

(I also feel it worth pointing out he's... Not a baby, he's a lawyer. This guy got a law degree. Paper has been to college.)

Anyways. I think a lot of my focus on the guy tends to center on him as a system, since that was interesting to me even if it wasn't done very well (... not that i really expected some kids in the early 2000s to accurately write DID). I think about the way it turned him into a generally more understanding person, where he places more focus on self care and therapy than he did before, because he KNOWS how important it is now. I think he probably tries to help out the other contestants here and there with some stuff he's learned. I think he'd be good to talk to if you needed to have a real serious mental health jam. I DEFINITELY want YinYang to talk to him at some point- i feel like them being sort of face to face would be interesting. Paper sort of pushes down and hides his alter (which he canonically still has). He masks. YinYang is incapable of doing that- they're both extremely active, almost always sharing the front.

I think Paper meeting Yang in S2 would've been a very unpleasant reminder of EP, but i... wonder how him meeting S3 Yang would go. Yin and Yang used to be a lot more like him, hating and attempting to control each other - and i think it's an interesting parallel they have, because Yin and Paper are very similar. They both viewed this angrier, more aggressive alter as something to hate/fear/control. Yin had constantly tried to repress and control Yang, and Paper, well. LITERALLY fought EP to try to repress him, too. ...So i sort of wonder how Paper would feel about the two now that they've started to calm down and understand each other better. Yang isn't nearly as violent as he used to be now that Yin has somewhat let go of that short leash he kept him on. Maybe Paper could learn something from them.

#or from candle. yknow. either way #inanimate insanity #ii paper #does mepad have a law degree.#or does he just have like #a lawyer app. and the judge was like.#well. i suppose that works because you are also defending another robot

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eatyoursparkout · 4 months

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did my penance (updated june bug), now i get to seize my newest fixation by the horns

#i'm a simple man w/ simple needs. they include victorian (edwardian?)/meiji era lawyers making out #if there are any tg//aa fans amidst my robot followers i hope you like baro//ryuu or [ship name redacted for spoilers]#because I’ve written 1500 words in an hour and a half. the inspiration is real #book.chatter

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dumpsterfireinc · 3 months

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Sigh..... Fictional guys I'm unhealthy attached to. Put me in a cage or something

I recommend making these for uh. Motivation 👍

#terminator 2 #t-800 #my lawyer is also..... my dad???? (bobby tag)#john connor his robot and his weird fucking friend (t-800 tag)#selfship #platonic self ship #yipppeeee!!!

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changeling-droneco · 2 years

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Kiibo robot apocalypse au when. Like there’s so much room for potential, whether it be Kiibo accidentally stumbled his way to an army after things escalated incredibly quickly and now he has no idea how to make things stop escalating or darker kiibo who is so fucking done with being treated so differently he’s going to get some damn respect even if he doesn’t really wanna actually hurt anyone. I just think there’s a lot of potential for Kiibo being pushed into a villain role and kinda sucking at it but somehow continuing to win here.

Extra points if Kokichi is forced to be the damsel in the distress because Kiibo figured it would probably be a good idea to get kokichi gently out of the way before Kokichi decides to make things Worse so now he’s pouting in a very well decorated cell somewhere. Kokichi is, of course, more upset about how horribly bad Kiibo is at evil dictator aesthetics then he is about being kidnapped. Seriously who gives their prisoners a weighted blanket c’mon what is this weak shit where’s the torture he feels cheated out of some torture!

#local robot decides lawyering up no longer enough to deal with robophobia #ndrv3 #kiibo #kiibouma #kokichi ouma #k1-b0 #kokichi #new danganronpa v3 #this has been three am thoughts

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skhardwarevers1 · 5 months

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guys I’m a really good lawyer you should hire me

#I don’t care if you did the crime I will defend you always !!!#I specialize in robot rights but I will be anyone’s lawyer #S.K thinks

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tracfone · 7 months

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"how come you always need financial help in the middle of the month" it's the mother FUCKING car insurance and I hate it so much

#it wouldnt be such a pain if i didn't get into an accident last year #that was written off as an at fault because the other guy had money and a lawyer #even though the damage done to my car could not have been caused by anything else but getting hit on that side and not a headon collision #ok back to not talking about my life again. i would much rather talk about gay robots

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ancientgoldring · 2 years

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#sonic boom #Sonic boom roleplay #Sonic boom rp #sonic roleplay #Sonic rp #original character muse #oc muse #sonic the hedgehog #knuckles the echidna #dr eggman #Orbot #boom sonic #boom knuckles #boom eggman #knuckles is a terrible lawyer 😅#Sonic should choose a better lawyer 🫤#why is the judge one of Eggman’s robots? 🤨#the villagers are not very wise 😓

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thechampagnesocialist · 1 year

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Yeah sure the domiku conversation is just totally hypothetical-- Im not downloading synthv and a voice bank-- Im not tuning ghost lawyer-- haha

edit: ive forgotten how much of a PAIN synth v is to use. god.

#...#okay its NOT miku because shes expensive and is only compatible with specific program and im too lazy to pirate those #but the main point is that I want to have a funny robotic girl singing ghost lawyer with a fanart of dom as miku alright? alright.

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torchiiko · 1 year

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i have videos games on my lappytop that i can barely play Bc its so old and slow and hardly portable anymore and my setup is Not Comfy and and. waahhhh

i miss my sims i miss inscryption. i have subnautica but ive never played it bc i dont trust the laptop to run it well At All i miss monster prom !! i wanna play games from my bed!!! grrhraghh

#stardew valley has controller support so i can play it on my tv with hdmi but im not always in the Mood for stardew yknow #i wanna play with my ocs in the sims i wanna get mods and cc and make my sona as accurately as possible #i wanna date monsters and get all the endings i wanna play cards with a forest deity and a mean robot #also the reason my laptop isnt portable is bc it just. turns off if its not plugged in and its got a very finnicky port #so i cant rlly move it a lot without messing everything up its gotta stay in the exact position #Hoping to get a new one this year tho so i can do a lot of the things i wanna do. so far it seems pretty unlikely :/#im gojna finish this epi of aa with an actua l lawyer and then sleeps i tjink #torch chatter

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squishycheekanon · 2 years

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Okay I have to ask everyone now cause I have four upcoming fics and I like to be organised. Right now I feel like I’m not so let’s do a poll of what you want next..

Yandere!Robot!Techno

Vampire!Techno

Lumberjack!Techno

Lawyer!Techno

#squishycheekanon #squishycheekanonanswer #asks are appreciated #beefy!techno #lumberjack!techno #Robot!Techno #vampire!techno #lawyer!Techno

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danieandflars · 2 years

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Susan Calvin: So you’re never going to tell us, then? If you’re a robot or not?

Stephen Byerley: I suppose you could say I’m non-binary. :D

Calvin:

Byerley: :D