Lex Academic®

Sentences strangely devoid of nuance, inhabited by an eerie, algorithmic tone. There is rhythm – one whose beat you can almost predict in its uncanny cadence – but it does nothing to stir the soul nor to arouse creativity. By contrast, reading AI-written content imparts a feeling of mild doom; a sense that nothingness has been malevolently cultivated, if not cultured, and mobilized into a terrible force. Few things, I shall contend, move with the same marauding, miasmic ick as prose produced by generative AI. While these tools bear their language stillborn, their ‘authors’ hope it will dance its way to success in whichever domain it finds itself foisted and put to work. It is at once ghoulish and grotesque.

‘The ick’ is a term to describe a feeling that something is a bit off. It very broadly denotes an emotion fomenting disgust and revulsion. People describe feeling ‘the ick’ about all manner of things, but common icks include bearing witness to chomping (i.e., eating very loudly without necessarily having one’s mouth shut), watching a fellow diner scrolling on the phone over luncheon, or having poor personal hygiene. The general idea is that one gets a feeling of acute disease and disquiet when exposed to certain stimuli, and icks are a natural, presumably evolved, response to reorient you towards something sounder and safer. The better cultivated one is in matters of taste, the stronger and more particular your ick-responses may be.

Facsimiles are amongst the contenders to disgruntle such people of taste. One need only eat a mango grown on an Essex industrial estate to know it is, at best, a mango-shaped object. One would struggle to show, without two reddened cheeks, an Indian farmer who proudly produces Alphonso mangoes what it is we have likewise denominated. With the consistency of a chamois leather and the flavour of soap-on-a-rope, it is hard to believe that the provision of English-grown mangoes has added anything of value to the marketplace of human life. (Perhaps the English should not be eating mangoes. This post, I was warned, was bound to draw controversy.) Even bearing witness to their ill-born brethren would turn the otherwise joyous and fecund Alphonso mango ashen and barren. It is not a world the Alphonso mango would will.

With the Essex mango, AI-written content shares a morphologically and gustatorily adjacent fate. Looking appetizingly like something-to-be-read, with no immediate eyesores to stir even the sleepiest proofreader, your mind begins to consume the promisingly titled text [whatever creativity goes into producing AI-generated content is disproportionately allocated into its title]. But just a few sentence-shaped constructions in, your appetite recedes (perhaps even retreating entirely) and your face crumples into ick pose. This is not safe reading, if indeed it is reading at all.

So pervasive and tainting is AI-written content that one almost begins to approximate it through exposure. Its lure lies not only in the cost–benefit analysis, but in the breezy contagion of its ‘paint-by-numbers’ facility. The normalized rot of writing that seems less ensouled than a puppet, and smiles at you with its easy but absent animation, begins to coax you to its side of the creativity divide. The splashy siren song of saved time, outsourced thought, and infelicity-free beigeness lands without a ripple. In a world where gloom seems to be the only currency currently proliferating, there is a heavy magnetism to sliding sideways into the AI morass, with everyone from marketeers to statisticians all hawking their latest ‘takes’ into ChatGPT-shaped gobbets.

It is impossible to gauge with precision, but it seems that everybody from tired journalists to expediency-seeking influencers are outsourcing their voices to machines. The content is startlingly vacant and vast. How, one wonders, is such a dearth of expression possible within quite so much prolixity? We all learn to write through reading, and when the material that fills online spaces becomes homogenized – dead behind the eyes, less able to arouse than a distant memory or faded photograph – it can begin to rub off. In the end, one might simply capitulate and lean into these tools, so easeful, unjudging, and ubiquitous have they become. In any event, the bar for genuine creativity seems to have dipped so low that writing as a skilful craft may end up as obsolete as phrenology.

I hope, however, that beyond the lure of quickly drafted posts and papers is the gnawing realization that life is great and best when it is animated by authentic human voices. We feel connection when what we read is soulful, born of experience, suffused with precision-picked language that is intentional, purposive, and crafted to arouse our fellow being from his or her expressive or existential doldrums. We also feel this way when we write with care: when we are selective, discriminating, and vying to reach into people’s hearts and minds. This is not to say I am the most effective at the art – like many others, I too have probably been dulled by over-exposure to AI-generated content. It enters my world through many different sluices at this point: AI voiceovers on YouTube, ChatGPT-drafted coaching programs for diet and fitness, doomscrolling past hundreds of slop reels on Instagram, etc. And I share the weariness of my fellow human in being an insufficiently agile sieve-wielder to prevent its entry.

The best we can do at this point is to remain vigilant and aware of what we actually stand to lose by making AI part of our life’s core machinery. Remember what you valued when you learned to read, when you began to be ambitious about reading, and when you started to write, if indeed that is amongst your valued crafts. Remember what is was like to select an ink pen for a new school year, imagining what you might achieve with every blue refill cartridge. My heart races nostalgically at the thought of it. Even the most pedestrian diarist or letter-writer will want to retain whatever gifts they boast.

But as researchers, creatives, and thinkers, we must not expedite the loss of what time all-too-inevitably takes. Our mental agility, our cognitive zip, and our skills of connection live in our languages. We must militate against their evisceration through mechanization. Even as merely self-reflective, ruminative beings, we should protect and cultivate our imaginative spontaneity and resist the grave, attractive magnetism of accepting the ick-making pseudo-creativity of generative AI.

I hope you will join me in keeping these powers alive.

Louise Chapman is the CEO and Founder of Lex Academic.