In 800 years, a group of students is sitting in a graduate seminar devoted to an era known as the Void Ages. They’ve read a couple of books and watched some of the two-dimensional, low-resolution media once called “movies”. A few students even assembled devices to experience “video games” – interactive stories devoted to accumulating digital representations of value – using the original controllers.
The professor is explaining the psychology behind why game controllers looked like fists covered in nipples, when somebody’s hand shoots up. Everything is fragmentary, and most of what we’ve read in this class was reconstructed from probabilities. Was it because of the atomic wars?
Or the Fire Years?” “No war or global wildfire could do this,” the professor answers gravely, uncoiling a liquid metal tentacle to point at a time map on the wall. All we have left is the output of ancient algorithms. We have to reverse-engineer what people were doing from that.” “So, we can never know if any of what we’re studying in this class is actually what people knew or saw or believed?
It could all be generated by LLMs?” “That’s right. There’s a reason why we call it the Void Ages.” More students break into the conversation, voices overlapping, frustrated and fascinated by the mystery of this pivotal era when their ancestors decided to subsume their greatest works of culture into a word-guessing model, the kind of thing a child would do to wreck their sibling’s homework. It sounds bonkers, but this is the future we’re building for ourselves right now.
When we feed books, movies, games and art into generative AI models, we risk replacing our own cultural history with a mishmash of auto-generated works that offer nothing to future generations who will be desperate to know what we were thinking. It’s as if we are deliberately recreating the tragic void at the heart of Bronze Age history, an era when humans transformed their civilisations across the globe – and left virtually no written narratives behind to explain what the hell happened and why. Who were the enigmatic Sea Peoples blamed for the Bronze Age collapse?
As a writer of both science journalism and science fiction, I continue to be appalled by the idea that using an LLM could substitute for the experience of writing to, for and about each other. The point of writing, of creating culture, is to communicate my own weird way of looking at the world. It’s my letter to you, another weirdo probably.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
