Delving Into AI Mindsets
In a world where we perceive life from the lens of our lived experiences, its important to realise that our truth or our reality is the sum total of the things that have passed before.. In short, one’s view though true to them is not necessarily true for the next person and might even be a less complete understanding…
There was a viral social media post on the platform formerly known as Twitter the other day which touched quite a lot of nerves. I shant be sharing the post directly because I am of the opinion, it was either a rage-farming exercise where people post dizzy takes to raise their interactions on social media or the person simply feeds off the engagement as evidenced by their purposely obtuse responses to people who engaged with the content.
The person had been sharing about how they rejected a novel project because they noticed it used the word Delve – because to them that was an indicator that the proposal had been written by ChatGPT. Outside of the AI correlation, they have a dislike of the word because no one (according to their experience) used that word in Spoken English and the only people who used such words are trying to sound clever.
For a bit of background context, the person who made the remark was an American and some people responded in support, adding other “mechanical” words, that were likely an indicator of AI use such as safeguard, robust, demystify and ‘in this digital world’.
In this era, where there’s rampant use and misuse of AI its become so hard to distinguish between what was written by a person and what was written by AI, academic institutions are in so much trouble right now. There are tools which can determine the likelihood of AI having created certain content, by trying to analyse; linguistic consistency, vocabulary complexity, syntactic patterns, stylistic uniformity and perplexity, but at best those offer possibility and not a certainty of AI usage, for now at least. You most certainly cannot flag content as AI via a couple of trigger words you believe no human regularly uses.
Regular readers of my blog might have notice I have certain flare for verbosity in my writing and it consistently predates AI…. Who knows, maybe the Language Learning Models trained on data sets they harvested from internet places such this blog right, how about that?….
English is not my first language, and every bit of English I learnt was from books, English Class and TV… The are words I struggle to pronounce even at my big age because I read them before I heard them spoken out loud… That story isn’t uncommon to me.
Zimbabwe is a former British colony, they came, they conquered and they made us speak like them… I will spare you the other bits of our colonial heritage but long story short, we had to learn the English to the detriment of our indigenous languages even, in some circles, one’s fluency in English is considered as a measure of intellect and a good education, yep, colonisation really did a number on us and we still haven’t fully recovered.
I can express myself faster and more creatively in English than in my mother tongue which while language is suppose to dynamic, somehow stopped growing right around the time the colonisers came and has been steadily dying off. How can it not die off when the are no words to describe what has become reality, the advances in tech, AI, the things one sees, hears and eveyday… We need new words.
In my blinkered view of the world, I used to think that situation as unique to my country but the whole continent is not without its trauma, which it still hasn’t moved past… A large number of my peers across the continent probably have a wider vocabulary than some native English language speakers (not pointing at any continents)
End Rant
~B
PS I ran my article in an AI checker and it is Highly Confident a Human Wrote it… what a brave new world we live in if we have to check our thoughts don’t seem like AI.. welcome to the future.
Becoming The Muse 
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