Staying the Course in Writing in the LLM Moment

In March 2024, I published an essay titled Humane Content in World of Language Models. While I have since taken a stronger stance about describing meaningful writing and media as content, it fits here. This essay was prompted by an incisive essay by Maggie Appleton titled The Expanding Dark Forest of Generative AI. I agreed with much of her essay, but disagreed with framing the challenge that humans writing on the internet face in an internet flooded with generative AI as a sort of “reverse Turing test” where humans should think about proving that they are not bots. My first argument against the reverse Turing test framing is that neither I nor anyone else writing on the internet can control what other people think. I know how I produce my articles, essays, and photographs and images, all without generative AI. I have promoted my projects as being humane in the sense that I write as a human being for other human beings who may happen to come across my projects. I subsequently went so…