We spot Certified Human Content! 👏 Check out Jeffrey Bilbro’s Article in Front Porch Republic!
“That said, people immersed in AI-generated text will lack opportunities to develop a sense for sense, a taste for meaning. Good speech or writing makes sense palpable. I have in mind Wendell Berry’s meditation, in “Standing by Words,” on the etymology of “sentence”:
When we reflect that “sentence” means, literally, “a way of thinking” (Latin: sententia) and that it comes from the Latin sentire, to feel, we realize that the concepts of sentence and sentence structure are not merely grammatical or merely academic—not negligible in any sense. A sentence is both the opportunity and the limit of thought—what we have to think with, and what we have to think in. It is, moreover, feelable thought, a thought that impresses its sense not just on our understanding, but on our hearing, our sense of rhythm and proportion. It is a pattern of felt sense.
If we hope to think well, we’ll need to exercise our minds and experience these patterns of felt sense. That’s the only way to develop a taste for truth. Machines—it should go without saying—cannot feel sense, no matter how well they may be able to imitate the verbal behavior of humans who can. Thus, if good writing makes sense palpable, machine text induces a kind of neuropathy, disrupting our ability to intuit truth.”
Jeff Bilbro asks what it may take to sustain the remnants of a contemporary republic of letters on the margins of a public square blasted by machine-speak.
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