Condemning authorship statements: A hand-written, full effort, thinking-mode-on piece because Substack's authorship statement submission box crashed — and I crashed out.

As a disclaimer: please pardon the break from my usual "storytelling" voice here. I'm going to swear, potentially a lot.

An unexpected next post But I'll never pass up on a good opportunity, and...

"On fait battre le fer pendant qu'il est chaud"

The subtitle gives away the bait, but it so happens that I was going to make a more in-depth post about academic honesty in the age of AI. In the essay below, I will attempt to get two birds stoned at once (as an ethical alternative to a time-honored tradition): here is my Authorship Statement, and my nascent take on where things like authorship statements stand, as I see it.

We'll start off with two facts.

1. AI touches everything I do. This isn't a defeatist exasperation at the state of affairs, where I lament how Big Tech frantically pushes AI in all aspects of our collective lives. Yes, it is a fact that AI is being infused by hyperscalers into our digital experiences in order to sell us things in increasingly creative and Machiavellian ways — or to find ways to make us pay for the things that were free 10 years ago. I actively choose to embrace the chaos and use AI in ways that enhance my life and imbue it with meaning on my terms (while the compute remains ridiculously subsidized through cheap-as-fuck entry tier plans). I use; lest I be used. I say it again: AI touches every part of my life, with the sole exceptions of my relationships, my personal (emotionally salient) data, and how I show up in the real life spaces I occupy. That is where I draw the boundary, and in doing so I retain my authority and sovereignty over my soul; as a human being.

2. I typed this by hand. By myself, on my phone. No AI. I typed the first version that I accidentally swiped away in the shitty little "authorship statement" box on Substack mobile; I wrote (or typed—once upon a time people argued over the distinction in an eerily similar fashion to what I see today) the second version, painstakingly, and like my classic dumbass self I forgot to copy it. I hit submit, thinking Substack was some infallible truth rather than a shitty mobile app trying its best. And the submission failed. I wrote the simple "fuck you" that is now my authorship statement by hand. I typed this as well by hand on my notes app, unassisted, in a bubble tea shop sitting on a comfy couch, soothing my digital owie. I then copied it to Google Docs, then edited it on my laptop, added some pics, posted it on my website, then posted it here. No AI pass-over, not even fucking a Grammarly spell check. That's my usual process, give or take some AI in the steps between Google Doc to Substack — the extent varying depending on how much I need to research to make sure I'm not talking out my ass. I have nothing to prove.

“There's an old saying in Tennessee — I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, 'Fool me once, shame on...shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again.”

Now here are 3 claims:

1. I have nothing to prove.

2. Good writing is still good even if it came from a bot. Shit writing is still shit even if it came from a person. Average writing does not get magically rescued from that distinction simply by virtue of it coming from the hands, or mouth, of a human being. In fact, when we move past the reactions, we see that beneath them lies the all-too-common fear that we all, these days and across domains, must contend with: "Maybe AI could do this shit better than I can".

3. I'll say it again: use, or be used. For years, we've cultivated a social environment that has normalized subscription pricing models, "personalized" ads specifically designed to appear when you are most likely to want to consume; all on the same bandwidth as our news, intimate updates to our friends lives, our politics, and the digital spaces we call "public domain". We have voluntarily ceded so much access and control of our information to private corporations, and we do so with the assumption that the information — the glut of it, the veritable deluge — is too plentiful for entities to make meaningful sense of, or put to meaningful use. AI, unfortunately, changes that paradigm. Inasmuch opportunity as it offers to the everyday individual to reclaim their digital sovereignty and express their wildest imaginations, it confers exponentially more avenues for the people who provide the technology to make sense of the "Big Data problem", and turn the already frightening Blind Idiot Machinery towards their own ends. It's not a conspiracy to simply open your eyes. We've been hearing it for years already: "This isn't a bug; it's the system working as designed"; "If you're not paying for a product, you are the product"; soon we'll see another bleak maxim rise up — "you are what you use". And we know all too well that the tech industry is cornering the market on addictions (see social media, ads, ever increasing screen time, etc). This is late-stage-capitalist-realism. This is historical materialism in real time, made manifest. The end goal is to have your experience through the screen be the experience you see when you finally look up.

1. Some snippets, and I'll leave you to infer the claim: Substack takes a lot of care in designing the articles, and even the notes. It automatically saves your drafts, remembers where you leave off, allows for convenient ways to format your text to your heart's content on desktop and on mobile...yet the authorship statement, the very thing that should be a credible certificate of human origination — the one quality this app is increasingly obsessed with — is shit. So shit you can type out an authorship statement by hand, hit send, and watch it disappear into nowhere.

b) Another. I wrote this while getting bubble tea. I walked in, took my headphones off, and tried to speak with the cashier to order. They appeared to be very overstimulated; they paused to take an airpod out of one ear to firmly, nervously, tell me that "please only talk to me if you have any issues. If you want to place an order, you can use the self checkout to the left". You can infer the claims here.

But of course, any worthwhile claim should only be put out to be tested and falsified, right?

Now, one prescription: Going forward, we ought to be honest about to what degree AI intercedes in our life and in our work. That's the only way we can reach a common consensus, and align ourselves, all, to something we can ground as truth. That is infinitely important, because from a shared universal truth we can, as a society, honestly and healthily evaluate:

Is AI good for me?

Where am I ceding too much control?

And who, or what, am I ceding it to?