Ark of the Lost Angels

The Prophet _{(Credit: Max Bedulenko on DeviantArt)}

Large Language Models are being sold as the future, and they are not.

“Shall we play a game?”

“Love to. How about ‘Global Thermonuclear War?’”

– Conversation between WOPR and David Lightman from WarGames (1983)

American nuclear weapons do not work the way they do in the movies. In film, nuclear weapons typically are controlled by a laptop carried in the nuclear football by one of the President’s aides. There is a dramatic moment when the President hits the big red button on that laptop and the missiles begin flying. Often times the ‘nuclear codes’ are input into the laptop by the President.

The truth is far more banal. The nuclear football contains information on attack options, classified sites, procedures for the emergency broadcast systems, the authentication codes, and communications equipment. The information held in the briefcase highlights the major attack options from which the President can choose. Nuclear ICBMs cannot be aimed at any target on a whim. Their trajectories are pre-planned, so a nuclear strike targeting a specific area doesn’t determine where the missiles are targeted, it determines which of the pre-targeted missiles are launched. The bomber crews have similar mission profiles which includes fuel loads, pre-planned refueling stops, and other logistical challenges which are difficult for the Air Force to figure out on the fly.

Once the President makes the decision to launch, they must confirm their identity with the National Military Command Center through an identity check using the nuclear codes. The codes are an ID check with the people on the other side of the line, reading out the correct information to the NMCC. Then the order to launch must be confirmed by another senior official with the President, usually the Secretary of Defense although others may confirm the order as permitted by law. Once the President’s identity is verified and the order for the attack is given, the NMCC contacts the appropriate nuclear assets for that attack option and gives them their orders.

Within the bomber crews, missile silos, and ballistic missile submarines, the order must be independently verified and consent must be given by two separate individuals. In some nuclear-capable aircraft, such as the General Dynamics F-111 Aardvark, a nuclear consent switch must be activated by both the Pilot and the Weapons Systems Officer before the weapons can be released. On the submarines, the Commanding Officer and Executive Officer must both agree that the orders are valid and mutually order the launch, with the launch keys being stored in a safe whit the combination only provided to the crew alongside the launch orders. In the missile silos, both launch operators must confirm the orders from the authentication code in a sealed envelope secured with multiple locks so that no one operator can open the safe. Additionally, their missiles will only launch once they turn their launch keys and another launch control center follows the same procedure and turns their keys as well.

The reason the nuclear launch procedure works the way it does is to inject the human element into the decision and action processes of the most consequential decision on the planet. Human instinct saved the world from nuclear annihilation multiple times over. Such as in 1983, when Soviet Lieutenant Colonel Stanislav Petrov saved the world from nuclear annihilation by trusting his gut. The automated warning systems claimed five American ICBMs were screaming towards the Soviet Union in a first strike attack. Petrov’s orders were to pass this information up the chain of command, however, his instincts in believing that the Americans would launch everything in a first strike were correct. His refusal to pass along the information, deducing it was an error with the early warning systems, proved to be correct. The USSR did not light the fire of nuclear war in a case of ill-placed paranoia thanks to the human element. The movie WarGames, while lighthearted, explores the anxieties and dangers of handing such a consequential process over to a machine.

Machines cannot make the same decisions humans can. They do not have the gut instincts nor the lived experience to make seemingly illogical decisions which turn out to be correct. They do not have the capability for unconventional thinking which has dominated human history’s greatest success stories. They do not have the emotional responses to guide their decision making. We do not trust machines with control over nuclear weapons for the reason that they cannot react as humans do and might end the world because it is the ‘rational’ thing to do.

So why would we trust machines to make other decisions?

Panacea of Delusion

Artificial Intelligence is being sold as the modern silver bullet, and it’s nowhere close to being so. Society’s reliance on Artificial Intelligence puts everyone in grave danger.

First of all, AI is a bit of a misnomer. True artificial intelligence is sentient, free-thinking, and creative. This is the type of thing prophesized by science-fiction which has no basis in current technology. Large Language Models are imitative, not innovative. They are trained on works created by humans and can only create derivative works. There is no original thinking, logic, or reason behind its decisions, only the pale emulation of true human thinking. Even the term AI when used to refer to video games bears more of a resemblance to sci-fi artificial minds than the LLMs which are today’s hot topic. Video game AI has several sets of actions they can take within the confines of the game world and the player’s actions. They can respond and seemingly ‘think’ for themselves within the sandbox of the game’s environment to provide a challenge for players, however, cannot strategize on their own. Generative AI/LLMs cannot think on their own. It can only synthesize a response based on information out there.

For the purposes of this article, LLMs will be referred to using the common parlance of Artificial Intelligence.

Right now, there is the prevailing opinion within the tech-sector that AI must be successful. Companies such as Google, Microsoft, Meta, and others have dumped massive amounts of money into their AI development efforts. There is a corporate need for this particular venture to pay dividends to recoup the investment and justify the pivot of massive company resource pools to its development. So far, these efforts have been in vain.

Nevertheless, AI is everywhere. Trawling your social media, assisting you in reading documents, replacing web searches for information with ready-made answers to fulfill every request for knowledge without regard for the veracity of that information. AI is being sold as absolutely vital for society despite humanity having gotten along for tens of thousands of years without it. But there is a corporate need right here and now for AI to be successful, so these companies

Thus, it should come as no surprise that these companies which need AI to be a success are trying to skimp out on paying the people who make it possible for their efforts.

Pay the People

Artistry is under fire from AI in ways that are incomprehensively detrimental. One of the largest strikes against AI is the blatant copyright infringement which lie at the foundation of the current success of these LLMs. Intellectual property lawsuits have had landmark impacts on multiple industries. Businesses in today’s world are expected to aggressively protect the ideas they come up with. The arts are expected to roll over and allow themselves to be pilfered without as much as a second thought. The arts and humanities are not seen as important in today’s day in age. So much so that AI companies are arguing that they should get free reign to infringe copyright on artwork, movies, television shows, video games, books, and anything else they can get their hands on to train their models. OpenAI is even arguing that without the right to rip off, that American national security will be weakened and America will lose the AI war.

It’s the weakest argument known to man. Using copyrighted material requires the rights holders, authors, and so on to be compensated for the use of that material. Using something like Seinfeld as an example, the show’s syndication revenue facilitated creator, producer, writer, and actor Jerry Seinfeld’s wealth to billionaire status. Obviously, Seinfeld is an exception not the rule thanks to its mythical status in the television world. Not every show will net that much money for its creators. However, because TV networks wanted to show reruns of Seinfeld, they had to pay for that right, to ensure that for every dollar they made off of advertising for rebroadcasting the show, the people who created, wrote, starred in, and worked on it got their fair share too. US copyright law exists so that others cannot continually profit off of the work of creators without the creators seeing money as well. The entertainment industry exists solely because people are able to make a living when the material they create makes them money. No writer, even if they dreamt of making movies since they were a child, would work in Hollywood if the studios took home all the cash.

AI companies argue that they do not have the same responsibility to pay creators for using their material to train the models because it qualifies as fair use. They claim that the results of generative AI do not devalue the work of the original creators, and therefore, should be allowed to use their work freely. Small artists on sites like DeviantArt rely on commissions for their livelihoods. They bring someone’s request to life by hand, using the skills they gained through schooling, self-teaching, or other avenues. From a human perspective, emotion is poured into art in ways no machine without a soul could ever replicate. From a business perspective, that is the result of spending on education, labor, materials, and so on. To profit off the result of someone’s out-of-pocket expenses without paying a dime to them is theft, plain and simple.

Disney and Universal would agree, and they’re taking legal action as a result. Copyright laws protect studios and entertainment companies as much as they protect the artists, voice actors, musicians, and so on. Perhaps they protect the large corporations even more so. If the courts rule in favor of the AI companies in a case like this, it sets a dangerous legal precedent over proprietary material. The idea of preventing people from making AI videos of Mickey Mouse or Dominic Toretto doing things which might damage the brand seems raising a lot of hay over something relatively harmless. However, without the right to protect proprietary information, every company would either be sunk or refuse to do business in America. Software companies whose development efforts would go to training competitors’ AI models would be just as damaging as a large bout of corporate espionage.

AI represents a massive threat to economic stability due to its potential to disrupt the white-collar jobs in addition to the threats to the manufacturing and entertainment industry impacts of the increased use of AI. The overreliance on AI will snowball into a lack of experience and qualified individuals down the line. The more entry-level jobs replaced by AI, the fewer experienced individuals will take over as older employees retire, which is another future crisis in the making. Without institutional knowledge and memory, legacy systems will be harder to maintain, potentially at higher cost. Furthermore, without a generation able to make as much money proportionally speaking to their parents at the same point, the less money they will have to spend. This sees an impact on the economy as well; the less money moves in an economy, the greater the stagnation that will occur. Inflation, rising costs of living, and an inability for the majority of the population to pay for housing, food, utilities, etc. will all contribute to societal instability. Generational problems in the future have to be addressed in the current age.

The greatest societies throughout history, Islamic Golden Age, Renaissance Europe, post-war America, all had booming creative industries. Art and commerce dovetailed together to create a better society. The humanities are necessary for understanding the society in which they are created because art is a mirror a society holds up to itself to view its flaws and imperfections. Art is inherently political and critical and illustratory. Commerce allows art to flourish, with the Renaissance ages seeing wealthy families and individuals patronize artists to create great works. Even in the Gilded Age in the late 1800s saw the most successful business-owning families build libraries, concert halls, and universities.

The lack of care shown to the creative arts by the tech-sector “visionaries” feels rooted in a sense of smug superiority and disdain for the arts. It’s a way to declare an arrogant victory from software engineers and STEM workers who believe the humanities were hippie endeavors for clueless dreamers with their heads in the cloud. In spite of this sentiment, the entertainment industry does business worth hundreds of billions of dollars each year.

With AI existing to leech all the value it can without giving anything up, it exemplifies the economic crisis society is hurtling towards at supersonic speeds. When upward economic mobility stalls, the conditions seen throughout society worsen. The more wealth concentrated in the top slice of society, the harder everyone else has to fight for the remaining scraps. Those times create massive political instability and societal upheaval. Crisis and civil war tend to be the results of such times.

It would be easier to navigate if it were possible to trust what’s in front of your very eyes.

The Loss of Reality

“Well, who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

– Chico Marx as Chicolini in Duck Soup (1933)

Sir William Francis Butler wrote in Charles George Gordon in 1889, “The nation that will insist on drawing a broad line of demarcation between the fighting man and the thinking man is liable to find its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.” A sentiment summarized that people must be well-rounded in all avenues for a better society. The internet would say the original statement belonged to Athenian historian and general, Thucydides.

AI synthesizes the incorrect information strewn across social media and the rest of the internet and presents the common trends as absolute fact. No sources, no reasoning, just an absolute, unimpeachable untruth to an inherently distrustful society which takes its word as gospel. 

Elon Musk engineered Grok and integrated it with his social media platform to drive user engagement. Elon Musk also often spouts falsehoods to support his political leanings which are then contradicted by his own AI model. He called Grok (correctly) speaking about the frequency of right-wing violence as “a major fail.” Musk’s own AI platform countermanding the narratives he tries to spin resulting in him adjusting the algorithm to be more favorable to his point of view.

Truth has become subjective.  

AI usage is also killing the environment. Water usage and heat production are off the charts. Overuse will create resource shortages, which will create the conditions for resource wars, which has the potential to spiral into World War III. The overuse of AI for simple tasks, which can be easily accomplished with a bit of effort and critical thinking, presents massive dangers to cater to a society which refuses to think for itself.

A massively alarming subset of the population believes AI is an acceptable replacement for human connections. People anthropomorphize AI. This is not the sentient artificial being of many a film, novel, comic, or television show. Saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to these LLMs does not do anything but eat up money and more of the precious environment. From a psychological perspective, that is unhealthy. Humanity evolved over hundreds of thousands of years to be the social creatures they are known to be today. By deemphasizing human interaction, people will further separate themselves from a sense of objective reality, and the healthy human interaction necessary for proper development. AI cannot interact with humans the same way other humans can, it can only approximate an illusion of such interactions.

In fact, AI can approximate illusions of much more sinister nature as well. AI is being used in smear jobs with impunity. The technology is so new that is has so few regulations. AI deepfake porn is just one way the technology is being used to harm others. This is situational, but an unfortunately common use of the technology. AI, like all tools, is amoral. It is only constrained by the ethics of its users. Deepfake porn is unfortunately only the tip of the iceberg. AI is being used to impersonate government officials. This spells immense amounts of danger for the public’s grip on reality.

Additionally, the use of AI in government decision making should give everyone cause for alarm. From seemingly using ChatGPT to create tariff policy to asking AI which classified documents should be revealed to the public, the current administration has a reliance on AI which should rank up with the highest security breaches and acts of treason ever committed in the United States of America. There are very specific protocols governing classified information, and extremely steep punishments for breaking those rules. To have an administration willingly feed sensitive information into a massive vat of data powering a glorified chatbot which looks at the most popular, not the most correct, information when creating its responses is disastrous for national security and the strength of the country. The reason why the human touch is used in matters such as economic policy or intelligence work is the same reason why humans have controls at every stage of using nuclear weapons.

“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

– George Orwell in 1984

Having an objective reality is a cornerstone for a functioning society. The dangerous lies being peddled as the truth by the current President, news outlets such as Fox News, and entertainment figures speaking authoritatively on matters in which they are completely unqualified as pushed a substantial portion of the population to reject reality in favor of their own pre-conceived notions. Facts no longer matter.

The prevalence of AI in these matters means not only is information from the government being provided to tech companies, foreign nations, and the public at large, but it erodes the public’s trust in the government. The use of AI as a panacea will only see economic growth stall and regress, trust in institutions collapse after being eroded for so long, and an insular society ripe for absolute Armageddon, in addition to damaging the environment which is already straining under the weight of the billions of humans on the planet.

Stop using AI to do things for you. Critical thinking skills and the human touch are absolutely vital to today’s existence. Exercise your own brain so that others who do the same with more malicious goals in mind cannot take advantage of you. We live in an increasingly hostile world where nothing is the way it seems. Learn to discern truth from a ready-made reality, even as tempting as the illusion might be. The world is so much richer when you feel its warmth, taste its offerings, and hear its songs. It is okay to not be perfect as someone. There is glory in effort, and dignity in falling short. Don’t deprive yourself of the innately human experience of learning because a machine offers an easier path to completion.

Fairytales often warned that the easiest past almost always carried the greatest cost.

On a personal note, I will never use AI. Every word written on this website will be written by me, or by a guest contributor should the opportunity to have one ever arise. Every idiosyncrasy of writing is one I developed by studying English Literature, reading, and writing as much as I have. I worked hard to develop my writing skills, and I refuse to give some machine the satisfaction of learning from me willingly, nor would I consider it ethical to put my name on something I did not create myself. I am as good as I am because I put the time and effort into learning this myself. I want every word I write to have heart and soul. I want to struggle over my writing because that is the most human thing to do. We live in an age of insanity, of chasing profits above all else, of playing god with everyone’s lives thanks to the internet which we all have to rely on. I have to play the game in the world, but every square inch I can take back, I will take it. If you are going to corrupt the ground on which I stand, you may have it once you pry it from my limp, lifeless, cold, human hands.

Skynet can suck it.