Is it a particularly academic thing to obsessively re-read one’s emails, texts, reports, slides and yes blog posts to evaluate how the sentences fall or fail? And is it particularly academic to slide back across paragraphs written several years back and think: hey, that has a certain something to it? And then (panicky): I don’t think I could write that again, now, ever. I’ve been smart enough to avoid ever really looking back at my dissertation. Probably only did within a year of finishing it, and even, already, then I thought: how did I think to say that? How did I know to take the argument there? Who was ghostwriting (can one ghostwrite for oneself)? Of course with AI we’ll always now have that feeling, I guess. Being ghosted. Ghosting oneself (and everyone else). Already I just grab those bits and bytes tossed at me when I Google something. Sure, sounds right, moving on now. Because it just doesn’t matter, does it, whether much of what we search up is precisely accurate. Ok, sure, there are lots of contexts in which it matters a great deal. But when are we going to publicly and to ourselves admit that the majority of online sleuthing we’ve been doing since the early aughts hasn’t been sleuthing but trivia grabbing. Temperature in October in Anchorage (do I need that information? two months later I won’t remember why I cared for that moment, no doubt to answer some now question). I mean, that’s what’s fundamentally different between my information world now and back in the 80s when I went to school of the 90s when I got married and went to grad school. No, it’s not the sophistication of library databases that’s blown the world open. It’s the always-on call-a-friend feature of finding stuff out. I guess we mostly just moved on back in the day. You’re talking to your parents or a friend and something comes up – the price of gold per ounce, the name of a currency in another country, why x is called x or y is called y. So maybe (if we were really motivated), we could answer some things with a dictionary of that set of Encyclopedia Brittannica that had been on the living room shelf since we were in grade school. But if it went beyond that, we probably just moved on, perhaps after someone asserted what was likely true, un fact-checked, and everyone elase tacitly took their word for it.

Wasn’t that fantastic, actually? We made crap up all the time. We flexed our this-sounds-plausible skills contantly. Probably in the 70s (that average temperature in x place) because you know the Gulf Stream. Nothing can cut a diamond except a diamond. You can get into an elite school by doing something brave on your college essay (like writing the word “brave” and nothing else). I mean, sure, we were all idiots and no surprise that the biases of our friend-groups and family and where we lived and what was familiar or foreign had tremendous weight on how we decided we’d heard something “true” (or true enough), moving on.

And that of course is utterly unfamiliar to us now that we have the world of facts at our fingertips. Thank all gods that be we aren’t at the mercy of those biases anymore now that we can tell our phones or watches or whathaveyou to give us real answers. Er.

I’d venture to say that both back when we were all ignorant and now that we’re still all ignorant but won’t admit it, when it mattered to (most of) us to do more than hazard a guess or take Google’s word for it, we took the time to find out, not moving on until we felt we had the information we needed. The fact that so many people are taking what’s offered for easy digestion online with no critical response shouldn’t surprise us. When have we ever taken the time to do more than move right along with a good enough answer unless it mattered to us. I’m a librarian and it stuns me sometimes the evangelical call to have students critically engage with information generally. When have we ever done that? We know everyone’s overloaded with general information in a way we weren’t before (it wasn’t like the pages of that encyclopedia were being read aloud to us as we moved through our daily lives – which essentially the internet does to us now. Did you know this? Did you know this? Did you know this??). And when have we ever not just been moving right along with good enough information (yes, with all its inaccuracies and biases) except when something actually mattered?

So the issue isn’t so much that we don’t move through our information swamps with enough skepticism as that we don’t care enough to be skeptical about much of it? Want push-back at the crap? Work on making whatever it is matter, which means making it relevant. AI is over-simplifying information. Sure. The internet is full of opinions masking as facts. Yep. Bad actors are trying to control the message. Absolutely. Do we expect 16-year-olds are reacting with horror (horror!) at those revelations. Welcome to our world. Moving on, move along.

I think we should recognize that we haven’t yet all become automotons ingesting drivel with no reflection. The giant deck of trivia cards that comprises the internet is ultimately boring. Handy, but boring. We still crave hearing from the people who always win the game of bullshit and balderdash in this world, who spin the facts in a way that makes us want to grant them authority. We like storytellers with conviction. We like personalities and quirks and assertiveness. Some of that pouring out like poison from mouths of people trying to tear everything down. Some of it pouring out inspiration from the mouts of people trying to lift us up. The internet as encyclopedia is functional and tedious. AI is (so far) pretty boring, condensing, slicing & dicing, serving up trivia in long form. As it starts to have voice it becomes more frightening – and more interesting.

AI’s never look back at what they wrote last week, last year, twenty years ago and ponder the fact that their brains produced those thoughts, chose those words. But like looking at a block of text produced by a well-wrought AI, I can look at something I wrote and wonder what caused words and ideas to fall in this or that way. Both reflections can feel estranging. Why those words, that meaning? The difference is I care that I wrote something – I read what I wrote and feel like I’m learning something about myself (I didn’t realize in the moment when I was writing). I don’t give a shit about the AI and have zero curiosity about why it crafted words in such a way, beyond the same kind of awe I feel in the face of pretty much all tech we use every hour of every day (I click buttons and things are created, purchased. I click buttons. Buttons? I click. Click?).

But people make me curious. Are curious. And the fact that we’re clearly so incapable of moving on from what we disagree with in this world that we’ll put so many trillion words out there (sometimes with the help of those AI’s) to debunk words we want to negate is a tremendous acknowledgement of just how potent they are when directed by human intention. I don’t know where these words come from. I don’t remember how I wrote some things? I can’t recreate the moment of thinking of a certain phrase or word. But unlike gorging myself on trivia that moves in and out, I recognize in what I’ve written (however it got written) that it’s more than an assemblage of facts, neatly organized. That kind of language is where the battles over meaning and action take place. We’ll never care about what we don’t care about. But where we pause to consider and find our own sense-making, there we stop long enough, perhaps, to understand ourselves and the world a bit better.