The Cognitive Costs of AI Squinting

Bad news: I’ve been thinking about AI again.

Anywhere we go online, we find ourselves squinting. Is that AI generated? We freeze, eyes narrowing at strange images, supposed gameplay clips, even songs. Halfway through reading a politician’s statement, we spot the infamous “it’s not X — it’s Y” construction, before swiping away in disgust.

All this squinting is starting to feel like a cognitive burden—like some ever-increasing percentage of our brains’ RAM is now constantly being allocated to the task of identifying human or robot provenance. Did that em-dash in the previous sentence trip you up? It slowed me down. I spent a few seconds debating whether or not to replace it because of the association that particular punctuation now has with ChatGPT-assisted writing. That’s despite the fact I’ve been using the trusty “—”for decades.1

I find myself squinting for hints of AI reliance constantly, even in my own writing, which is certified AI Free™. I’m not terribly offended when others get assistance from AI to write, because writing is hard and most people find it terribly painful. But I—maybe arrogantly—believe my own writing will always be “better” than AI generated writing, if only because the words I type are an authentic expression of my irreplicable, God-given human spirit.2

At this point I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t feel at least some cognitive dissonance when thinking about AI. Even if you lean optimistic (as I do), you’ve got to admit things are getting real weird, real fast. And the more bothered you are by AI’s omnipresence in media, the worse the cognitive burden of AI squinting becomes.

A quick example:

I’ve been thinking a lot about something Wanderbot told me about the effect his own AI squinting is having on his motivation for his job.

I’ll just quote directly from what he wrote to me:

The main thing I'm worried about is generative AI. Frankly, I hate everything about it, and I'll fully admit it's making me lose interest in a lot of media, games included. Seeing the sheer amount of game developers (indie and AAA alike) throwing artists, voice actors, writers, musicians, etc... under the bus to save a buck is infuriating, especially when those models were built upon those people's work. I've received emails for and rejected countless games over the past three years for using generative AI, and that number is rising alarmingly.

I'd be less bothered if developers properly labeled their usage of AI on Steam, but for every developer that does it feels like two more actively refuse to do so and it's making my efforts to avoid covering their games far more time consuming. It's not very fun having to scrutinize every game to this degree, and rather than wearing down my resistance to seeing AI in games, the increase of its usage is just pushing me away from games in general.

—Wanderbot, in an email to Push to Talk

This is a person feeling discouraged. He’s becoming less motivated to do the thing he’s dedicated the last decade of his life toward.

I don’t really know what the solution is here. But I’ll make two predictions:

1. Many people (maybe even a majority?) are going to feel basically unbothered spending time on an internet where a huge percentage of content is synthetic. Arguably, we’ve already been living in that world for a long time.

2. But another significant slice of the audience is ultimately going to decide to withdraw away to venues less exposed to synthetic content. This is already happening now as people withdraw their attention from platforms with For You feeds in favor of private group chat and Discord servers. But new venues are going to emerge.

This latter group will obviously include the self-identified anti-AI crowd, but I think the demand for these new spaces will be bigger than that. There’s only so much cognitive burden anyone can take. Soon, it’ll seem like a basic cognitive security practice to limit time spent on the open web.

1

Here’s me in 2014 going full ChatGPT (eight years before it launched) while describing “Twitch Plays Pokémon” in a piece for WIRED:

It started just over a week ago when an anonymous programmer used Javascript and Python code to connect Twitch's chat functionality to a copy of the 1996 Game Boy game Pokémon Red, the first in Nintendo's mega-popular series. Anyone watching the stream could type commands—up, left, down, A, B—and the game reacts as if you'd hit the corresponding button on a Game Boy.

Simple, right? Now imagine 75,000 people trying to elbow you out of the way and press the buttons on your Game Boy. It's not actually you playing the game—it's a vast hivemind of which you are but one small part.

2

The single greatest thing ever written about the conflict between humanity and technology was written for a banquet speech by a Mississippi man in Stockholm, Sweden on December 10th, 1950.