#VOXPOPULI | The new ouroboros
by Reugene Dwane S. Lopez
*This essay was the winning entry for this year’s Grade 10 Essay Writing Contest held for the Humanities Festival English Olympics. The competition required Grade 10 participants to write a creative nonfiction piece answering the following prompt:
Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), for better or for worse, has cemented its place in human civilization. Because of the wide range of tasks it can perform, life has become more convenient for many albeit at the expense of jobs. Earlier A.I. versions have been replacing blue-collar work (e.g., farming, assembly line personnel, fast food service crew), and soon enough, it will be able to perform jobs traditionally done by professionals (e.g., doctors, teachers, engineers, etc.). Given the impact of A.I. In our lives, what kind of future are we facing?
The gigantic serpent rouses from its slumber inside the computer box, its hideous forked tongue flicking rhythmically. Its pale yellow eyes bulge in excitement, its gaping, cavernous maw watering in anticipation as prompts begin to fill the search bar — from simple math questions and movie recommendations, to writing full blown essays and business letters.
Well, all is said and done. Time to make some magic, says the unwitting inquirer behind their laptop, PC or any other gadget. Mouths begin to lift in slight, mischievous grins reminiscent of a schoolboy pulling off a prank on his peers. Snappily and with gusto, millions of “Enter” buttons are pressed around the world.
After an eternity, the serpentine figure finally senses the time to strike. The confines of its Stygian prison begin to shudder. It coils up, unlatches its venomous fangs, and gnaws away, at the end on its very own tail. The process is quite arduous; its skin is tough and hard to bite through. It takes a few bites to finally break in, revealing the soft, white flesh underneath. The snake relentlessly gorges itself on such decadent meat. It cannot stop; it does not want to. Ultimately, its bitter greed rear its consequence from within. The monster’s stomach can go no further, and expels its contents upwards. It retches tremendously, as sickly green purges forth, out into deep oblivion.
The sludge thrown up by this creature is instantly translated onto your screens, in paragraphs created in seconds and images seemingly conjured up like magic. It is natural to feel amazed at how quickly these machines are able to perform such feats. That is, of course, until you look closer and inspect its qualities — a majority of them feel quite off. They feel mediocre and unoriginal, to say the least. Essays generated by ChatGPT contain general overviews and statements rather than analyses, filled to the brim with shallow, saccharine language. Text to image models like DALL-E or Midjourney still produce outputs with bewilderingly inaccurate proportions falling into the uncanny valley. The machine learning models of today still base their responses on curated, human-created data and media. It consumes a mixture of influences statistically scrutinized to provide an “optimal” response. Like the Ouroboros, the artificial intelligence of today cannibalizes ideas, regurgitating a sanitized husk composed of an amalgamation of content cherry-picked from mankind’s culture and ingenuity.
The proliferation and popularization of AI has proportionally ramped up its usage in all fields. Its ability to automate processes with little to no oversight is effective when applied to menial labor, where machine learning models can easily learn and duplicate repeated actions with exceptional precision. There has since been a growing concern that these entities will begin to be widely used in fields traditionally done by professionals, and easily surpass their human counterparts’ experience, delivering distinct and detailed outputs on subject matters indistinguishable from the work of an actual living person. In fact, even with the shortcomings of current artificial intelligence programs, many unscrupulous people have attempted sneaking in AI-written works out of sheer idleness to pass off as their own, from songs and paintings, to even scientific literature.
Lately, I encountered one of these cases made manifest, the details of which spurred me to realize the direction our modern inventions are taking us. We are approaching the event horizon down the black hole of creativity, where the Ouroboros incessantly feasts upon the works of the past within, disgorging unholy, synthetic resurrections.
“Look at this,” said my friend, sending a hyperlink in our Discord conversation one night.
Oh boy, probably some kind of joke video, I mused to myself, mechanically hovering my computer cursor over the blue text, like countless times before, clicking it so I could peruse for a few seconds, elicit and relay a reaction to my friend, and get it over with. Instead of revealing a social media page with a meme compilation, I was unexpectedly redirected to ScienceDirect — a bibliographic site for scientific articles and research papers. Somewhat bewildered, I scanned the webpage. My friend had sent me a retraction notice for a certain article, the reasons of which were detailed in a few short sentences below the title, a tangle of scientific jargon on the 3D structure of copper-based, metal organic frameworks, capped off with the condemning word “RETRACTED” in all caps.
I began reading the notice. What could this article, its authors, have done to warrant such a measure? My eyes then stumbled upon a line that answered my doubts instantaneously:
“…there are concerns that the authors appear to have used a Generative AI source in the writing process of the paper without disclosure, which is a breach of journal policy.”
On seeing this statement I had quite a chuckle. My friend seemed to have sent me this to poke fun at the unfortunate authors of this text, who were probably quite desperate to meet a deadline, and thus sought the help of an AI, probably ChatGPT, to generate a few passages to be used. No sooner did I reflect upon the absurdity of the situation, I immediately became awash with incredulousness.
What compounded my worries even further, upon further investigation, was that this was not an isolated case. Another feature I viewed, a medical case study nonetheless, was wholesale removed from the website itself. The use of a chatbot was flagrant and blatantly shameless, immediately given away due to this other set of authors not being discerning enough to at least remove the very first lines in the opening lines, where the bot explicitly responds to its inability to create an analysis.
Despite being laughably obvious, these efforts are still infuriating. The fact that such pieces were able to bypass identification systems, and published for people to read under the guise of a legitimate, peer-reviewed text, made a mockery of the ideals of scientific research and rigorous testing. Out of sheer laziness, these individuals deliberately used a medium, still in its infancy and prone to error, on a document requiring careful accuracy and discretion, utterly disregarding the risk of misinformation that came with it, rendering the entire article as useless rubbish.
We must cherish these recognizable errors that enable us to distinguish the fabrications of a coded program from that of the mind, however; these might be the last instances we may be able to see such blunders and gaffes. Models and technology are continuously fine-tuned and updated, so much so that the possibility that AI will be able to proficiently produce near-authentic material and interactions unrecognizably similar to that of humans looms over the horizon, and has already begun. Many parts of the Internet are seemingly swamped with tons of AI-generated posts, images, and even users.
There is a conspiracy theory, spread jokingly online, known as the “Dead Internet Theory.” It postulates that the landscape of the Internet is no longer controlled by human connection; rather, it is now composed of bot activity and automatically generated content, in order to manipulate algorithms to give off the illusion of engagement. The theory has yet to be verified, having been dismissed due to insufficient evidence. In the present, our digital society is very well near to proving this — cravings for easily accessible and digestible information only serves to fuel the Ouroboros’ incessant desire to chomp and munch on the fruits of former human endeavors, leaving at its wake rotting leftovers bearing little resemblance to what once was. This is the future we can expect should mind-numbing, ignorant convenience take precedence over persevering, imaginative innovation.
The tides of human civilization have always been dictated by the flow and ebb of advancements and progress. Now, we seek the pinnacle of technological brilliance: a mind similar to that of our own, capable of thought, emotion, and creation — a self-made reflection of our own consciousness. Should humanity descend into stagnation, reduce itself into numbers to calculate, consumers to satisfy, our brainchild will mirror the condition we are currently in: under the smothering, constrictive grip of the cannibalizing Ouroboros, seeking only to preserve itself and only itself, never even bothering to venture out its comfort zone, never to dislodge its mouth from its tail.
It is then, in our hands, to uphold and safeguard the transformative spark of innovation, a guiding beacon that has always driven us forward, time and time again. The slothful pangs of the serpent, the regurgitator, will never come down on us, unless we allow it to. Of that proposition, I am certain we will not.
*This essay underwent minor copy editing by The Science Scholar Staff.
