ChatGPT and the Monstrousness of Silicon Valley Ideology
As a humanities educator, I have been closely following the news and discourse around ChatGPT. To be sure, I have been investigating the detection software and thinking about how I structure assignments. I’m also well aware that this software isn’t really capable of writing something “good” in any meaningful way.
That is probably why I keep hearing all this hype about it coming from those who are using it for legal and bureaucratic writing, endeavors that are mostly devoid of meaning. Turns out it’s easy to get a robot to write like it has an MBA when most business administration writing already sounds like it’s coming from robots.
The problem is that our world is run by a management class whose work mostly involves producing reams of bullshit. Of course they see no issues with promoting it! More than that, ChatGPT is the product of a Silicon Valley committed to turning our lives into a giant carousel of passive consumption that they can monetize. ChatGPT turns writing from an act of active work and creativity into a passive act devoid of creativity and individuality. Just have the bot do the work. After all, it’s only words.
It’s part and parcel of a general trend towards the devaluation of the written word and language itself. When I was still in academia universities were cutting language and comparative literature programs left and right. Now they are going for the humanities. After all, who needs these trifles in a world where nothing has value unless it can be converted into money? If a computer can produce words, why bother teaching anyone to do it themselves? And isn’t writing just an instrument for doing work to make money, and nothing else?
The Silicon Valley ideology has already infected our lives to an alarming degree. It tells us that all of our endeavors can be converted into cash payments, that anything that can’t be turned into money lacks value, and that technology holds all the answers to our problems. Anyone who disagrees is simply “behind the times.” Just think about the word “content.” I hear this used in contexts that ought to horrify us. The wealth of films, music, literature, and art created by humanity are mere “content” now to be paid for on streaming services and in online marketplaces. The same goes for the historical knowledge I teach my students. Educators are constantly told that “content” is of little value, compared to “skills,” which are necessary for making money. Reducing human cultural achievement and knowledge to paltry “content” is a monstrous outlook on the world.
It is perhaps the most intense expression of capitalism’s capacity for destruction. And yet I hear the usual voices of the cult of technology, telling me that this is “inevitable” and that educators should just “get used to it.” They have inured themselves to our modern way of living, one that turns us into nothing more than stupid, passive consumers, dumb happy pigs in shit, not a thought in their heads about the looming trip to the slaughterhouse.