Another day, another round of tech company CEOs proclaiming we have a greater than 10% chance of artificial intelligence causing the extinction of humanity. Though that dire of an outlook seems a little alarmist to me, it’s hard to argue against the immediate need for some kind of AI regulation.
That is, unless you’re a bloviating madman. In his refutation of the need for any type of AI regulation, even as major tech companies ask for a regulatory framework to be imposed upon themselves, President Donald Trump may have just inadvertently stumbled into a solution to being replaced by AI.
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To really dumb it down, to achieve whatever goal it is given, an AI system looks at how things have been done before, and tries to accomplish the task in a way most likely to succeed without making any of the same mistakes twice. But how can a learning machine learn to make completely illogical missteps like an unhinged lunatic with an utter disregard for the ultimate outcome?
For instance, no machine relying on the dictates of good sense to reach a positive outcome could have predicted that Trump would go against the CEOs asking for their companies to be regulated, the overwhelming support of the American electorate for AI regulation, and the global consensus that relying only on voluntary self-regulation by AI companies causes “greater existential risks to every aspect of our lives.” Yet, the guy ignored all of this, and he has been president, twice.
Unfortunately, at first glance my job as an ATL columnist seems a prime example of a position ripe to be supplanted by artifice. All of my columns, dating back to the very first one eight years ago, are available for free right here at Above the Law thanks to our wonderful sponsors. That amounts to about 416 columns made up of something in the neighborhood of 300,000 words that someone could easily feed into a large language model.
I’ve asked a few of the more popular models whether they’ve in fact trained on my writing, and don’t really get a satisfying answer (we all know AI is effective at lying). Yet, if someone specifically set out to create a Wolf-bot, asking it to spit out future columns in the style of Jonathan Wolf, the end product would probably be reasonably readable.
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Ah, but those simplistic assumptions leave out the human factor that Trump represents so crazily. Unlike humans, and particularly addled, aged dictators, machines use logic, reasoning, and unimpeachable replication to make their decisions.
The lesson to be learned here is clear to me. If I do not want to be replaced by an AI ATL columnist, I have to become more and more deranged in a way that no AI could ever possibly replicate.
Go ahead, call my decline into mental illness a crutch if you will. But it just might be my most powerful tool in resisting the influence of the coming AI overlords, and I’m only following the example of our most powerful leader, after all.
This strategy also has the benefit of being true. While Trump is clearly in age-related decline himself, even at half his age the deluge of batty nonsense he causes to be hurled at us all every day genuinely does have my brain teetering on the precarious verge of sanity.
An AI isn’t going to pull its hair out because the president’s eldest son had his wedding bankrolled by an evil Russian oligarch and Republicans just shrug like it’s not a big deal. No machine can vomit into its hat when Trump closes the Kennedy Center because judges keep telling him he can’t add his name to it. Hell, for that matter, would any MAGA voters even bother sending vile hate mail to an AI author if they somehow realized there wasn’t a real person behind the name?
I think the path is clear. Sure, a sufficiently advanced LLM could probably make a passible facsimile of the writing I’ve done in the past. But no machine can predict just how deeply into madness living through the rest of this presidency will drive me. Writing about this sort of thing is exactly the type of genuineness I think valued readers like you will continue to appreciate.
Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].