Liminal. A doorstep. On the entrance of. A limit.

At what point do we cross the threshold between honest and dishonest writing? A text that an LLM spews out is surely artificial. A text, like this one, written originally with pen on paper is undoubtedly (wo)man-made. I confess: I couldn’t come up with an acceptable verb just now and so I Googled synonyms for “shoot out” and found “spewed out” on Word Hippo. How dishonest is my sentence? What if I had looked that up in a thesaurus? But who owns a thesaurus anymore? (I do, Roget’s Thesaurus, but it’s in my parents’ house, 3,447 miles away, as the crow flies.) (I got that last analogy from ChatGPT, which calculated the distance between my flatshare in Scotland, where I’m doing my PhD, and my parents’ home near Washington, DC.) Are we, am I so dependent on online tools that I can no longer write without a machine?

I don’t feel mechanical. I’m an old soul (re: stubbornly attached to arcane ways just to make a point). I spend hundreds of dollars each year on Pilot pens, sleek binder paper, calendars, maps, overpriced Moleskin notebooks, and oh—books. Preferably of the paper variety. I am so wedded to paper paraphernalia that using an LLM seems like the antithesis of everything this novelist-researcher-tutor stands for (history, tradition, honour). Yet. Yet I haven’t written a long email since June 2023. I have Mr. Chatty open on my computer all day, all night, asking questions I used to ask Mrs. Google, transliterations from Persian, words ending in “ization” to fix my half-British, half-American English; and on and on.

Curiously, my writer’s identity hasn’t changed through all this usage. Had I never had access to Google Search, Google Translate, DeepL, Dictionary.com, StackExchange, or any other assistant besides a cherry-red Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, I would feel differently.

To me, a text generated by an LLM has no meaning. You can feel it. It’s like Patrick Bateman expounding his opinion on Huey Lewis & the News: “It’s not just about the pleasures of conformity and the importance of trends. It’s also a personal statement about the band itself.” That sentence says nothing, means nothing. At least not on the surface. On the inside, of course, it’s a plea for help in a consumerist world that can’t recognise psychological abnormality. ChatGPT doesn’t get that deep. Patrick then takes a swing of his axe on his colleague’s neck.

Where do we swing our axe? Where, if the problem is all the human content channelled into LLMS? What happens when society, politics, philosophy become so unmanageable that they coalesce into amorphous “data”, understandable only to machines with greater processing power than us?

We’re in a liminal moment. On the doorstep of a house we’ve never seen because the façade is made up of data bricks. One foot is in the door. The other foot cannot, I fear, step back.