Proof of Care in the Age of A.I. – Jacob Filipp
Now, the same lengthy Pomeranian piece could’ve
been blooped out by a bot in 1 0
seconds
flat.
Impossible
to tell if any effort went into writing
it. This ease makes it hard to connect with others
over shared interests, and harder still to convince
people to change their mind about an issue.
A . I. is making it easier than ever for people
to put the ir t hough ts into writ i ng.
A nd tha t’s a problem.
In this
document
, I will review the l atest
ways in which people are restorin g trust in
their work in a noisy post-LLM world. Ways
of
demonstrating
that effort went into their
message
. Ways of proving they care.
One-To -M any, O nline
The
simplest
wa y to make a message effortful
is to hand- write it. It takes time to write out
thousands of words and there are no shortcuts.
It’s tedious. It hurts.
It even works for short
messages
. Try it now:
think of a quip you’d like to post to Socia l
Media. Write it out on paper. Take a photo
and post tha t. I
guarantee
that your message
wil l hit home be t ter than if you’d written
it digit ally.
You can add “extras” that make the task
more difficult. For exam p le, you can manua
ll y ref l e c t each le t t er o f the wr i tte n
mess age. I have only seen a few people
do this becau s e i t make s the te x t
ha r d e r to rea d at a g lan c e. Bu t,
pe rhaps, t h a t kin d of fr ic t io n is
w e l co me in ou r skim- it- an d - fo rg e t -
i t mo d e r n w o r l d ?
One interesting qua li ty of handwriting is
that you can apply it to LLM - generated text
by tracing the output of an A.I. tool. The act
of rewriting by hand still proves that you
cared
enough
abo ut a ma tt er to rise above
ju st copy- pasting the text.
O ne - To - M a ny, O ff l i ne
Your photo of a handwritten message proves
that you cared enough to write the message
once. But how do you make it effortful to
share a genuine message at-scale ?
One solution is to hand-write many flyers
and distribute them on the street. A physical
f lyer , handed out by a living
human being
, is
w ay more effective than a
message
on a
social media feed.
The core skill for this
approach
is to keep
things short: when you hand - write 1,000
flyers you bet ter use the fewest words that
get your
message
across. If you don’t want
a wrist injury , th at is !
U nfortunately, the Rich and M oderately
Rich have co- opted this
handwriting
approach
to lobby for their
interests
in a way that
looks “ organic”. They use machines ca lled
Pen Plotters to make
imitation
handwritten
flyers at scale. These can have all the
imperfections
and variations of the real thing.
Down to having one-of- a - kind fonts
created from a particular person’s
handwriting
.
A carte l of
bu sinesspeople
can
pass
these
flyers over to
dozens
of
gig-workers
, who in
turn hand them out at various town centres.
Over the past three years, the public had
smartened
up to the use of plotters and this
led to the invention of new proof-of-care
indicators.
T a t t o o s
One way to
broadcast
one’s thoug hts is to
get a big bold ta t too.
By
permanen tly
writing a mess age into one’s
body, tattoos show an unfakeable conviction.
What’s more, tattoos display a message to
everyone in the vicinity without having to
exert constant effort.
For as long as real tattoos can be
distinguished
from the fake thing they remain a good way
of proving commitment. They are most practical
in places with temperate climate. The key with
tattoos is to keep the message a) short and
b) evergreen. This
message will adorn
your body
forever
so it can’t be something you’ll rethink in
the
next twenty years.
This is easier said than done!
Who among us
hasn’t seen a young lady with
“Meat is murder” down the middle of her torso,
or a young man on his hustle with
a “ Grind Hard”
message across his forehead ?
I’m sure that they’ll regret their choice when
they are older and their
priorities sh if t !
S tory tellers
One unf a keable way to rea ch an a udience
is to shout your message at a busy place.
This harks back to “Speakers’ Corner” in
Hyde Park in London, and to other such
spots that were popular un ti l the late
twentieth century. I have personally seen
more people in North American cities shouting
out in public. There is also a rise in
the number of people I can only describe
as “ Town Criers”, moving on foot through
a city and spreading true news to
counteract all the false news on the Net.
I believe that this greater use of in-person
communication is part of a migration from
the Online World back into the Physical
World. This wave will only intensify over
the next five years
Between cities, travelling storytellers are
reportedly plying a route and sitting down
with the townsfolk to share tales. I hear that
this is how the I liad and Odyssey were
first transmitted. Except now, it is more like
Julius Caesar’s autobiographical books: each
story is not just entertaining but aims
to telegraph a message about a person or
initiative.
Story telling requires adapting a message to
rhyme and repetition. The
storyteller can’t
just
read out prepared text, either: the story
needs to be adjusted to match the energy of
the listeners, to their identity and to
the setting.
One would tailor a story differently whether
the audience are office workers, warehouse
labourers or a group of nurses who’d just
gone off-shift.
The challenge with the above is that
regional oligarchs will
undoubtedly
hire and
train
people to spread their own propaganda.
That’s why the storytellers form guilds and
initiate members with
a trial in pain, written
in the body. A young man typically
becomes a Storyteller by having his skin
cut with razors, row on row, and getting
burnt wood ash rubbed into the wounds. The
ceremony itself is painful, and the four-week
recovery is even more so. When they heal,
the scars form raised patterns like alliga tor
scales. A young woman usually
becomes
a Storyteller by having an artist carve
ornate shapes into her face with a bone
chisel.
When telling a story, the
listeners
can tell
at a
glance
whether a Storyteller is “the real
deal” and has not been bought.
S ubtraction
The most extreme means of emphasizing one’s
message is by mutilating the body. Some
businessmen
in The East may cut off their own ear to
sea l a Billionaire Elevation Deal, or a critical
political marriage.
Closer to home
, in Designated
European Warzone II and in the
Euphrates Crucible,
we have the
practice
of
government ministers
underscoring
a declaration of war by cutting
off a finger.
Body mutilation is a gesture of unquestionable
commitment. And it gets attention. It is
egalitarian in that it is
available even to the
poorest of people. But, I believe, there is
an “escaltion effect” here that will land
people in the same position as the Tibetan
protestors from previous decades,
dousing themselves
in gasoline and lighting
themselves
aflame.
When you start
one-upping
each other,
there
is only one destination where this practice
can lead.
This kind of Proof of Stake is mostly done
by followers of the
Witch Priestess
from the
North, and loyal readers of my blog alread y
know that I hold her in low esteem.
I ncreasing the bandwidth
What’s
common
to all the methods we reviewed
so far is that they are low bandwidth.
Short messages you can shout and handwritten
flyers
are bad at
transmitting complex ideas
.
In past times, this is
when the speaker would
pen an essay or write a book on a subject,z
but A. I. has made
those formats suspect.
I n order to dive
deeper into
an idea, people
have begun to schedule
face-to-face
gatherings
that last one or two
hours
.
And why restrict yourself to talking ?
To get the
message across, communicators are now
performing with their whole body – a dance, a song,
a play, or something in between. Smell, touch
and taste, too, increase the surface area for
their
message.
I f a digital video call is
higher-bandwidth
than
reading a document; if an in-person group
presentation is higher-bandwidth than video;
and a 1-on-1
conversation
is even higher… then
what is higher-bandwidth than that ?
You’d have to do
something
extreme to your
brain to cram in more content. And that’s
exactly where the cutting edge is: today’s
youth are using psychedelic drugs to kick
the gates of communication wide open.
First, one would gather an audience
and
have
them
ingest mind-altering drugs.
Then, put the
listeners into
a cozy and safe
environment
–
perhaps
sitting around a fire. The communicator could speak
the message aloud.
Or, they could
push the limits of
communication by also
ex aggerating
their facia l
expressions, moving the
arms
and
feet
in extreme
gestures
, by
adding layers
of drum music.
F rom there it is a short step to painting your
body, adding
feathers
, masks and
dancing.
Those
in the
vanguard
aim to get the most “juice”
from
those hours together. Drugs prime
the mind for
maximal intake.
On any given night, on the outskirts of
our larges t cities, you can find young
people
having
a genuine dialogue by
dancing
around burning bonfires, bodies a black
silhouette, feathered masks shaking.
I n this bizarre digital age of Artificial
Intelligence, there is just one thing that
I can say for sure:
The kids are allright
Proof of Care in the A ge of A .I.
Previously, if you created a 4,000 - word
b log post abou t
Pomeranians, people
could
a ssume that here was a person who really cared
a bout dogs. Fine – may be the qua lit y of the
wr iting was
imperfect
– but the sheer effort
it took to write so much was proof t hat you
reall y cared abou t this topic.
Not any more.
Proof of Care in the Age of A.I. – Jacob Filipp
Click here to see the “how this was made” feature
I wrote this piece by hand and photographed the pages. After that, I wanted to make the text copy-pasteable. So I put the images into one SVG file with a text overlay:
Pictured: overlaid + spaced out text. Notice the ` spacers and extra spaces.
The font (Barlow Condensed – Italic Condensed) and the line height roughly match my handwriting’s dimensions. For spacing, the idea was that I’d add spacing characters that’ll be removed in Javascript during the copy-paste event that fires on the webpage.
I used ` (backtick) characters for narrow spaces that’ll be fully removed, and multiple spaces between words where I planned to collapse them into just 1 space. The hyperlinks are made using Inkscape’s
Create Anchor functionality
.
After exporting the SVG file, it required some post-processing:
Embedding the font using
Replacing the ` characters with
Six-per-em Space characters
so the backticks don’t show up when selected
Replacing the linked local image filepaths with full URLs
Finally, the SVG is fully added as an
element into the HTML file. I couldn’t trigger on-copy Javascript events if I embedded it as an