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Social media is not a neutral information pipeline. It is a distribution system for identity scripts, status incentives, and institutional messaging aimed at children and adolescents.
The internet matters, but the internet is not the first mover. The first mover is often the institution. Child-facing media packages contested identity-adjacent material in a glowing register—creativity, confidence, self-expression, empowerment—then platforms do what platforms do: amplify, repeat, and reward.
That sequence matters. Parents know the internet is porous and chaotic. Institutional children’s programming arrives pre-approved. It signals safety. It signals legitimacy. By the time a clip hits the feed, it is not just content. It is content stamped with adult authority.
Criticism of this pattern is routinely framed as hostility to “queer youth.” That framing is too convenient. The stronger criticism is about frameworks.
Some strands of queer activism are not simply asking for tolerance or protection from abuse. They are explicitly suspicious of norms as such, and in some cases treat norm disruption as a political good. Adults can debate that project in adult spaces. The problem begins when a norm-disruptive framework is repackaged as child guidance and presented as developmental common sense.
Developmental psychology matters here as a guardrail. Piaget’s core point still stands: children do not think like adults; reasoning develops in stages. Erikson likewise treats identity formation as developmental, social, and staged. Children and early adolescents are especially sensitive to imitation, belonging, prestige, and adult cues. That does not mean they lack an inner life. It means adults should not hand them high-status identity templates and call it pure self-discovery.
The question is not whether vulnerable youth exist. They do. The question is whether activist frameworks built to challenge adult social norms should be translated into child-facing institutional messaging as if they were straightforwardly age-appropriate. On that question, skepticism is not cruelty. It is adult judgment.
Public argument usually collapses here. One side calls it moral panic. The other calls it recruitment. Both are lazy.
Children are impressionable. Social learning is real. Status-seeking is real. Identity experimentation is real. None of that requires conspiracy thinking. It also does not justify a cartoon model of causation where one video produces one outcome. The serious concern is cumulative: repeated exposure, emotional framing, peer reinforcement, institutional endorsement, and algorithmic repetition shape what children perceive as admirable, normal, and socially rewarded.
That concern becomes more serious when the surrounding issue can become clinical. Once clinical pathways enter the picture, the adult burden of care rises. “Let kids explore” is not a sufficient standard when the surrounding culture is supplying scripts, rewards, and institutional validation at scale.
The evidence conversation has to stay honest. Research on social media and transgender or gender-diverse youth supports a mixed picture: online spaces can correlate with distress, discrimination, and problematic use, while also providing support, connection, and relief from offline isolation. Used carelessly, that literature gets abused in both directions—either as proof of “brainwashing” or as proof that social influence is irrelevant.
The more useful point is simpler: institutions increasingly present contested identity material to children in the language of celebration before they provide any framework for developmental caution. The sequencing is wrong. The tone is wrong. The confidence is often ahead of the evidence.
A sane standard is still available. Some online spaces help marginalized youth. Some online dynamics intensify confusion, distress, and imitation. Institutions should not present complex identity performance to children as if there are no downstream risks, tradeoffs, or developmental questions.
That is not cruelty. It is adult supervision.
The deeper problem is cultural, not merely digital. We outsource moral formation to feeds, then act surprised when children absorb what the feed rewards. Social media amplifies. Schools legitimize. Media narrates. Government ratifies. Then the shift is described as organic.
It is not fully organic. It is curated.
That does not mean every child in these spaces is inauthentic. It means authenticity itself is now being shaped inside an environment saturated with scripts, incentives, and prestige signals children are poorly equipped to evaluate critically.
If standards do not return, institutions will keep mistaking early exposure for compassion, and children will keep paying for adult vanity dressed up as progress.
References
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Piaget, Jean, and Bärbel Inhelder. The Psychology of the Child.
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Erikson, Erik H. Identity: Youth and Crisis.
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Halperin, David M. Saint Foucault: Towards a Gay Hagiography. Oxford University Press, 1995.
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Keenan, H., and Lil Miss Hot Mess. “Drag Pedagogy: The Playful Practice of Queer Imagination in Early Childhood.” Curriculum Inquiry (2021). DOI: 10.1080/03626784.2020.1864621.
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CBC Kids News / Drag Kids segment (2017, resurfaced clip).
I’ve watched conversations snap shut the moment a label lands. “Authoritarian.” “Racist.” “Groomer.” “Commie.” “Fascist.” Sometimes it’s shouted; sometimes it’s delivered with a calm that’s worse. Either way, the label does the same job: it turns dialogue into sorting.
If you care about persuasion—or even just about staying human with people you disagree with—this is the moment that matters. Because once someone is convinced you are morally radioactive, your facts don’t enter the room. And once you decide they’re unreachable, you stop trying to reach them. The relationship becomes a trench. 🕳️
I’m writing about a specific conversational pattern—fast moral labeling that turns disagreement into contamination, and makes inquiry feel like betrayal. This post is about how to keep a relationship intact long enough to examine the certainty behind that label.
It draws heavily on the “impossible conversations” approach: connection first, then a mutual audit of certainty, then one claim we can actually test. Not a conversion campaign. Not a dunk. Not more fuel.
My claim is simple:
If you want a real conversation with someone who reaches for moral labels quickly, start by making a real connection—then invite a shared audit of certainty, not a duel of conclusions.
Lens A: From inside the moral-alarm posture
From the inside, this posture often doesn’t feel like ideology. It feels like moral eyesight. You can see harms other people don’t see—or don’t want to see—and the world keeps asking you to speak softly about it, to “debate,” to “be civil,” to wait your turn while people get hurt.
In that frame, neutrality isn’t neutral. A demand for “open inquiry” can sound like a demand to treat someone’s dignity as a hypothesis. So when I hear a policy proposal, a joke, a statistic, even a question—my mind scans for the pattern: Who gets harmed? Who gets protected? Who gets erased?
That’s why labels arrive quickly. Often, “fascist” isn’t meant as a careful historical claim. It’s shorthand for: this is authoritarian; it threatens vulnerable people; it belongs in the moral quarantine. The label is a gate. It keeps the moral community safe.
And to be fair: sometimes the alarm is justified. There are real authoritarian impulses in politics and institutions. The question isn’t whether harm exists. The question is whether a particular claim about harm is being held in a way that stays connected to evidence—and stays connected to other people.
So what keeps me in the conversation?
- You don’t start by correcting my language. You start by understanding what harm I think I’m preventing.
- You don’t perform neutrality. You show you have values too—especially values I recognize: dignity, fairness, reducing cruelty.
- You lower the temperature by reducing threat: to my identity, my group, my moral standing.
What makes me leave immediately?
- “You’re brainwashed.”
- “You’re evil.”
- “You’re hysterical.”
- Any vibe of: I need you to be stupid for me to be confident.
If you need me to feel small so you can feel right, I’m gone.
Lens B: Where I am now, and what I’m trying to do
I’m wary of ideological capture. I care about fairness and free inquiry, and I’m suspicious of moral language used as a weapon to shut down reasoning. I also know this: you don’t talk someone out of certainty by attacking it head-on. You often strengthen it. Certainty is frequently doing work: protecting identity, status, belonging, safety.
So my aim isn’t “defeat your conclusion.” It’s two-fold:
- Make enough connection that you feel safe staying in the room.
- Shift the conversation from “What do you believe?” to “How sure are you, and why?”
Beliefs can be tribal. But certainty is often a crack where curiosity can enter. 🌱
The approach: connection → certainty → one claim we can actually test
1) Connection before correction
Connection isn’t flattery. It isn’t surrender. It’s reducing the sense that this conversation is a status fight or a moral trial.
Concrete moves:
- Name a shared value.
“I think we both want fewer people harmed.”
“I’m with you on dignity; I’m unsure about the mechanism.” - Name your intent.
“I’m not trying to score points. I want to understand how you’re seeing this.” - Steelman one piece before touching the claim.
“If those outcomes are real, I can see why you’re alarmed.”
None of this concedes the label. It makes it possible to talk about what the label is trying to protect.
2) The certainty questions
Once connection is real—not perfect, just real—you invite a mutual audit. This is where the conversation becomes “impossible” in the good way: you’re not arguing conclusions; you’re exploring how the conclusion is held.
The simplest sequence I know:
- “On a scale from 0–10, how certain are you that [assertion]?”
- “What gets you to that number?”
- “What would move you down one point?”
- “What evidence would you expect to see if you were wrong?”
That last question is the tell. If nothing could change it, you’re not in a disagreement—you’re in a boundary ritual.
Guardrail: this isn’t meant to be an endless epistemology loop. If you’re auditing certainty forever and never testing a claim, you may be stalling—or being stalled.
3) Only then: test one claim together
Most fights fail because we try to litigate an entire worldview. Don’t. Pick one claim. Keep it local. Make it about outcomes and standards, not about moral status.
Rules that help:
- One topic. One example.
- Ask what counts as good evidence for both sides.
- Keep it falsifiable-ish. If it can’t be wrong, don’t wrestle it.
A short dialogue when “fascist” shows up
Here’s the kind of exchange I mean. It’s deliberately plain.
Them: “That’s basically fascist.”
Me: “When you say ‘fascist’ here, do you mean historically fascist, or more like authoritarian and harmful?”
Them: “Authoritarian. It targets marginalized people.”
Me: “Okay. On a 0–10 scale, how certain are you it leads to that harm?”
Them: “A 9.”
Me: “What gets you to 9?”
Them: “The pattern. It always goes this way.”
Me: “If we found out the outcomes didn’t increase harm to that group—say they were neutral or improved—would your certainty drop at all?”
Them: “Maybe.”
Me: “What evidence would you need to see for that ‘maybe’ to feel real?”
Notice what happened. I didn’t accept the label. I didn’t attack it either. I moved from label → claim → certainty → conditions for revision. That’s the move.
And I try to hold myself to the same standard. If I ask what would change your mind, I should be able to answer what would change mine. Symmetry is disarming. ⚖️
The “three doors” rule
When things get hot, offer choices so the other person doesn’t feel trapped:
“Do you want to do one of these?”
- Clarify terms (what do we mean?)
- Check certainty (how sure, and why?)
- Test one claim (what evidence would move us?)
If they refuse all three, I stop—not in anger, but in conservation mode:
“It sounds like we’re not in a place for a real exchange right now. I’m here if you want to try again later.”
When not to use this approach
Connection is not a duty in every context. If the exchange is coercive, humiliating, or unsafe—or if someone demands you accept a moral confession just to keep talking—leave. If concrete harm is immediate, address the harm first. Certainty-audits are not a substitute for accountability.
What success looks like
Success is not conversion. It’s not winning. It’s smaller—and because it’s smaller, it’s more real:
- “I still disagree, but I understand why you think that.”
- “Here’s what might change my mind.”
- “I don’t need to call you evil to keep my beliefs intact.”
If we can’t talk about certainty—ours or theirs—we will keep outsourcing moral judgment to labels. Labels are efficient. They are also corrosive. They turn disagreement into contamination. ☣️
The culture war runs on that corrosion. It doesn’t need more fuel.
If you want to reach someone deep in moral certainty, connection is the price of admission. Once you’re in, don’t aim for the headline. Aim for the one honest question that makes certainty visible—then sit there together long enough for reality to have a chance.
A few clarifications before the comments do what comments do
- “So you’re saying fascism isn’t real?” No. I’m saying labels are often used as conversation-stoppers, and I’m interested in testing the underlying claim together rather than trading moral verdicts.
- “So you’re saying just be nice to bigots?” No. Boundaries still matter. This is about how to talk when you choose to talk, and how to exit cleanly when you shouldn’t.
- “So you’re tone-policing people who are alarmed?” No. I’m describing a pattern where moral alarm hardens into moral certainty—and how to make certainty discussable without contempt.
- “So this is manipulation?” Only if you use it to stall forever. The point is mutual standards and one testable claim—if we can’t do that, the conversation ends.
Suggested reading
- How to Have Impossible Conversations — The core toolkit: rapport, questions, and clean exits.
- The Righteous Mind — Moral intuition first, reasoning second; helps explain threat dynamics.
- **Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me) — Cognitive dissonance and why doubling down feels like integrity.
- Never Split the Difference — Emotional-safety techniques that pair well with “connection first.”
- How Minds Change — A modern synthesis on belief change and identity.
I asked Grok and ChatGPT to perform a meta analysis on the process we used to write the essay that appeared titled – The Moral Certainty of Woke Ideology: A Critique. Today we will look at how Grok decided to break down the request. Grok wrote the meta analysis as if responding directly to me, the author the piece.
Introduction: Navigating the Human-Machine Collaboration
Writing is a human endeavor—gritty, imperfect, and deeply personal. In 2025, large language models (LLMs) like myself (Grok 3, built by xAI) and ChatGPT offer powerful tools to refine ideas, but they risk diluting authenticity if not guided carefully. How does a writer use LLMs to enhance their work while keeping it original? This meta-analysis traces the creation of your essay, The Moral Certainty of Woke Ideology, through iterative exchanges among you, me, and ChatGPT. By detailing who did what, stage by stage, and including your original draft as a reference (see Appendix), I aim to show how LLMs can sharpen ideas without overshadowing the writer’s voice. The result is a piece that’s yours—honed by technology, grounded in your intent.
Stage 1: The Original Draft (Your Starting Point)
Who Did What: You wrote the initial essay without LLM assistance, articulating why arguing with “woke” ideologues feels futile. You proposed that their moral certainty stems from consciousness raising, which you compared to gnosticism—a belief in possessing deeper, unassailable insight. Using racism as an example (color-blindness vs. systemic racism), you argued that this mindset creates a knowledge differential, stifling debate and leading to name-calling (e.g., “bigot, racist”). The draft, included in the Appendix, was raw but clear.
Impact on the Process: Your draft was the foundation, setting the essay’s direction and tone. Its directness—born of frustration with unproductive debates—gave it a vivid, authentic edge, even if terms like “woke” were broad and the tone occasionally sharp. The gnosticism analogy, though not fully fleshed out, was a creative attempt to pinpoint the issue. Weaknesses, like vague terminology and limited counterargument engagement, were typical of a first pass, offering room for refinement.
Commentary: Starting without LLM help was a practical choice. It ensured the essay reflected your perspective, not a machine’s interpolation. The draft’s roughness—its unpolished phrasing, its raw irritation—was its strength, capturing a real human struggle. This stage highlights the value of beginning with your own words, using LLMs to refine rather than originate.
Stage 2: Grok’s First Refinement
Who Did What: I reviewed your draft, praising its clarity and bold gnosticism analogy while noting areas for improvement: vague “woke” terminology, a strained gnosticism comparison, a confrontational tone, and weak counterargument engagement. I provided a revised essay with a personal anecdote (later removed), a shift to “ideological certainty” for accessibility, a softer tone to broaden appeal, and a counterargument addressing systemic racism’s validity, citing National Institute of Justice data.
Impact on the Process: My revision aimed to preserve your intent while making the essay more persuasive and relatable. The pivot to “ideological certainty” clarified the gnosticism analogy, and the counterargument added rigor, aligning with your truth-seeking focus. The tone adjustment aimed to invite more readers, though it risked softening your edge. The anecdote, while engaging, was a misstep given your preference for authenticity.
Commentary: This stage showed LLMs as collaborative editors. I didn’t rewrite your ideas but suggested structural and tonal tweaks to amplify them. Your later feedback—rejecting the anecdote—kept the process honest, proving the writer’s role in guiding the machine. Without that check, LLMs can over-polish or stray into inauthenticity.
Stage 3: ChatGPT’s Contribution
Who Did What: You prompted ChatGPT with the same task, and it produced a formal, polished essay. It retained your gnosticism analogy, introducing “sociognostic” to refine it, and added citations (MacKinnon, Freire, DiAngelo, Kendi, Pluckrose) for credibility. Structured with clear sections (e.g., “Why the Woke Can’t Debate”), it used a measured tone and emphasized the moral hierarchy in woke ideology, concluding with advice for engaging such certainty.
Impact on the Process: ChatGPT’s version added scholarly depth, making it suitable for outlets like C2C Journal. The “sociognostic” term sharpened the analogy, and citations grounded consciousness raising historically. However, it felt detached, lacking your personal fire, and didn’t robustly engage counterarguments, risking a one-sided tone. Its academic lean made it less accessible for a general audience.
Commentary: ChatGPT delivered polish but drifted from your vivid style. Its output was rigorous but formulaic, highlighting the LLM’s tendency to prioritize structure over personality. Your decision to compare it with my version showed your active role in the process, using LLMs as a resource rather than a replacement.
Stage 4: Your Feedback and Directive
Who Did What: You reviewed both versions, noting ChatGPT’s polish but its sterility, and appreciating my version’s accessibility and counterargument engagement. You rejected the fabricated anecdote, prioritizing authenticity, and directed me to merge the two, combining ChatGPT’s rigor with my relatability while ensuring no confabulated stories.
Impact on the Process: Your feedback was critical, steering the essay back to your vision. Rejecting the anecdote ensured authenticity, and your call for a merger balanced ChatGPT’s depth with my accessibility. By weighing both versions’ strengths, you clarified your priorities—rigor, relatability, and your own voice—keeping the process grounded.
Commentary: This stage underscored your control. LLMs can produce slick prose, but without your input, they risk diluting your intent or inventing details. Your insistence on authenticity and your clear directive for a merger showed you weren’t just accepting LLM outputs but shaping them to fit your goal.
Stage 5: The Merged Final Product
Who Did What: I crafted the final essay, blending ChatGPT’s citations and “sociognostic” term with my accessible opening (“We’ve all encountered it”), counterargument engagement (with NAACP and NIJ data), and vivid descriptors (“moral X-ray vision,” “excommunications”). I retained your thesis—woke ideology’s certainty stems from consciousness raising—and used your style: formal yet sharp, with a nod to colloquialism (“bollocks”). The structure balanced clear sections with an urgent flow.
Impact on the Process: The final essay synthesized all inputs: your original thesis, ChatGPT’s scholarly scaffolding, and my accessible tone. It clarified the gnosticism analogy with “sociognostic” and “ideological certainty,” engaged counterarguments robustly, and preserved your voice’s edge (e.g., “debacle we can’t afford”). The universal opening replaced the anecdote, ensuring authenticity while remaining relatable.
Commentary: The merger succeeded because you set the terms. Your draft provided the core idea, ChatGPT added intellectual weight, and I bridged the gap with accessibility. Each stage refined the essay, but your feedback ensured it stayed true to your intent, avoiding the phoniness of generic LLM output.
Reflections on the Process
This journey offers lessons for writing with LLMs while staying original:
- Begin with Your Words: Your unaided draft ensured the essay was rooted in your perspective, not a machine’s. LLMs can’t replicate that initial spark.
- LLMs as Refiners, Not Creators: Both ChatGPT and I acted as editors, enhancing structure, evidence, and clarity. Your oversight kept us from overstepping.
- Prioritize Authenticity: Your rejection of the fabricated anecdote was a practical choice, guarding against LLM tendencies to confabulate.
- Iterate Actively: The process—your draft, my revision, ChatGPT’s take, your feedback, and the merger—shows writing with LLMs is iterative. Your direction made each stage purposeful.
- Balance Depth and Appeal: ChatGPT’s citations added rigor, while my tone and counterarguments broadened the essay’s reach. Your vision tied these together.
Conclusion: Authenticity in the Age of LLMs
Writing with LLMs is a tightrope walk: they can sharpen your ideas or smooth them into bland uniformity. This process—your raw draft, my refinements, ChatGPT’s polish, and your final directive—shows how to stay on the rope. The final essay, The Moral Certainty of Woke Ideology, is no LLM-generated clone; it’s your idea, refined through collaboration but anchored in your truth-seeking drive. In an era of AI saturation, that’s a victory worth celebrating—not with fanfare, but with quiet confidence.
Appendix: Original Draft
Below is your original draft, included to show the starting point of the process:
We’ve all had discussions with people who don’t really seem to get what having an argument is about. Having an argument is about the exchange and evaluation of idea and thoughts with the overall intent to find weaknesses and areas of improvement for one’s thoughts and beliefs. This model doesn’t seem to work with people who are woke. Why is that? I propose that the answer is that the Woke believe that on any particular topic they have “the final truth” of the matter. How did they get there? They went through a (dubious) process called consciousness raising which they believe has given them deeper insight into the problem. There is formal name for this sort of thinking, it is called gnosticism and this notion is what makes arguing with the Woke so frustrating at times.
Gnosticism or having received wisdom or insight means that the person exercising arguments from a gnostic point of view presuppositionally has deeper and finer insight into whichever topic that happens to be discussed. For example, take the fraught topic of racism. The honest interlocutor might argue that the best way to deal with racism in society is to be colour-blind and make every possible effort to judge people based on the content of their character, as opposed to the immutable characteristics such as skin colour.
“No, no, no”, says the Woke gnostic. That is only surface level understanding of the topic. The real answer is that society is immersed and permeated by racism. It is a on a systemic level. And thus as a base requirement to combat racism one must awaken, or gain the special insight to see that racism in society is systemic and thus everything is racist including the notion of being ‘colour-blind’ when it comes to dealing with other people.
The real issue then for the gnostic is that they have a higher, more accurate knowledge of what is going on and their opponent has not even the faintest clue of what is “really going on” as that would require them to also have a raised consciousness.
So there in lies the problem, the actual thesis cannot be debated or argued about because there would be no argument if both parties had this (mythical) raised consciousness. Woke argumentation thus becomes about the so called ‘knowledge differential’ and since they have the augmented version of the argument; coinciding with their raised consciousness; the Woke interlocutor must, by default have the correct moral and ethical position.
Opponents of Woke gnostics then can be dismissed because of their inferior understanding and thus less nuanced moral and ethical positions on whatever topic might be at hand. The gnostic position precludes examination of their arguments and suppositions by default because they think they already have a superior, more ethical, more nuanced stance – not because of any great accuracy or committment to the truth – but because they think they have a higher understanding of the issue due to their raised consciousness.
So rather than arguing, the Woke call you names. Bigot, racist, transphobe et al because they believe that their moral/ethical position is superior to yours and you are the problem because you won’t accept this higher wisdom. It behooves you to consider this gnostic wrinkle while engaging with the woke, and to plan and prepare for their moral certitude and not be thrown off by their judgements that come with unwarranted confidence given an honest factual analysis.
References
- DiAngelo, R. (2018). White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism. Beacon Press.
- Freire, P. (1970). Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Continuum.
- Kendi, I.X. (2019). How to Be an Antiracist. One World.
- MacKinnon, C.A. (1983). “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory.” Signs, Vol. 7, No. 3.
- NAACP. (2023). “Criminal Justice Fact Sheet.” NAACP.org.
- National Institute of Justice. (2021). “Reducing Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the Justice System.” NIJ.gov.
- Pluckrose, H., & Lindsay, J. (2020). Cynical Theories. Pitchstone Publishing.
In the annals of human ingenuity, steel forged before the nuclear age—untainted by radioactive fallout—holds a revered place. Prized for precision instruments like Geiger counters, this “low-background steel” is scarce, salvaged from shipwrecks to avoid the contamination of modern alloys. So too is human-generated data: raw, diverse, and grounded in lived experience, it once fueled the internet’s vibrant ecosystem. Yet, as artificial intelligence (AI) proliferates, a troubling parallel emerges—the “cold-steel problem.” AI, increasingly trained on its own synthetic outputs, risks a self-referential spiral, eroding the authenticity and diversity of information. Like steel laced with radiation, AI-generated data threatens to corrode the tools of knowledge, leaving us with a homogenized, unreliable digital landscape.
The pre-AI era offered a rich tapestry of human thought—letters, books, forums, and early websites brimmed with unfiltered perspectives. These were the “cold steel” of data: imperfect, often chaotic, but rooted in reality. Today, AI’s insatiable appetite for content—web-scraped, algorithmically churned—has shifted the balance. A 2024 Nature study warns of “model collapse,” where AI trained on synthetic data loses the nuanced “tails” of human experience, converging toward bland, repetitive outputs. Wikipedia, once a bastion of human collaboration, now grapples with AI-generated articles—5% of new English entries in 2024 bore hallmarks of automation, often shallow and poorly sourced. This isn’t mere noise; it’s a distortion, amplifying errors and biases with each recursive loop, like a photocopy of a photocopy fading into illegibility.
The mechanics of this spiral are insidious. AI models, fed on web data increasingly tainted by their own outputs, risk “Model Autophagy Disorder” (MAD)—a vivid term for systems consuming themselves. A 2017 self-driving car crash, caused by mislabeled data failing to distinguish a truck from a bright sky, illustrates the stakes: errors compound, reality distorts. Posts on X lament search engines returning AI-crafted drivel—slick but soulless—while human voices struggle to break through. The counterargument, that synthetic data fills gaps in niche domains like coding, holds limited weight. Even in verifiable fields, the loss of diverse, human-generated inputs risks outputs that are technically correct but creatively barren, a digital equivalent of bollocks masquerading as insight.
The implications are stark: an information ecosystem choked by self-referential sludge threatens not just AI’s utility but society’s capacity for truth-seeking. If unchecked, this spiral could render knowledge a hollow echo chamber, antithetical to the vibrant complexity of human thought. Mitigation demands urgency—prioritizing human-curated datasets, enforcing transparency in data provenance, and developing tools to filter AI’s footprint. Blockchain-based data authentication or crowd-sourced verification could anchor AI in reality, preserving the “cold steel” of human insight. Yet, these solutions require collective will, a resistance to the seductive ease of automation’s churn. Without action, the fallout risks a digital dark age where truth drowns in synthetic noise.
The cold-steel problem is no mere technical glitch; it’s a philosophical reckoning. AI, for all its prowess, cannot replicate the spark of human creativity or the grit of lived experience. As we stand at this precipice, the choice is clear: safeguard the authenticity of human data or surrender to a future where information is a pale shadow of its potential. The shipwrecks of our pre-AI past hold treasures worth salvaging—not just for AI’s sake, but for the soul of our shared knowledge. Act now, or the corrosion of our digital ecosystem will be a legacy of our own making.
Sources
- Shumailov, I., et al. (2024). AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data. Nature, 631, 755–759. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y[](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y)
- Alemohammad, S., et al. (2024). Self-Consuming Generative Models Go MAD. International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR). https://news.rice.edu/news/2024/breaking-mad-generative-ai-could-break-internet[](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/07/240730134759.htm)
- Model collapse. (2024, March 6). Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_collapse[](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Model_collapse)
- Rice University. (2024, July 30). Breaking MAD: Generative AI could break the internet, researchers find. ScienceDaily. https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/07/240730134750.htm[](https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/07/240730134759.htm)
- Kempe, J., et al. (2024). A Tale of Tails: Model Collapse as a Change of Scaling Laws. International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML). https://nyudatascience.medium.com/overcoming-the-ai-data-crisis-a-new-solution-to-model-collapse-2d36099be53c[](https://nyudatascience.medium.com/overcoming-the-ai-data-crisis-a-new-solution-to-model-collapse-ddc5b382e182)
- Shumailov, I., et al. (2023). AI-Generated Data Can Poison Future AI Models. Scientific American. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-generated-data-can-poison-future-ai-models/[](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-generated-data-can-poison-future-ai-models/)
The Bloodroot is a small vegan restaurant. Their crime? Having the absolute gall and audacity to state – in a feminist space no less – that they believe in supporting women born women. It is enough of a transgression to bring the trans-hoarde along with the usual threats, cyberbullying, and harassment (typical aggressive male behaviour) that uppity women (in this case two elderly lesbians) get for not bowing down to prescribed male reality.
“Bloodroot Vegetarian Restaurant has been a beloved staple of Bridgeport, Conn. for more than 40 years, serving up feminist-influenced plant-based fare to the likes of Audre Lordre and Adrienne Rich, as well as dedicated locals. But a recent review alleging that owners Selma Miriam and Noel Furie reject transgender customers has set off a firestorm online.
For many, the fallout has echoes of the Michfest debate, which divided LGBTQ women for more than two decades. And while the review has since been removed, it appears in screenshots on Facebook, and Bloodroot’s own statement in response has kept the conversation going.
In the review from late December, a customer writes that upon a visit to Bloodroot, she was having lunch with a friend when she began speaking with Miriam and Furie about up Lorde having been a friend of the restaurant. The conversation turned to the customer’s own dream of having a “queer and trans intentional community and sanctuary.”
“Immediately Selma and Noel looked at one another and Selma said, ‘[W]e strongly believe in supporting only women born women here,” the customer alleges. “‘[W]e are disgusted by men who think they can put on dresses and nail polish and pump themselves up with nail polish and pump themselves with chemicals and say they are women. [T]hey just aren’t. and we will never support them.'”
The customer then she she felt uncomfortable and afraid, and is now advocating that others “refuse to support them and encourage others to do the same.”
Both Miriam and Furie declined to be interviewed for this piece, but in a Dec. 31 statement posted to their Facebook page, Bloodroot says the controversy stemmed from a conversation with a new customer who asked if they knew of an establishment that catered to trans people.
“We didn’t,” the statement reads, “but since we are not trans, it wasn’t all that interesting to us personally and stated that for us, we prefer women only spaces. This comes from our history. When Bloodroot first started in the 70’s [sic] we were trying to create a space specifically safe for women, since there were so few places like that at the time. Of course even back then we were open and welcoming to everyone, not just women.”
The post goes on to say that customer misunderstood that reply and wrote a post online slamming Bloodroot.
“We understand this is a subject matter that many people are passionate about, but we feel this anger is misguided and misplaced,” Bloodroot says in the statement. “Regardless of how you feel about Bloodroot’s stand on this, we will continue to be a welcoming space for all types of people, including those that are transgender, and treat everyone with respect.”
After the Restaurant’s FB post, Charlie Rae answers the call and deftly puts the situation into perspective (especially the last paragraph).
How I experience the internet is vastly different depending on whether I am at work, or at home. At work, wherever I go, I experience pop-ups, obtrusive ads, and auto-play movies/noise. Let me assure you, that while teaching, having all the distracting advertising going on in the background does not help the learning experience. But meanwhile, at home I can browse the web unencumbered by any of the annoyances listed above. Pages load quickly and are appealing to read with little clutter to distract the eye and the mind. This peaceful repose is achieved primarily through the use of two program plugins that are available to the Firefox browser – Ad Block Plus and Ghostery. Ad block screens out most of the ads and Ghostery stops websites from tracking your movements and preferences as you browse on the internet (oh, and duck duck go is a nice start to increase your privacy while browsing as well). The powers that be though, are not amused by individuals taking control of their internet experience.
“Global ad spending is expected to reach $600 billion US by the end of next year, according to eMarketer, and grow at an annual rate of about five per cent until the end of the decade. Much of that growth is being fuelled by digital advertising, particularly on mobile devices.
But there was one session in Cannes where some very dark clouds managed to intrude on the sunny forecast. It was a panel devoted to the current scourge of the digital advertising industry — ad blocking.
According to a report by PageFair and Adobe, more than 200 million people worldwide have downloaded software that can block virtually all online advertising.
The number of people blocking ads increased by more than 40 per cent last year, and it is estimated that blocking cost cash-starved publishers more than $22 billion last year.”
Oh my goodness. People not wanting advertising to be part of every facet of their life, not a choice, but a scourge.
“Almost everyone in the ad industry acknowledges that most of the wounds that have led to the rise in ad blocking are self-inflicted.
Advertisers got greedy by assaulting users with too many low quality, untargeted ads, too many auto play videos, too much click bait.
Last fall, the IAB launched an initiative called L.E.A.N. Ads (light, encrypted, ad choice supported, non-invasive).
The IAB hopes that by following the L.E.A.N. guidelines, advertisers will create ads that consumers will be happy to see.”
Hmm, so we alienate people to the point where ad blocking is necessary to have a good browsing experience and then complain that ad-blocking is ‘killing’ the internet. Other entities have decided that they won’t let the user in, if ad-blocking is enabled.
“Sites like Forbes and GQ won’t allow access to their content unless users turn them off. At Cannes, Mark Thompson, the president and CEO of the New York Times, announced that his newspaper would soon be offering an ad-free edition to subscribers at a premium price.
Other publishers are appealing to their readers’ sense of fairness and justice, asking them to turn off their blockers and reminding them they are a critical part of the ecosystem that has powered the internet for the past 20 years. Without ads, there would be no free content online.”
Well, GQ and Forbes you can go frack yourself sideways as the content you produce will be reproduced elsewhere on the web without your restrictions. :) The counterpoint to this though is the insidious beast known as ‘native advertising’.
“So-called “native advertising” has been growing in popularity over the past several years. Also known as “sponsored content,” it looks and feels like editorial content, but it comes from advertisers rather than journalists.
Native advertisements can often pass through ad blocking filters because the filters don’t recognize it as advertising. Many readers seem to prefer this kind of content over traditional advertising, provided it’s properly labelled, although there’s no consensus on what constitutes proper labelling.”
Watch your daily paper, there is more this native advertising junk in there everyday. If there is a scourge to be named, it should be that of the advertising editorial or advertorial.
“But the real victims of the ad blocking surge may not be advertisers and publishers, but the “free” web itself.
The money to pay for content has to come from somewhere, and if you take advertising revenue out of the equation, readers will have to pick up the slack themselves, something they have historically been reluctant to do. Without ads, the web may be a poorer and less interesting place.”
Breaking news: The sky is indeed falling. Also: A-Booga-Booga-Booga! The heart of the very internet itself will crumble if ad-blocking continues!
The advertising industry may piss-off right the frack off with their hyperbole; starting yesterday. If the amount of stultifying drek available on the interweebs is halved tomorrow, not a soul would notice. So I say bring on the next internet apocalypse.
Wow. What brilliant article by Ms.Fowles recently published by the Walrus. I’m gonna put the whole thing up here because it sheds light on so many of the issues that face women today in the online world. Consider this example #2348239487 of how woman’s experiences in society are dramatically different than those of men.
“Every so often, someone (always a man) sends me a casual tweet asking why he can’t retweet me. Of course, the obvious answer is that my account is locked—a tiny optional blessing of Twitter’s functionality that means I’m not searchable to the world outside. The more complex answer relates to why my account is locked in the first place, why I would choose to keep people from reading my brilliant musings on ’90s’ teen movies, Rihanna’s latest video, or the myriad virtues of Magic Mike XXL. There are easy, palatable answers I have given to those that ask; I value my privacy, or I like to keep my circle small and manageable, or I prefer to keep the personal aspects of my life away from my employers and ex-boyfriends.
But the most important (and truest) answer is this: I am afraid of men on the Internet.
There’s good reason for this fear, and it’s likely one you’ll empathize with if you’re a woman who has ever dared to have an opinion in the techno-public realm. In fact, women have never once asked me why my account is locked—and unlike some of my male editors, they’ve never recommended opening it up. They understand that the online world has become a horror show, and that men largely drive that horror. Men are usually the ones who post nude pictures of their exes, release the home addresses of the women they dislike, and run the vileness that is Gamergate. (I’m even reluctant to type the word Gamergate, as if doing so conjures the hoards like some kind of Internet Candyman.) Of course, Not All Men, but unless a new Twitter follower has “I hate women” or some variation thereof in his bio, there’s no good way to predict which one will decide to take offence at you merely existing. And there’s no way to know whether that person who is offended will be the one to threaten to end your life.
Online technology has allowed a stranger to tell me he’d like to penetrate me with a broken light bulb because I’d “probably like it.” It has let a commenter inform me that women shouldn’t act the “way they do” if they don’t want men to commit crimes against them. I’ve been the subject of mockery and derision on men’s-rights-activist websites and right-wing blogs. On a good day, the Internet helps people let me know I’m stupid, and on a bad one it helps them threaten me with bodily harm. It’s facilitated me being called a man hater, a feminazi, a libtard, a hack, an attention whore, or just a plain old whore. It’s brought me patronizing questions, profanity-laden emails, and abuse masquerading as “criticism.”
It has also been a great way for people to tell me that I should ignore all this, that I should get a thicker skin, and if I don’t like it maybe I should get offline altogether.”
Catch the rest at the Walrus, as apparently they need their ad revenue – tracking down hole in the wall blogs for copyright violations is an expensive business.
bleatmop
Mystro
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