Incuriosity in the age of ‘AI’

AI isn’t the problem. The utter lack of curiosity among the people using it is the real worry.

If you’re wanting to read the number one book on the Chicago Sun-Times “summer reading list,” you’re out of luck — because it doesn’t actually exist.

In fact, 10 of the books on the 15-book list aren’t real titles; and the reason why is pretty ridiculous: Rather than creating a “summer reading list” for a content syndication company from scratch, “writer” Marco Buscaglia merely asked ChatGPT to do it for him.

The problem with generative AI, however, is that it’s often a little fuzzy about what’s real and what’s imaginary.

Not unlike Google hallucinating about a black Pope or producing images of ethnically diverse Nazi SS soldiers, much of what AI offered Buscaglia — that he then mindlessly copied and pasted — were nonexistent books, complete with entirely fabricated synopsizes and reviews.

Oops.

Certainly, a bunch of newspapers running an AI-generated reading list that was comprised largely of nonexistent books is worth a chinwag, as is the idiocy of a “writer” plagiarizing a ChatGPT answer for their submission to a national syndication company. However, the more stunning part of the story to me is how an obvious piece of unintelligible nonsense made it to publication in the first place.

One would imagine that, at some point in the process of editing and reviewing the piece, there’d be at least a single human being along the way who would have done a quick Google search for at least one of the listed books — if for no other reason than to see if it was available on Audible for their upcoming summer vacation.

But no. Evidently, the mere fact that there were words on a page — content purely for the sake of content — was enough for everyone to assume everything was copacetic. There was no interest in what, exactly, those words said or what books were being recommended… but there was enough text to fill a printed page, and that’s all that really mattered to everyone involved.

As one post on X.com (formerly known as Twitter) opined, the scandal demonstrates “a startling failure up and down the chain. An indictment of our profession. And a bleak sign of the times when the folks tasked with suggesting books to others are, themselves, apparently disinterested in actually cracking a book open.”

Indeed. And more to the point, the oversight of all the editors, content managers and newspaper owners who merely plugged the column into the system and hit “print” for distribution shows what the real danger of AI is going to be moving forward: People.

After all, the notion that a lazy “writer” thought it fine to hack his way along with some AI interface is bad enough — but it’s not entirely unexpected in a world where “content is king” and everyone from local newspapers to social media marketers are more interested in having something to share online than they are in what, exactly, it is they are sharing.

As bad as an AI-generated reading list is, it’s probably not that much worse than what the syndicate would have sent out anyway, considering the author of the article clearly had no interest in writing such a list (let alone reading books worthy of suggestion in the first place).

And that seems like a bigger problem than HAL9000 providing us with a list of nonexistent literature.

After all, while AI might create some junk, so do an awful lot of the “creatives” currently producing content for ad agencies, national brands and even content syndication companies.

As I argued not too long ago when Hollywood writers were concerned about being replaced by robots, if the end result of their human efforts are drab and dull corporate drudgery, then no one should be too surprised when AI comes along and starts replacing such crap with cheaper alternatives:

AI is a looming threat to many of the writer jobs in Hollywood — but that has less to do with the wonders of modern computing abilities, and a whole lot more to do with the low-value content being produced in our current era of formulaic and “franchised” world of entertainment.

Maybe — and this is just spit-balling here — but maybe if Hollywood was cranking out films with a little more depth than the visually-spectacular CGI superhero reboots we’ve come to expect every blockbuster season, writers wouldn’t be too worried about being replaced by an intern putting a prompt into a Chat-GPT engine.

Alas, we live in a world awash with content for the sake of content — which means a great amount of it is bound to be uninspired. And this is a big part of the problem the creative world is now running into: There’s a huge demand for content, but only a relatively small slice of those demanding it give a damn about its quality.

Recently, for example, I lamented the depressing future Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has imagined for advertising in a quest to address such demand — a world in which adverts are churned out en masse from an AI factory at Meta headquarters:

What a depressing world Zuck has imagined for our future — one in which fake images and soullessly generated copy are assembled in accordance with what some infinitely complex algorithm concludes will arouse the greatest number of clicks in a world populated entirely by doomscrolling platform addicts.

And while that essay was largely an argument that creatives won’t be entirely replaced by Zuck’s army of AI Mad Men, I have to confess a reader pointed out something rather obvious to me after it was published: Much of our human-made creative outputs aren’t exactly spectacular nowadays either.

We live in a world where there is an insatiable desire for every brand to keep up in our new social-media world of nonstop doomscrolling — and whether it’s some hastily assembled graphic design from someone hired on “Fiverr,” or a summer reading list thrown together by a wannabe writer using AI, much of it is passionless commotion rather than deliberate and intentional creation.

In my estimation, what allows such uninspired noise to proliferate is the general incuriosity that accompanies such a “content-first” approach to creative endeavors.

For example, the reason an AI generated reading list full of nonexistent books made it to publication is simply because no one actually read the column beyond a quick skimming to ensure it was in accordance with AP style guidelines. There was no curiosity, no intrigue, no desire to “dig deeper” by anyone — including the hack that submitted it.

And that incuriosity is what troubles me far more than dreary “content” or some wannabe-writer’s bullshit dependence on ChatGPT prompts.

Look at the world of news, politics and social media and this incuriosity becomes quite palpable. Sure, fake news, deep-fakes and outright lies are a danger for public discourse — but such dangers (whether generated by AI or some unemployed basement-dwelling troll) are only real because large enough swaths of the public are incurious about deeply investigating whatever partisan bullshit their “side” peddles their way.

Institutionally, in journalism, we often see this play out in dramatic fashion.

During the last presidential election, for example, much of the media seemed genuinely incurious about President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline — blindly accepting the administration’s insistence that, despite public evidence to the contrary, everything was hunky-dory behind the scenes.

(Oddly, the media really only became curious about the possibility of a “cover up” after the election was over and an opportunity for a book deal was suddenly on the table… but that’s probably just a coincidence.)

Similarly, much of MAGA’s influencesphere seem genuinely incurious about the massive fortune their dear leader has acquired while “serving” as commander in chief — demonstrating a sudden and convenient disinterest in potential corruption considering the years of handwringing they had over the Clintons, Bidens and other legendary residents of “The Swamp” enriching themselves.

Even in our personal lives, incuriosity can erode away at our wellbeing, our relationships and our ability to engage with the world around us. As I’ve written before:

It’s not just the world of politics that has grown cagey of exploring divergent viewpoints or considering the understandable perspectives of those with whom one might disagree — much of our professional and personal lives suffer from similar incuriosity. Simply put, we seem hardwired to argue with those we consider wrong rather than investigate why they might subscribe to their supposedly “wrong” beliefs in the first place.

All too often, our reaction to disagreement is a reflexive rationalization of our own worldview rather than a genuine attempt to understand or persuade our ideological “others.” When our differences in opinion generate division, we tend to retreat to a form of “argument” that… is basically just a form of propagandizing our own beliefs

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Curiosity, on the other hand… forces us to critically explore the ideas of others and, in so doing, examine our own preconceptions and cognitive biases.

The unwillingness to explore the world around us — let alone explore the “content” we consume privately and professionally — is what lead the Chicago Sun-Times to run an AI-generated summer reading list full of nonexistent book titles. More to the point, however, that relatively harmless faux pas demonstrates something important:

ChatGPT spewing out incorrect, biased or wholly fabricated fiction isn’t the leading threat faced by society. Instead, the incuriosity of those who consume such fiction is what should really keep us up at night.

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Michael Schaus is a communications and branding expert based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and founder of Schaus Creative LLC — an agency dedicated to helping organizations, businesses and activists tell their story and motivate change. He is also a regular opinion columnist.

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