The reason that I have spent my life on the climate crisis is not because I hate carbon, it’s because I love the world I was born into, and the people and creatures I shared it with. The greenhouse effect is by far the biggest threat that world has faced. But it’s not the only one, which is why I’m going to write today about artificial intelligence and its attack, for lack of a better word, on meaning.

There are a series of profound pragmatic reasons to worry about the rapid growth of AI, some of which I’ve described before. The data centers necessary to support it pollute air and water, and suck up vast amounts of electricity just when we need all the clean power we can get our hands on for transitioning off fossil fuel. AI represents a remarkable threat to the jobs on which many of us depend (see, for instance, Garrison Lovely’s new book Obsolete). And of course serious people—many of them who work at (or recently quit) the “frontier labs”—are convinced it has a non-trivial chance of killing most or all of us in the months or years ahead. (Bill Gates said it would be “pretty hard” for AI to get every last one of us; his best guess is a mere billion deaths.) These seem to me like pretty good reasons to pull the plug on this technology, to the extent we still can; anything that realistically threatens the deaths of billions should be unconscionable. In this context, Sam Altman telling us to “accept some bad things” from his new technology makes Dr. Strangelove look like Ralph Nader.

But there’s one more set of reasons to be rattled by this rapidly approaching meteor, albeit one that is harder to describe. That involves its impact on what it means to be human. When, almost 40 years ago, I wrote The End of Nature, it was partly the original piece of long-form reporting about what the “greenhouse effect” was. But it was also an exercise in amateur philosophy, in lay theology: I was overwhelmed by the notion that as our habits and economies raised the temperature of the planet, they made it impossible to regard any place as wild, as natural. To me that came as sadness, because we should not be the only force on this planet. “By changing the weather, we make every spot on Earth man-made and artificial. We have deprived nature of its independence, and that is fatal to its meaning. Nature’s independence is its meaning; without it there is nothing but us.”

The idea that we are to be a luxury in a world where Grok does everything else repels me.

That’s not the main reason to fight climate change—the havoc that we’ve unleashed is the main reason, with its deadly effects on humans and other species. Still, it accounts for a sadness beneath the fear.

And for me the same with AI. In essence, it takes much of the meaning out of being human. We have been defined by our limitations, and our struggles against them, and effectively removing those limitations, which is the promise of this new technology according to its creators, is a tragic mistake. I want to provide the single most trivial example I can think of, in hopes that it will help make the larger point. Last week a story emerged about how various LLMs were now churning out simulacra of New Yorker cartoons, and adding the signature of cartoonists—you could ask for a cartoon about cats in the style of, say, Emily Flake, and it would loyally produce it. The point of the story, and it was a good and useful point, was that this was a kind of advanced plagiarism:

"It’s an uncanny simulacrum of an impression of a joke,” said Jason Adam Katzenstein, who has been publishing cartoons in The New Yorker since 2014. “But it’s not the point for it to actually be funny or good. The point is that it’s trying to deal a death blow to labor. It’s trying to render individual cartoonists obsolete because we cost money and take time.”

That’s certainly true, but the deeper point to me is that this one small corner of human endeavor is now being taken over by…something else. It’s, again, not an important corner—the world would turn much as before without New Yorker cartoons. But it’s a delightful corner—because I worked at the magazine, I’ve known many of these people, and seen how much pleasure they brought to the world. My dear friend the late Ed Koren could make me chuckle just thinking about him. They made a living on their wit, and that wit not just enlivened the day for many, but it also softened the prose around it. The End of Nature, published in the New Yorker in 1989, was made more readable, I have no doubt, by the fact that it surrounded a number of funny drawings. Garrison Keillor, in fact, once imagined what a parade of writers down Fifth Avenue would look like:

The honor guard of editors swings by, carrying ceremonial carbines and Old Glory (with a few stars and stripes deleted), and the Newsstand Band, playing the “Washington Post” march, followed by crack typing-drill squads, their Underwoods draped with fresh ribbons. Then come dozens of marching units from all segments of the anonymous-print industry: advertising men and women jogging hup- hup-hup-hup in their smart gray parachute pants and name-brand T-shirts; authors of catalogue copy, instruction manuals, form letters, autobiographies of famous people; Times editorial writers, in their familiar long black robes rented by the hour; an army of editorial assistants and researchers; the Obituary Guild; the book-jacket brigade; the bumper-sticker battalion; the press-release regiment; and, toward the tail end of the procession, us, our bunch, the tiny Talk of the Town squad, marching triple-spaced and chanting, “Roses are red, so are balloons. We write the gray stuff around the cartoons!”

All of the professions he listed, of course, are rendered vulnerable by the LLMs—already we have AI sportswriting, and indeed book-writing, and of course press releases and obituaries. Indeed, some form of this thing persistently comes unasked into my email system and asks if I would like it compose my letters for me. I would not. More letters would be produced that way—but really, more is not the point. The point is the doing.

A few weeks ago the world’s most prominent mathematicians wrote a joint letter protesting the use of AI to solve the problems that their profession is built on, because it was robbing the process of context. The mathematical community, they wrote:

functions, in many ways, as a miniature version of humanity. It consists of individuals using a wide variety of different approaches, joined by core values. The most precious resources of our profession are students and ideas, and these we nurture with great care. We feel responsible to let them grow to their full potential, until they can live a life of their own in the mathematical world.

But Claude, or whatever, was just bulldozing through all of that:

We are witnessing a general threat to intellectual work, with misalignment between the outcome of the use of AI and its initial purpose. In many fields and activities, years of training have traditionally served not only to produce a final answer or product, but also to develop understanding and the ability to formulate new questions and ideas. However, building on a vast body of previous human work, AI systems are becoming increasingly capable of producing the results of such work directly, and these goals cease to align. The issues the mathematical community faces now are similar to issues that other scientific and creative professions........

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