The soul of a dead machine
By 
Dan’s post regarding Eve Fairbanks’ essay about what’s wrong with AI prose reminded me of a thought I’d had a couple of times recently, which is this: Such criticisms are reminiscent of the arguments Orwell makes about contemporary — meaning now 80 years ago — English language prose, in his classic essay “Politics and the English Language.” So I re-read that essay, and it was an uncanny experience:
Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.
Hey, you say prefabricated hen-house, I say predictive algorithm.
And again:
[M]odern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier – even quicker, once you have the habit – to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don’t have to hunt about for the words; you also don’t have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences, since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious. When you are composing in a hurry – when you are dictating to a stenographer, for instance, or making a public speech – it is natural to fall into a pretentious, latinized style. Tags like a consideration which we should do well to bear in mind or a conclusion to which all of us would readily assent will save many a sentence from coming down with a bump. By using stale metaphors, similes and idioms, you save much mental effort, at the cost of leaving your meaning vague, not only for your reader but for yourself. This is the significance of mixed metaphors. The sole aim of a metaphor is to call up a visual image. When these images clash – as in The Fascist octopus has sung its swan song, the jackboot is thrown into the melting pot – it can be taken as certain that the writer is not seeing a mental image of the objects he is naming; in other words he is not really thinking.
“He is not really thinking” — in this sense AI is merely the most extreme final product of a long-term tendency to suck as much cognitive effort (or as Orwell would say “thinking”) out of the act of writing. Instead, writing becomes a kind of mechanical robotic production line exercise, that involves human intelligence as little as possible.
This is why an internet meme such as “America is a land of contrasts” is both funny and true: A phrase like that is something that anyone whose job it is to evaluate student writing will recognize as an example of when the mindless machine is churning out pseudo-thoughts, instead of attempting to genuinely connect with another intelligence, aka the reader. AI eliminates the need for actual writers, but in the long run it also eliminates any need for actual readers as well. This is the dead internet, which is both a paranoid conspiracy theory, and an all-too-plausible prediction of the general direction of things at the moment. The real threat is not so much that our machines will start thinking, but that we ourselves will stop doing so altogether.
Orwell’s point is that the struggle against mindless prose is ultimately a political struggle:
Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.
As true as this was in 1946, it is even truer in 2026, when quite literally mindless prose has become a fantastically lucrative creation of hyper-capitalism in its most toxic form. I don’t think, therefore I conform and consume might be the Cartesian dictum of our age, and the large language models are very much at the center of a kind of ongoing mass cultural suicide.