The 2009 sci-fi action flick Surrogates posited a world where people send idealized physically fit robotic versions of themselves out into the world. Meanwhile, the actual people puppeteer their surrogates from the safety of their homes, while growing fat and lazy.
As I have been reading more and more research papers that have obviously been “cleaned up” by ChatGPT or one of its cousins, I am reminded of this film (based, by the way, on an excellent comic book series). Now in 2025, the thing that is being idealized is not one’s physical appearance, but how one expresses oneself.
We are entering an age when the words people use in public discourse are not their own. Rather the words you see them use are a kind of amalgam of all the words that have ever been used by everybody else, courtesy of Large Language Models.
It’s the intellectual equivalent of digital make-up. Except it is worse, because now it is not merely our physical form that is being painted over, but our very thoughts and ideas.
Will we eventually arrive at a reality in which verbal expression itself is systematically cleaned up and homogenized? Will every human utterance we hear eventually become a kind of intellectual autotune?
I worry that in this brave new world the unique poet’s voice will disappear, replaced by homogeneous A.I. slop. This would be tragic, because society needs that idiosyncratic spark of the individual human mind to keep it awake and healthy.
As Bob Dylan once said: “He not busy being born is busy dying.”