-OpEd-
PARIS — As the AI World Summit was getting underway earlier this week, I took a dazzling technological leap: After several months of avoidance, I updated my Word application. This procrastination was not entirely without reason. First, I wanted to finish the first draft of a novel, because for a writer who spends his day staring at the still page of a computer, Word isn’t just a word processing program. It’s a craftsman’s tool, laboriously set up to his own (in this case, minimal) needs, virtually worn down by accumulating docs and spinning character counters, and to which you become attached like a carpenter to his hammer. I was too afraid the update would break my little hammer.
For the latest news & views from every corner of the world, Worldcrunch Today is the only truly international newsletter. Sign up here.
Jackpot. After duly restarting my computer, a multicolored fly appeared on my screen: Copilot, Microsoft’s generative AI. It now sticks to each of my lines, offering to write for me. “You’re tired, Gaspard,” says the fly. “Just leave it to me. Trust me. I’m your slave: give me an order and I’ll do it. Your readers won’t notice a thing.”
I answer vehemently. “Go away, Satan! These are my words, my thoughts, my work, my life.” But the little fly keeps on dancing in front of my eyes. No amount of maneuvering will get it out. Microsoft has just committed the ultimate sacrilege. It has forcibly introduced a robot into the heart of the creative process.
Sacrilege
This is the danger I always dreaded when AI — a formidable technology, by the way— began to intrude our daily lives. We are getting used to delegating our ability to choose to the machine, out of laziness or comfort. Yet a human who ceases to exercise free will eventually loses it, signalling the end of the modern individual.
Neurological studies have shown that private-car chauffeurs who follow the instructions of a navigation app all day long suffer from an atrophy of the area of the brain responsible for decision making. Copilot is the Waze of thought. Entrusting self-expression to a robot is the ultimate step of voluntary servitude. Signing an email you didn’t write is an abdication of all dignity.
The very name, Copilot, is an insult to the author that I am.
In writing, like in everything else, it is naive to think that AI will rid us of menial tasks while offering us all the leisure of using our genius for noble and mysterious pursuits. For it is precisely in the painstaking carving of the work, the patient eradication of repetition, in the contemplative abyss of the comma, that a singular style is forged. It is through the countless mistakes and misguided ways of early manuscripts that we learn to mold our own language.
Copilot embodies the essence of the nudge, the little push that puts our mind on convenient tracks and, through the merciless game of algorithmic correlation, ends up reducing them to the statistical average of its fellows. The very name, Copilot, is an insult to the author that I am, alone in his cabin for the past 20 years, who is suddenly burdened by a chatty neighbor. Where I try, with some difficulty, to chart my own course, the copilot brings me back incessantly to familiar paths, easy ways and herd ideas.
Existential threat
In the face of this existential threat, Microsoft’s economic extortion almost takes a back seat. Not content with authoritatively modifying the product I bought, Microsoft has announced an increase in the subscription in order to finance Copilot. In other words, paying for what we don’t want.
Worse still, we’re now working for free for Microsoft, who will most likely use our texts to train its AI. The company explicitly states: “When a user interacts with Microsoft 365 Copilot (using applications such as Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OneNote, Loop or Whiteboard), we store data about those interactions.” It would not only be an unacceptable intrusion in our creative privacy, but also an unwarranted harvesting of the value we produce, and a pillaging at the source of copyright.
Using AI must remain a conscious choice.
I’m all the more dismayed by the fact that, until now, Microsoft had represented a bastion of purity in a lawless digital capitalism. I was born at the same time as the very first Word program. At the age of 10, I learned to type on a Macintosh 128k keyboard, a big purring safe that promised a better future. My parents, who wrote their first books and articles on typewriters, were enchanted to finally get rid of scissors, Scotch tape and Wite-Out; no longer tangled in correction ribbons and crumpled pages. ⌘ C, ⌘ V: that was progress.
The decision-makers meeting in Paris these days seem bewitched by AI. I would advise them to take a look at the computer forums where Word users share tips on how to get rid of Copilot (apparently possible on some computers), and complain in selected terms about the violence done to them.
Using AI must remain a conscious choice, reserved for the uses we define ourselves. If public authorities have one mission, it’s to not become start-up salesmen but to safeguard the freedom of their citizens. Give me back my little hammer!
