Will the next wave of frontier large language models make it harder to detect AI writing by eliminating its current telltale signs (weird mixed metaphors, “not x but y” formulations, and the like)? One thing is certain: AI is writing, spreading, and now appears everywhere. AI prose is like the kudzu vine in the American South: a non-native species, in this case of linguistic operation, that spreads so quickly, and puts roots so deep, that one forgets it was ever not there.

Therefore, personal distaste, and aesthetic and moral reaction against AI writing, are less important than the larger questions: how did we get here? What is the contact with all of this generated text doing to our minds and, indeed, our souls? And how do we act sensibly and intelligently given the new facts of our information ecosystem?

It may not be productive to divide the world into camps, AI users and AI rejectors, not only because AI is a complex tool with many uses, but because the climate of persecution around AI use only incentivizes bad-faith dissimulation, likely to be made easier by models like Astra. Eloquent dissent and conscientious objection from AI is good, we might say, but running everything you read — or that your friends, colleagues, or peers write — through Pangram seems unproductive, likely to yield false-positive shame, and mimetic retribution.

You have a 38% Pangram score. I have a 42% Pangram score. She has a 10% score. Who’s better? What do the scores even mean? This kind of thinking only reflects how much AI already determines our life-world: we are now measuring quality by what something is not, rather than by what it is.

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We are all Bryan Johnson now

By Matthew Gasda

The Wall Street Journal’s recent defense of running an AI-generated opinion column by the investor Stanley Druckenmiller, therefore, offers a dose of productive realism; not because it is right, but because it draws clear terms for debate and analysis. 

Paul Gigot, the Journal’s editorial-page editor, asserted that “the question for us is whether what we publish from contributors reflects an author’s original argument, and if the author has the standing and credibility to make it. In Stan Druckenmiller’s case, we have had a relationship with him for many years, and nobody can doubt that his op-ed is his genuine opinion.” Druckenmiller himself compared using AI to using a calculator.

Gigot’s and Druckenmiller’s two major claims are, first, that an essay is a verbalized form of an argument and, second, that LLMs are calculators for words. These are cogent claims. And they reflect most people’s view of LLMs, even if they don’t admit it, which is that LLMs make communication easier and more efficient in the same way digital calculators made doing long-form division easier and more efficient. Mass condemnation of AI writing in professional writing fields isn’t going to change what now amounts to folk belief: language communicates concrete information; writing is a chore.

Druckenmiller’s op-ed and the Journal’s strident defense of it force us to think about the cases in which AI use represents a difference of degree from uses of other generally accepted technological tools like Google searching or even calling a friend, and where it represents a difference of kind — a holistic, global, novel phenomenon that marks a point of no return for our species, insofar as we are Homo scriptor: man the writer.

Druckenmiller’s excuse was ultimately lame, but his distinctions were canny. In essence, he told his opponents: you’ve yet to make clear distinctions between writing and other important cognitive processes that are enriching when conducted by hand.

As Druckenmiller’s analogy suggests, we have already automated a lot of cognitive processes. I haven’t done math by hand, for instance, since grade school; I have always used GPS to drive. How many AI or LLM objectors have never used or would never use a calculator, GPS, Google search, banking apps, Yelp, Netflix, Amazon? Where actually is the line? 

Western humanism, going back to Plato, has always placed a high value on math and geometry (the legendary inscription above the gates of Plato’s Academy read, “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter here”). Renaissance post-Platonic humanism required hand calculations; modern physics, beginning with Newton, involved working on pen and paper, turning metaphysical intuitions about space and time into testable formulas. Most contemporary humanists, by historical standards, have surrendered to machines everything humanistic except discursive writing.

This is why the Druckenmiller case is so important and interesting. It is not about letting the invasive species rip, because it already has, and it is not the first such species; it is about what it would mean to return to a native cognitive environment. Druckenmiller’s provocative example forces one to ask: which calculators allow me to be human, and which deprive me of my distinctly human characteristics? 

Should we congratulate ourselves on not using Claude to write essays, if we are not also doing mathematics by hand, trading pen-and-paper epistles, keeping a physical diary, walking or driving around a city without a digital map, learning to talk to strangers rather than using dating apps, going to the library instead of opening a laptop? I think the answer, essentially, is no: if we keep AI out of writing, then we should keep computers out of almost everything.

If you accept that cognitive automation is deleterious for the soul, then you have to really start deleting automated steps, restoring them to your own control, in an effort to become someone capable of independent, deep, and flexible cognition, both for moral and aesthetic reasons. If automation in writing is bad, then it’s bad in a lot of places. We connect writing in language to identity and identity formation, so using AI to write feels and seems worse than not doing math by hand, but it may not be. You’re not learning how to play popular music on the piano as people often used to do. Remember songbooks?

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Have you corrected your racist robot?

By Sohrab Ahmari

In terms of culture and social policy, it’s hard to imagine the non-professional non-writers will return to pen and paper or even the typewriter in the absence of some larger civilization-level emphasis on the slow and the artisanal. There simply has to be a larger, internally consistent, collectively held belief that productivity isn’t always the point, that speed isn’t always desirable, and that efficiency isn’t the highest good of human life.

It is unclear how much Druckenmiller’s handwritten essay would have deviated in its argument from the auto-written version. But we can be certain that we, as readers, were deprived of Druckenmiller’s personality in the human context that frames his formal technical analysis, and this is why some readers and commenters canceled their subscriptions. As human beings, we crave and need human-supplied narratives, because we are narratives and characters, voices.

Druckenmiller is one of the greatest investors of all time, and there is an elusive genius in his brain composed of the totality of everything he’s ever thought and experienced. It’s more interesting, it’s intuitively richer. You can read about the battles of Ulysses S. Grant, both military and political, but Grant’s own memoirs activate the imagination and bring a whole lost world back to life. The subject of the Druckenmiller piece — the economic debate between the investor and his peer, Scott Bessent, now the secretary of the Treasury — is no doubt far richer in human interest and in intellectual content than whatever Druckenmiller’s calculator created for him.

But we are where we are. The models will only advance in sophistication. Just as most people won’t go back to long division by hand, so many kinds of writing will be automated and accepted as such. In some cases, this will be no great loss (news releases, weather and sports reports, company annual reports, a great deal of legal writing, and so on).

What must be preserved from the encroachments of the calculator are forms of writing in which excellence was always an uphill battle: the long-form essay, literary fiction, poetry, plays, memoir, as well as personal letters. But even this preservation must make room for reasonable carve-outs. There’s a difference between a journalist who prompts Claude to generate a sentence, a paragraph, or a whole article, on the one hand; and one who asks Claude a factual question, on the other. The latter is doing something no different from consulting Google (Google results now are AI-driven anyway).

Norms can and should be developed within these professions for certifying organic work, which will no doubt command higher prices, just as handmade furniture from a carpenter comes at a higher cost than a chair from IKEA. If this means fewer people will be thought of as true writers, is that really such a bad thing?

Consider the weavers. In 1750, India produced 25% of the world’s textiles. Beloved by consumers, the fine muslin cloths of Bengal were the envy of manufacturers throughout the globe. Braving the vagaries of wind, shipwrecks, piracy, and disease, generations of Dutch, English, and Portuguese ships made the dangerous, year-long journey to fetch this precious cargo. Concentrated in Bengal, Coromandel, and Gujarat was a rural and decentralized workforce of skilled weavers, their expertise passed down from father to son. These weavers were the backbone of India’s export system. Nevertheless, within a few decades they had been reduced to poverty. By 1830 India had become a net importer of textiles from Britain; by 1900, it produced a mere 2% of global output. Its textile trade had collapsed, and with it the livelihood of the weavers. Previously prosperous, textile-producing regions struggled with repeated famines; a world-leading industry had been wiped out.

Three factors reduced India to poverty: loss of sovereignty, the power of a foreign multinational, and the impact of automation. Amid the ruins of Mughal power, the merchants of Britain’s East India Company seized control of key ports and provinces. Supported by the British state, they used their new power to squeeze out French and Dutch trading interests — thus wrecking the economic leverage of the weavers, who could no longer choose their export market or set their own prices. A decade or two after the final conquest of India, British textile firms — protected for years from Indian competition due to a strong tariff regime — began utilizing technological innovations such as the spinning jenny, the spinning frame, and Crompton’s mule. Combined with steam power, these undercut, outcompeted, and ultimately destroyed India’s textile industry. The present now echoes the past; we would be wise to listen.

Bengal’s past is Britain’s future. They may not know it, but the lawyers, financial experts, and account managers of the British service economy are almost as exposed as the Indian artisans once were. The things that brought catastrophe to Bengal — the erosion of local sovereignty, the state-backed power of foreign corporations, and the wrenching effect of automation overseas — now threaten the economy and society of the United Kingdom. If we do not act, we will face ruin.

To understand why, reflect on the world around you. To be alive, connected to the internet, and minimally curious is to experience the dizzying advance of technology. On any given day we may use ChatGPT or one of its competitors as an accountant, therapist, copywriter, spellchecker, graphic designer, legal drafter, doctor, business analyst, or artist. Entire industries rise and fall in the sociological blink of an eye; influencers, crypto traders and SEO analysts work in industries that didn’t exist 20 years ago, yet now stand to be automated away. More satellites wheel overhead every month, connecting us at all times to a world of apps, communication, and business; electric vehicles are transforming global supply chains; drones are revolutionizing warfare; robots clean, dance, drive, and compete in marathons.

Soon, possibly within a decade, humanity may create AI systems capable of outperforming humans at every task we do. Even should full-on “AGI”-type systems not arise, huge numbers of roles will be automated at a pace and speed unlike anything in history. This will have epochal effects on every part of our society. The optimistic view is that this automation will bring with it a wondrous array of new roles and opportunities for displaced workers; pessimists point to the disruption and turmoil experienced by the workers who live through such changes, the sheer disruptive pace of this automation, and how it will impact social power. Individual human workers will stand in an increasingly unequal relationship to the new mechanisms of production; this will impact every element of society.

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Nick Bostrom: Will AI lead to tyranny?

By Flo Read

Britain’s workers are highly exposed. Our lawyers are finding that AI can be used to generate and review contracts, and our accountants have discovered ChatGPT can be used to analyze accounts. DeepResearch — an AI agent integrated into ChatGPT — does the work of a research team; Gemini can easily do the work of a set of graphic designers. Our recruiters and HR teams are increasingly composed of chatbots. And yet Britain doesn’t own any of this technology.

The fact of automation changes the social and international balance of power. Even the most monstrous tyrannies have ultimately relied upon consent. Had Russia’s people risen up as one, Stalin’s regime would have ended in a day. Without workers, factories stop, mines stand still, and ships go unloaded — but in an automated economy, this leverage will no longer exist. Cognitive and physical automation will mean that the contribution of human workers is less and less important; more and more relative power will thus accrue to the owners of AI-enabled systems. The risk is not that mass resistance will be futile; it may simply become irrelevant.

This startling future is being driven by a small subset of US and Chinese companies. Like the East India Company of two centuries ago, the largest tech companies have a power and reach that surpasses most sovereign states. This power not only threatens the independence of individual states; it threatens the viability of the Westphalian order. The companies’ decision-making shapes the sovereignty of entire nations, and they increasingly control the terms under which businesses make it to market, decide public health, and influence political processes. Indeed, tech firms control the very medium of political action. A tweak in an algorithm of a search platform, social media company, or AI chatbot can lead to the rise and fall of governments, and a decision to block or boost news items and politicians decides what is discussed and who gets to discuss it.

Decisions made by the tech majors can bring entire countries to their knees. Rejecting some $290 million in regulatory fines, Meta is currently threatening to withdraw from Nigeria; such a move would devastate the millions of small- and medium-sized businesses that rely on Facebook and Instagram for their marketing. In many places, national governments are relying upon foreign corporations to achieve their basic functions.

Matters of war and peace are now decided by the whims of tech CEOs. Through Starlink, Elon Musk decides the success or failure of military actions in Ukraine. By providing Ukraine with Starlink access in 2022, he gave it vital communication systems and thus kept the country in the war; by refusing Ukraine access to Starlink over Crimea, he prevented planned offensives upon Russia.

Covid even showed the tech majors dictating terms to nuclear powers. Utilizing the market power of their app stores, Apple and Google were able to dictate the Covid responses of Western economies. These companies determined which apps could be offered to citizens, how many could be developed per region, and how they could be used. Britain and France — top-10 economic powers, members of the Security Council, and in possession of nuclear weapons — were forced to bow before the joint determination of Apple and Google to stop them using centralized databases within their national contact tracing apps.

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Britain’s defence delusions

By Aris Roussinos

Generative AI further deepens the power of the tech majors. A new generation of tech giants — OpenAI, Perplexity, and others — are aiming to own the future. By controlling the foundational models from which LLM-based applications are being built, they have become fundamental economic actors. In an economy that uses AI agents, OpenAI and its competitors will reap outsized profits from replacing workers. With this, a new, yet deeper era of corporate power is being born.

Like other middle powers, the UK must work out how to tax, regulate, and limit this power, or even build its own — but it does not act upon a level playing field. US policy strives to reshape the world to the benefit of its tech companies. Barriers to profitability are being swept aside, new markets are being opened up, competitors and their products isolated, and tariffs used as a tool of policy.

A crucial factor behind the EIC’s conquest of India was the support it had in Britain’s parliament. Through bribery and lobbying, the EIC knew it could rely on Britain’s military, diplomatic, and financial support. Recall now Trump’s second inauguration day, and the spectacle of the tech CEOs. Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg and Pichai — the four wise men, or, at any rate, exceedingly rich ones — lined up to do homage before the king. Having rejected and resisted Trump 1.0, they see in Trump 2.0 an opportunity to control the future.

The US government now desires to prevent the implementation of AI safety rules, and to eviscerate the tech taxes of Britain and Europe. Despite the recent US-UK trade deal, the US is still pushing to scrap the UK’s digital services tax. EU taxes are another target; even before Trump’s election, the US used the threat of punitive tariffs to pressure the EU over digital taxes. Nationally, Musk’s DOGE is being given free rein to bring AI into the core functions of the US state; GOP policymakers, meanwhile, are attempting to freeze all state-level control or regulation over AI, a move that would primarily benefit US tech majors.

Barely reported in the UK press, Trump’s recent dealmaking in the Persian Gulf shows that the full weight of US diplomacy is being applied to capture markets for AI. Traveling with Trump on his Gulf tour were CEOs of NVIDIA, Amazon, OpenAI, IBM and Tesla; the results are staggering. Inking some $2.2 trillion in technology deals for US companies, Trump has reversed the “AI diffusion rule”, a Biden-era policy placing export restrictions on AI chips and model weights. Instead, the US now gambles that by flooding Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar with American chips and technology, it will bind them to the US and US companies.

Central to all of this is China. Just as competition with France drove Britain and the East India Company to expand their international reach, so too does US competition with China guide its priorities in diplomacy and technology. The US aims to cut China out of international markets, and will use all diplomatic and commercial means at its disposal. This might help the US, but it might not help its allies; captive markets are more easily controlled.

The Gulf has leverage: vast pools of petro-capital, cheap land, cheap energy, and active strategic competition between China and the USA. Britain does not; our land is scarce, our energy is expensive, and we are driving away capital. As an unreflective vassal of the US, we rarely consider the geopolitical implications of limiting our strategic supply base; whatever the realities of Huawei’s security implications, the scandal showed the UK as content to reject Chinese tech providers on the basis of US pressure. In doing so we are reducing our options. A world where China is cut out of international tech markets is a world where middle powers have less choice and less leverage.

It is fantasy to believe that the gains from AI will be fairly distributed. The surging power of US and Chinese tech multinationals layers itself upon a world of deep inequalities, tensions, and rivalries between and within individual countries. We cannot presume that the shareholders of OpenAI or DeepSeek possess a deep urge to prop up the polities of Europe, or that the immiseration of once-prosperous regions will move the conscience of AI leaders. Universal Basic Income is proposed as a key tool for managing the problem of mass unemployment. But if only a handful of states and companies control the most valuable AI systems, and if they use their market power to reduce their local taxes, other governments will have no way to pay for it. Only by building and scaling homegrown AI companies, and by offering value to the technology industry as a whole, can Britain hold a stake in the future. Britain must build leverage, not loyalty.

Britain has more options than the weavers. To survive, we must do four things: embrace AI, develop independent national capacity, increase our leverage, and articulate our national interest. The clock cannot be turned back; we must embrace a new age of ambition. Driving forward the adoption of AI will boost the growth and productivity of the British economy, and expand the market for homegrown AI companies. Every cultural and social measure should be considered: prizes, competitions, TV shows. Bring back Robot Wars, bring in Robot Marathon, or Robot Bake-offs; every schoolchild should aspire for their robot to compete, and win. Small businesses must be encouraged to embrace AI; towns and villages should compete to experiment, and we should mobilize groups like the Cambridge Ring as providers of insights and investment.

At the same time, Britain must urgently review the capacity of foreign actors to control its technology stack, and work to both widen its supply base and develop homegrown capacity in strategic areas. We should identify and cultivate British and EU alternatives to US tech majors; by doing so, we can develop functional sovereignty, and resist attempts by any foreign power to circumscribe the commercial choices of our governments and companies. If Amazon Web Services no longer provides cloud hosting for some or all government departments, then British policymakers are less exposed to vagaries of US policymaking.

We must seek leverage over compute, data, and talent, and we must identify and dominate commercial niches that match our pre-existing commercial and technical strengths. The more hyperscale data centers Britain hosts, the bigger the role it can play in the foundational infrastructure of AI, and the more rent it can extract from the tech majors. So too with data; through using the National Data Library, and passing new data trust and data intermediary laws, Britain has an opportunity to become a center for the exchange and management of data. In talent, Harvard’s trouble is to Britain’s advantage; using US political instability and immigration clampdowns, our universities can poach the world’s leading AI researchers. As for academics, so too for salespeople, product managers, and marketers: the UK should aim to attract the top 100 performers in each category into the UK and place them in UK firms. By doing so, it can supercharge growth.

Economies and societies that host corporate headquarters derive more benefits than branch offices. As a matter of national strategy, Britain should aim to promote and host category-leading AI companies in areas of pre-existing British strength: sectors like law, insurance, finance, pharma, and science. Like Taiwan did over the global chip industry, the UK must also strive to achieve dominance in strategically important sectors; though it may be too late to achieve sustained dominance in the foundation models behind LLMs, we can still look to other areas of the AI and technology value chain.

Above all, we must develop a deeper sense of the national interest. Britain should aspire to be more than a captive market for US tech products, or a declining service economy on the fringes of Europe; we have the talent, the universities and the infrastructure to be a world-leading player. Our path must be that of Meiji Japan, not Mughal India; in transformation lies survival.