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Proof of Care in the Age of A.I. – Jacob Filipp Now, the same lengthy Pomeranian piece could’ve been blooped out by a bot in 1 0 seconds flat. Impossible to tell if any effort went into writing it. This ease makes it hard to connect with others over shared interests, and harder still to convince people to change their mind about an issue. A . I. is making it easier than ever for people to put the ir t hough ts into writ i ng. A nd tha t’s a problem. In this document , I will review the l atest ways in which people are restorin g trust in their work in a noisy post-LLM world. Ways of demonstrating that effort went into their message . Ways of proving they care. One-To -M any, O nline The simplest wa y to make a message effortful is to hand- write it. It takes time to write out thousands of words and there are no shortcuts. It’s tedious. It hurts. It even works for short messages . Try it now: think of a quip you’d like to post to Socia l Media. Write it out on paper. Take a photo and post tha t. I guarantee that your message wil l hit home be t ter than if you’d written it digit ally. You can add “extras” that make the task more difficult. For exam p le, you can manua ll y ref l e c t each le t t er o f the wr i tte n mess age. I have only seen a few people do this becau s e i t make s the te x t ha r d e r to rea d at a g lan c e. Bu t, pe rhaps, t h a t kin d of fr ic t io n is w e l co me in ou r skim- it- an d - fo rg e t - i t mo d e r n w o r l d ? One interesting qua li ty of handwriting is that you can apply it to LLM - generated text by tracing the output of an A.I. tool. The act of rewriting by hand still proves that you cared enough abo ut a ma tt er to rise above ju st copy- pasting the text. O ne - To - M a ny, O ff l i ne Your photo of a handwritten message proves that you cared enough to write the message once. But how do you make it effortful to share a genuine message at-scale ? One solution is to hand-write many flyers and distribute them on the street. A physical f lyer , handed out by a living human being , is w ay more effective than a message on a social media feed. The core skill for this approach is to keep things short: when you hand - write 1,000 flyers you bet ter use the fewest words that get your message across. If you don’t want a wrist injury , th at is ! U nfortunately, the Rich and M oderately Rich have co- opted this handwriting approach to lobby for their interests in a way that looks “ organic”. They use machines ca lled Pen Plotters to make imitation handwritten flyers at scale. These can have all the imperfections and variations of the real thing. Down to having one-of- a - kind fonts created from a particular person’s handwriting . A carte l of bu sinesspeople can pass these flyers over to dozens of gig-workers , who in turn hand them out at various town centres. Over the past three years, the public had smartened up to the use of plotters and this led to the invention of new proof-of-care indicators. T a t t o o s One way to broadcast one’s thoug hts is to get a big bold ta t too. By permanen tly writing a mess age into one’s body, tattoos show an unfakeable conviction. What’s more, tattoos display a message to everyone in the vicinity without having to exert constant effort. For as long as real tattoos can be distinguished from the fake thing they remain a good way of proving commitment. They are most practical in places with temperate climate. The key with tattoos is to keep the message a) short and b) evergreen. This message will adorn your body forever so it can’t be something you’ll rethink in the next twenty years. This is easier said than done! Who among us hasn’t seen a young lady with “Meat is murder” down the middle of her torso, or a young man on his hustle with a “ Grind Hard” message across his forehead ? I’m sure that they’ll regret their choice when they are older and their priorities sh if t ! S tory tellers One unf a keable way to rea ch an a udience is to shout your message at a busy place. This harks back to “Speakers’ Corner” in Hyde Park in London, and to other such spots that were popular un ti l the late twentieth century. I have personally seen more people in North American cities shouting out in public. There is also a rise in the number of people I can only describe as “ Town Criers”, moving on foot through a city and spreading true news to counteract all the false news on the Net. I believe that this greater use of in-person communication is part of a migration from the Online World back into the Physical World. This wave will only intensify over the next five years Between cities, travelling storytellers are reportedly plying a route and sitting down with the townsfolk to share tales. I hear that this is how the I liad and Odyssey were first transmitted. Except now, it is more like Julius Caesar’s autobiographical books: each story is not just entertaining but aims to telegraph a message about a person or initiative. Story telling requires adapting a message to rhyme and repetition. The storyteller can’t just read out prepared text, either: the story needs to be adjusted to match the energy of the listeners, to their identity and to the setting. One would tailor a story differently whether the audience are office workers, warehouse labourers or a group of nurses who’d just gone off-shift. The challenge with the above is that regional oligarchs will undoubtedly hire and train people to spread their own propaganda. That’s why the storytellers form guilds and initiate members with a trial in pain, written in the body. A young man typically becomes a Storyteller by having his skin cut with razors, row on row, and getting burnt wood ash rubbed into the wounds. The ceremony itself is painful, and the four-week recovery is even more so. When they heal, the scars form raised patterns like alliga tor scales. A young woman usually becomes a Storyteller by having an artist carve ornate shapes into her face with a bone chisel. When telling a story, the listeners can tell at a glance whether a Storyteller is “the real deal” and has not been bought. S ubtraction The most extreme means of emphasizing one’s message is by mutilating the body. Some businessmen in The East may cut off their own ear to sea l a Billionaire Elevation Deal, or a critical political marriage. Closer to home , in Designated European Warzone II and in the Euphrates Crucible, we have the practice of government ministers underscoring a declaration of war by cutting off a finger. Body mutilation is a gesture of unquestionable commitment. And it gets attention. It is egalitarian in that it is available even to the poorest of people. But, I believe, there is an “escaltion effect” here that will land people in the same position as the Tibetan protestors from previous decades, dousing themselves in gasoline and lighting themselves aflame. When you start one-upping each other, there is only one destination where this practice can lead. This kind of Proof of Stake is mostly done by followers of the Witch Priestess from the North, and loyal readers of my blog alread y know that I hold her in low esteem. I ncreasing the bandwidth What’s common to all the methods we reviewed so far is that they are low bandwidth. Short messages you can shout and handwritten flyers are bad at transmitting complex ideas . In past times, this is when the speaker would pen an essay or write a book on a subject,z but A. I. has made those formats suspect. I n order to dive deeper into an idea, people have begun to schedule face-to-face gatherings that last one or two hours . And why restrict yourself to talking ? To get the message across, communicators are now performing with their whole body – a dance, a song, a play, or something in between. Smell, touch and taste, too, increase the surface area for their message. I f a digital video call is higher-bandwidth than reading a document; if an in-person group presentation is higher-bandwidth than video; and a 1-on-1 conversation is even higher… then what is higher-bandwidth than that ? You’d have to do something extreme to your brain to cram in more content. And that’s exactly where the cutting edge is: today’s youth are using psychedelic drugs to kick the gates of communication wide open. First, one would gather an audience and have them ingest mind-altering drugs. Then, put the listeners into a cozy and safe environment – perhaps sitting around a fire. The communicator could speak the message aloud. Or, they could push the limits of communication by also ex aggerating their facia l expressions, moving the arms and feet in extreme gestures , by adding layers of drum music. F rom there it is a short step to painting your body, adding feathers , masks and dancing. Those in the vanguard aim to get the most “juice” from those hours together. Drugs prime the mind for maximal intake. On any given night, on the outskirts of our larges t cities, you can find young people having a genuine dialogue by dancing around burning bonfires, bodies a black silhouette, feathered masks shaking. I n this bizarre digital age of Artificial Intelligence, there is just one thing that I can say for sure: The kids are allright Proof of Care in the A ge of A .I. Previously, if you created a 4,000 - word b log post abou t Pomeranians, people could a ssume that here was a person who really cared a bout dogs. Fine – may be the qua lit y of the wr iting was imperfect – but the sheer effort it took to write so much was proof t hat you reall y cared abou t this topic. Not any more. Proof of Care in the Age of A.I. – Jacob Filipp