I wish I didn’t need a new lexicon of niche words to describe strange and awkward new emotions or scenarios from this AI-era.
Last week I coined the term “slop-scanning” which is the new cognitive tax for having to constantly filter whether something human-generated content or AI-generated.
This week I want to coin another new adjacent technical term - Aignosis.
Aignosis is defined as the cognitive angst associated with having a high degree of certainty that something was AI-generated but having no definitive ability to prove that your intuition is correct.
Aignosis can lead to both mental frustration and loss of relational or institutional trust. Let’s run through a few scenarios:
Work Scenario
You receive something at work from a co-worker, subcontractor, or consultant. The work bears a lot of the hallmarks of a lot of AI-generation or at least significant AI-assistance. You were clear in your directives that you wanted human generated work. After all, you could have taken 30 seconds of time and made a good prompt to get a similar quality deliverable. In this scenario, you have now been placed in a state of aignosis where you have a high confidence in your intuition that this work has been phoned in. Now you are wrestling with the interpersonal and institutional implications of whether and/or how to address this matter with the party involved.
Knowledge Economy Scenario
You have paid a good sum of money to fly and attend a conference and you are excited to hear a favorite thinker/writer give a plenary session on a subject very relevant to you. You attend the plenary session but the first thing you see is the slides were likely made in 10 seconds in Claude from a fed manuscript. Now, subconsciously, your slop-scanning radar is up. In the first 15 minutes you hear three, “it’s not X, it’s Y” sentence constructions. Now your train of thought is completely lost. Slop-scanning has now passed over from subconscious to conscious. You are no longer able to follow the actual content of the talk and the entire reason you traveled to the conference. The talk finishes and you are left in a state of aignosis. You have a high degree of confidence that you wasted all that time and money to travel to hear someone speak and you feel disrespected that you could have simply gotten 60%+ of the plenary content from a well crafted prompt from your phone. You can’t prove it but your intuition is strong and you are left just sitting in the frustration and angst.
Here are a few developments in AI worth noting from this week:
Demis Hassabis changes roles at Google - Google Press Release
I will be teaching two sessions in this AI cohort here aimed at ministry leaders who want to get up to speed on AI developments
AI and the Image of God: What Does it Mean to be Human? [Silicon Spiritualities - Ep. 3]
Thanks for these thoughts! They've jogged something in my mind: why do we need to investigate or critique along this angle at all? In other words, does it matter if it's AI generated or not? Why not just examine material along the lines of it being good/helpful or bad/unhelpful? I wonder how much of this aignosis is a symptom of these early days of gen-AI. It's a new-ish thing so we are looking around for the new thing. Curious what you think!