Defying the Flatness
The world is becoming flat. What can we do about it?
I’m Tim Gorichanaz, and this is Ports, a newsletter about design and ethics. You’ll find this week’s article below, followed by Ports of Call, links to things I’ve been reading and pondering this week.
“It’s final exams week… and I’ll be writing papers, lots of papers. And if I want to get A’s on those papers, they better be free of typos.”
So begins an ad for Grammarly, the “secret weapon” to help you correct your spelling and grammar. And it’s not just for students. Other ads for Grammarly show how it can help you impress your boss by nailing the right turn of phrase, or ensure that you don’t embarrass yourself as a learned-language speaker of English.
There’s so much wrong with these ads I can hardly type for all the cringing. But regardless, since its founding in 2009, Grammarly’s user base and feature set have grown. It’s come a long way from fixing your typos. A recent update, for example, incorporates the generative AI we’ve been hearing so much about lately into Grammarly to rewrite your work with the desired tone—personable, empathetic, positive, etc.
What could be the danger in better grammar?
Becoming Artificial
At the end of last quarter, I became involved in a case of suspected cheating with a student and another professor at my university. The professor had a hunch that the student used ChatGPT to write an essay. Several AI detection tools flagged the essay as likely AI-generated. But the student claimed that the essay was original work. I was brought in to comment on the case from a technical perspective.
In the end, there was doubt on all sides. But what struck me was that the student, by admission, used Grammarly Premium to revise the essay—apparently taking all its rewriting suggestions. Since Grammarly makes use of AI models similar to ChatGPT, it was no surprise to me that Grammarly-rewritten text would be flagged as AI-generated.
Assuming that the student was telling the truth, what this means it that the student unwittingly used software to make a human-written essay sound like it was written by AI—all in the quest to improve the text. The sad thing is that the writing still wasn’t good, even though it was “correct.”
Opportunities to become like this student are beginning to proliferate. Reply suggestions in our email, AI integration within Word… Seen from one vantage point, it would seem that we’re making ourselves into AI’s.
The Encroaching Flatness
Some force is sweeping through our world. It started with the built environment: details and flourishes gave way to sleek, smooth, plain shapes. Everything from fences and benches to doorknobs and hinges.
Take a look at these two pillars, and you’ll see what I mean:
You might say the one on the right is more efficient than the one on the left. It’s simpler, cleaner. We’ve been trained these days to conclude that it is therefore better.
But if we let ourselves really sit with these two pillars, it’s clear that the one on the left is more beautiful. And all else being equal, beautiful is better.
Beautiful things have been disappearing from the world, from those fences and benches to doorknobs and hinges… to building facades and the structures themselves and on to other things, such as logos and books and clothing.
This force is what Christopher Alexander railed against throughout his life. In his final book, he characterized our situation as a battle between two possible worlds. On one hand, a world of beauty; on the other, one of soulless efficiency. The latter is winning.
It’s a world of flatness.
That’s the term that the writer David Samuels uses to describe this phenomenon. He tells the story of a trip to Geneva on which he encountered a cathedral that had once been Catholic, with all the attendant ornate decoration, but was stripped by the reformer John Calvin in the 16th century and turned into a Protestant cathedral, austere and plain.
On Samuels’ view, something similar is happening today in the age of the smartphone, driven by the tech elites he calls Techno-Calvinists:
And just as Protestants used the miracle of the Gutenberg press to spread their doctrines, the Techno-Calvinists use monopoly speech platforms designed by Silicon Valley engineers to spread their doctrine of an all-consuming flatness spread out like an open book beneath God’s single, all-seeing eye. Flatness is cheap manufactured goods, Uber rides, bad take-out food. Flatness is Airbnb and Tinder dates. People with professional credentials consume flatness as politics or as jobs in global banking. For “organizers,” flatness means the promise of “social justice.” Flatness means monopolizing the book industry, the diaper industry, the news industry—you name it. It’s all flat.
Flatness is an aesthetic strategy.
Flatness is business strategy.
Flatness is a political strategy.
Flatness is where money and power come from.
Flatness is baked into the systems that run the global economy, in which poor people in distant countries are paid pennies per hour to produce crap at the expense of American workers, and the disintegrating communities they live in. … The more flatness you consume, the richer the oligarchs who own the monopoly platforms get.
The notion of flatness points to the encroaching conformity in our digital environment and the way it is seeping into everything. The way many Airbnb rentals look the same, with the same generic decorations and Ikea furniture, with none of the quirky personality you might expect when people are allowed to put their own houses and rooms up for rent.
And what Samuels suggests is that it’s not just the physical world but also the realm of thought and imagination that’s becoming flat. In his essay, he makes a larger point about our apparently shrinking toleration for diverse opinions on certain topics, on platform-massaged consent. Brave New World comes to mind.
The essay was written at the height of our collective social fever in mid-2020, and in some ways it feels happily dated now. But this notion of flatness has stuck with me.
A World of White Noise
The rise of AI-generated text signals that the flatness has come to a new domain: our writing. Why write like you when you can write like everyone else?
And beyond text, there’s also imagery and video and even music. Last week, a song went viral purporting to be a collaboration between pop megastars Drake and The Weeknd. But the song was AI-generated (though surely with plenty of human editing, just not by Drake or The Weeknd).
Commentators have been impressed with how authentic the song, “Heart on My Sleeve,” sounded. Universal Music Group swiftly acted to have the song scrubbed from the internet on copyright claims. (But search around and you can still find copies popping up like whack-a-moles.) Cue the fears about how AI is going to replace artists.
But while everyone has been distracted by the song’s seeming authenticity, its larger quality has been overlooked—indeed, the quality from which its authenticity arises: its flatness. The prank works precisely because it sounds like every other Drake song—indeed, every pop song you’ve heard in the past ten years. But in what sense is that a virtue?
Over the past decade, we’ve seen the term “content” grow to become a generic term that covers everything from vlogs and recipes to learning materials and artwork to research and even pornography—as if all of these are the same kind of thing. In the world of flatness, maybe it really is all the same. We humans are just “content creators.”
I’m not convinced that AI will put artists out of work. But one thing it does do is enable everyday people to put imagery and music where before there was none. Elevator music, PowerPoint slides, webpages…
Soon, the flatness will be echoing out from every corner. Will we really be better off? Is there not some value in the empty space? Do we need imagery and music everywhere, especially generic filler? (Just think: Already, how easy is it to find a bar or restaurant that isn’t playing music?)
When it comes to AI, the coup de grace of our encroaching flatness will be that inevitable moment when AI content becomes the training data for future generative AI models. Already there is evidence that the web is becoming polluted with AI-generated content. Once the snake has eaten its tail, perhaps the web will be entirely unusable.
We may be in for a world of white noise. Or maybe better said, the world of White Noise, the prescient 1985 novel by Don DeLillo. “We can't get outside the aura. We're part of the aura. We’re here, we’re now.”
Keeping Your Wrinkles
The flatness is even starting to pervade the way we understand human cognition. Decades past, some people suggested that “the brain is just a computer”; now, in the age of AI, we’re hearing that “all we do anyway is predict the next word too.”
One can only buy that claim if one has already succumbed to the flatness.
Most animals have smooth, flat brains, but not us. Our brains are wrinkly as raisins, and these wrinkles enable our intelligence and creative thinking. We wouldn’t want to make flatness of our brains. But in a world that prizes the generic, the formulaic, the statistically probable, that’s what many of us are doing—such as the poor student I mentioned at the outset of this piece.
Even if our brains can calculate the statistically most likely word to come next, we can choose to say something different. Amazon used to have a feature showing the statistically improbable phrases that appeared in its catalog of books—perhaps today they should bring that feature back.
So what can we do to defy the flatness? In short, find a way to keep your wrinkles.
The art critic Jerry Saltz shared this wisdom, which I think applies here: “Your mistakes are your style.” He was addressing artists, but this is wisdom for all of us.
Ports of Call
Not too much to share this week, but:
Streaming and Running: I wrote an article for Outside magazine this week on how livestreaming will shape the future of ultrarunning. Perhaps a bit niche, but it also provides a lens on how media technologies have shaped sports and their audiences more generally.
A Cake: I’ve been dreaming recently about the gâteau Basque, the classic cake from the Basque country that straddles Spain and France. “Cake” doesn’t quite do it justice. It’s more like a cookie, maybe, but also part croissant. Here’s a recipe.
This one was one of my favorite "Ports" newsletters. I thought about how AI has been negatively affecting us as a society. I didn't know about the Drake and The Weeknd song that was AI generated! I recently finished the book "The Creative Act" by Rick Rubin and he echoed similar themes about beauty. I thought about how we perceive art and beauty as well as what is considered beautiful. Some of the points he mentions:
1. The process of creating art is not a one size fits all method.
2. Each artist has their own process thats allows for individuality and uniqueness.
3. Breaking the sameness and self-awareness are essential components in the creative process.
I agree that the world is becoming flat and AI seems to be exponentially flattening it.