m. 🇺🇸🚀

On April 1, 2024 we published a satirical April Fool's article claiming we were reformatting from War on the Rocks to AI on the Rocks. A surprising number of you fell for it. I received tons of complaints as well as a few compliments on how visionary I was being (Maybe they were right. I could have sold AI on the Rocks by now for tens of millions). We had to take the unprecedented step of telling everyone it was all just a joke. One line in the article sticks in my head because I see it now every day. "While we will be automating content generation, we cannot automate your role in content consumption and we will remain indebted to you until we can." Every day we receive AI generated articles and every day we reject them. And on this site and elsewhere I see how people have surrendered their own role in reading anything and instead just have an LLM read it and tell them what opinions to pass along about it on social media. So what we now see is the steady elimination of human intellectual participation on both sides of the intercourse of ideas. Another line now seems particularly pointed. The article identified topics we would be focused on. One of them: "The limits and illusion of human creativity and choice" Indeed. This is like a snake eating its own tail while congratulating itself on solving its hunger problem. warontherocks.com/from-war-o…