Post by Isaac Cates / Redsky

Isaac Cates • Feed

If you’d like to read my essay about George Orwell, writing by machines, and our current nihilism about meaning, I offer you the entire zine in this thread. I will finish the thread with instructions on how to print your own copies of the zine. #OrwellvsChatGPT

GEORGE ORWELL VS. CHATGPT =* AN ESSAY BY ISAAC CATES * NOV. 2024 *=

nov 15, 2024, 8:53 pm • 150 67

Replies

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dec 17, 2024, 5:58 pm • 0 0 • view

You don't happen to know @eriebasin.bsky.social do you? He and Matt Feazell taught me zine making in Detroit.

jun 16, 2025, 1:20 pm • 1 0 • view

I think I only know him from having read Jape

jun 17, 2025, 12:53 pm • 1 0 • view

This was a truly excellent read.

dec 7, 2024, 11:42 pm • 1 0 • view

Thanks! Feel free to make copies if you want to distribute a few in print to people who’d appreciate it.

dec 7, 2024, 11:44 pm • 1 0 • view

I love this! I'm currently reading his Homage to Catalonia and having a lot of feelings about it (also your lettering is sublime).

dec 9, 2024, 3:47 pm • 1 0 • view

Thanks so much! Honestly when I look at the zine there is a LOT of lettering I’d like to fix, but I figure it’s good enough!

dec 9, 2024, 4:11 pm • 1 0 • view

(The full text also appears in the alt-text descriptions of the pictures.)

If you don't require yourself to say carefully and precisely what you mean, Orwell argues, you will allow yourself to repeat and to endorse language that contains ideas you would not accept if they were spoken truthfully: TRANSFER of POPULATION for forced deportation … ELIMINATION OF UNRELIABLE ELEMENTS for Siberian gulags … PACIFICATION EFFORTS for firebombing civilians. These are Orwell's examples, but we could add

Such a speaker, repeating phrases that are not his own, not even thinking the script he intones, has, for Orwell, already

nov 15, 2024, 8:53 pm • 15 3 • view

The rest of my argument.

Programs like ChatGPT Merely PRODUCE language, without understanding or intending it, like a larynx emitting words without a mind to guide it. They work by predicting words that tend to be associated with each other, clustered in a certain order, in the context of particular clusters of other words. They have no ideas, no referents in the real world toward which their words point. An algorithm PROCESSES language into plausible responses, but it does not THINK. A parrot might have more intelligence. If it were only a toy that didn't consume colossal amounts of energy, money, and computing power, ChatGPT and other artificial

Casider what it suggests about thinking and meaning — about the VALUE of that work — to treat the words extruded by an automaton as JUST AS GOOD as your own thoughts, or anyone else's. This sort of cynicism or nihilism about meaning should make us QUEASY. But it surrounds us; we are simmering in it. Would you let an unthinking robot speak for you? Imagine signing your name to a business email assembled by an algorithm, or submitting an essay as your own that not only wasn't written by you, but also Wasn't WRITTEN in any Meaningful way by ANYONE. Whose ideas have you just subscribed to? These algorithms notoriously replicate the biases they are trained on. How could they not? Maybe you see ChatGPT as a harmless dodge that saves your time for something more valuable to you. We all have bullshit tasks, and some of them are writing. But whom does it serve for you to outsource your intellectual work to Something that doesnt THINK at all? I think the solution to bullshit tasks is to seek MORE meaning, not less. We should remember that not every convenience or compromise actually makes the world better.

If you let unthinking, automatic doctrine spill out of your morth — like a tasteless version of the toads in a fairytale curse — you make yourself into something a little less human. With the eyeless face of an automaton you welcome potentially terrible ideas uttered in your own name. Any responsible politics reguires you to THINK. It's hard to think. It's worK. It involves facing ugly truths about our own society, about our mistakes and our complicity, about our ignorance. But if we dont Do that thinking, it will be done for us — by the powerful, by the wealthy, by those who value our servitude more than our wellbeing. Real individual writing, human art, is not the strongest tool against authoritarians, but I believe it is fundamental to any hope of resistance. ~ WORKS CITED ~ • George Orwell's 1984 should be easy to find in various editions in any local bookstore or library. Let’s just say that it really holds up. •

nov 15, 2024, 8:53 pm • 20 1 • view

If you’d like your own copy of this zine, you can run into me in person, or you can make your own copy from cartozia.com/samizdat (Download the PDF, print it double-sided, cut it across the “waist,” and staple: two copies.) If we are friends, you can also DM me about mailing a copy to you.

nov 15, 2024, 8:53 pm • 14 7 • view

Amazing! Thank you!

dec 9, 2024, 4:23 am • 2 0 • view

I’m glad you enjoyed it! Please feel free to print copies and circulate them to folks who would like to read it but aren’t on BlueSky :)

dec 9, 2024, 4:36 am • 1 0 • view

I love seeing the samizdat, Isaac! but I don't see any links to it in the menu bar. izzat on purpose?

nov 17, 2024, 5:23 pm • 1 0 • view

Yeah, it’s a hidden page — you can get to it if you know it’s there, but a casual Cartozia visitor (if such a person exists) would only see Cartozia stuff.

nov 17, 2024, 6:07 pm • 0 0 • view

I may need to bookmark it.

nov 17, 2024, 6:19 pm • 1 0 • view

The URL is very easy to remember! And you’re welcome to download both of the PDFs I’ve put there so far.

nov 17, 2024, 6:20 pm • 0 0 • view

Love this, thanks a ton for sharing, I’ve been enjoying your posts on the progress!

nov 15, 2024, 9:12 pm • 1 0 • view

I hope you’ll print a copy for yourself!

nov 15, 2024, 9:23 pm • 1 0 • view

Excellent. Thank you so much for this! In my college (Humanities & the Arts at San José State), we had a faculty working group on 1984 to accompany its theater performance and student projects. I’ll share the zine with the group! exhibits.sjsu.edu/s/1984/page/...

dec 29, 2024, 5:48 pm • 1 0 • view

Please do! I encourage you to make a bunch of copies for them from the link at the end of the thread!

dec 29, 2024, 10:29 pm • 1 0 • view

Thank you! I’ll give it a go

dec 30, 2024, 1:42 am • 1 0 • view

📌

dec 8, 2024, 3:12 am • 0 0 • view

This is so good. As I was reading it and before I looked at your account I was thinking "man, the drawings are giving Vermont. Why am I getting Vermont out of this". Aaaand, lo and behold, UVM in the bio. I've shared with a bunch of my friends. Thanks again!

nov 27, 2024, 2:35 am • 1 0 • view

I’m glad you like it! You’re welcome to print copies if you want physical booklets.

nov 27, 2024, 3:10 am • 0 0 • view

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dec 11, 2024, 6:11 am • 0 0 • view

Thanks so much for giving this to me at the Nonfiction Comics Festival! REALLY enjoyed it, especially the way you methodically built the argument -- 8 pp. before you even mentioned ChatGPT! (I almost feel you should have NOT mentioned the AI in the title and let the reader discover for themselves.)

jan 5, 2025, 7:01 pm • 1 0 • view

I’m glad you liked it! I suspect that fewer people would have wanted to read it if I hadn’t explicitly plugged it into ChatGPT — for the “relevance,” y’know

jan 5, 2025, 7:39 pm • 1 0 • view

I s'pose that's true... Anyway, I LOVE that you hand-lettered and illustrated it -- what could be more non-AI? Shared it with my wife Sari, who's been reading Orwell recently. She loved the mini too -- but thinks AI will soon write with intelligence and purpose b/c of neural networks.

jan 5, 2025, 7:56 pm • 1 0 • view

An intelligent AI (one that could mean what it said) would need to begin with a different framework from the LLMs, for sure. The hand-lettering was a little anti-machine thing, but also a way of implying that the piece requires attention, since you can SEE the effort in its writing.

jan 5, 2025, 8:53 pm • 1 0 • view

It’s sort of like looking at one of Sacco’s intensely cross-hatched or detailed pages: the image, by having taken days to draw, requests your sustained time and attention.

jan 5, 2025, 8:53 pm • 0 0 • view

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jan 17, 2025, 2:10 am • 1 0 • view

Your lettering is exquisite! I really appreciate your arguments too, of course! Question: is there any reason the PDF file is high-contrast b-w versus this soft yellow-y background? Was it just easier to output it that way?

dec 17, 2024, 6:01 pm • 1 0 • view

The PDF is designed for printing, not reading as is. If it had a background, it would print a bunch of gray onto every page. Thanks for saying that about my lettering, though honestly when I look at the zine I see a lot that I’d like to fix

dec 17, 2024, 7:22 pm • 0 0 • view