# The Mechanical Turk, Part 3: Lying Liar Filled With Power

If we accept the Mechanical Turk as a fitting metaphor for an aspect or potentiality of LLMs, namely of their ability to aid in deception…

Jan 31, 2025, Ian Belknap

If we accept the Mechanical Turk as a fitting metaphor for an aspect or potentiality of LLMs, namely of their ability to aid in deception, then we’re obviously confronted with the question of what to do about it. If we aim to avoid such deception, our impulse might simply be to refrain from engaging with material generated with ChatGPT or any of the others, a position that grows less and less possible with every passing day; the near-ubiquity of LLM content renders it essentially unavoidable. If, in our efforts to avoid deception, we resolve to do a better job at *detecting* the presence of LLM intervention, we miss the point. The point is *not* simply to affix some kind of lie detector plug-in.

The recent proliferation of “AI detection” platforms and software, ostensibly designed to detect novelty of language, as means of inferring originality of composition - a function, it’s worth nothing, they cannot actually carry out in their present form - does nothing to interrogate the *intent* underlying or animating a piece of text. These detection systems are essentially a binary answer to the question **“Written by robots? Y/N?”** This is a valid question, surely. But is it the most *salient* one? Does such a question help unearth the objectives of a text’s creator? Their motivations? Their tactical approach? No. Does this binary robot question even contain any element of *“Is this a lie?”* It does not. This kind of low level Turing test is not what this series of posts has been about, however - it’s a call for the elevation of ***our own*** critical faculties, a leaning into ***our own*** capacities of discernment and distinction-making. It is a call, above everything, to **remain un-dazzled.** At the dawn of any new technology, there is a natural tendency to become so impressed by novel capabilities that we lose some of the skepticism required to make sense of the world. After this dip in our dubiousness, we return to it once we’ve grown accustomed to the once-new technology, we return to ourselves, once again becoming alert to the presence of bad actors. Who are always human.

**It’s like seeing somebody on stilts for the first time - after a lizard-brain scream of *“AIGHH! A GIANT!”* we calm down, figure out what’s going on, and scoff at the circus nerd.**

The antidote to bedazzlement is familiarity - use over time engenders comfort and clarity. The advent of indoor plumbing or gas lanterns or automobiles were all likely pretty mind blowing for folks first encountering them - over the course of intervening generations, these have all been folded into our prevailing sense of what life is like, and we take in stride the improvements made to them over time.

We return to the caution **Lector cave** (“reader beware”) - because rightly or wrongly, the onus of determining the motivations underlying *any* communication we receive from *whatever* source falls to us as the recipients of it. If there are bad intentions at the heart of any message, whether these are intended, or it they arise from inattention or ignorance on the part of the sender, the *consequences* will likely be ours. Whatever the case, we are always better served by a close rather than a cursory reading.

A close reading demands an *active* form of engagement just about antithetical to the ethos that springs up around any supposedly miraculous new form of communication. The more “seamless” and “automated” it becomes to *generate* content, the more tempting it becomes to treat the other end of communication, the *deciphering* end, the same way, to skim, to glean no more than the gist. The perils and downsides of this kind of generalizing and approximation are manifest - erosion of shared understanding, diminished clarity, time lost to avoidable repetition. And ever-widening gaps, in other words, through which lies may pass.

Think of written communication over the course of our history - in broad strokes - the earliest clay tablets contain essentially mercantile transfers of information, inventories, lists, and receipts, essentially, where there could be said to be a one-to-one ratio of representation: a phrase like “50 casks of wine” was not meant to convey anything beyond an amount of a readily understood noun. As the sophistication of language and our means of expression have snowballed over millennia, the linkage between our *representations* and the *substance* they’re meant to convey grows less and less concrete.

The *means* by which a written communique comes to us have grown similarly more remote and abstracted. Getting a handwritten letter - even one concerning some comparatively straightforward business transaction, say - carries with it tangible evidence of the effort put forth, a physical artifact that invites and insists upon scrutiny. Whereas a telegram might feel to its recipient less *directly* attributable to a single intelligence - the effort to compose it is there, but it arrives in a standardized fashion, delivered by intermediaries. An email, then, dispenses with the physical artifact entirely, in an insubstantial form identical to all other emails. Each subsequent digital format and platform has firmed up this tendency toward standardization - even the little “personal” touches have been codified (emojis, digital signatures, etc.) The pace and volume at which communication arrives grows with every advance.

Today, we must add to this puzzle the fast emerging question of whether something was even written by a person. But again, this outside of certain narrow contexts - academia, say, where notions of intellectual ownership are more consequential than elsewhere - this is not the *central* question we’ve grown convinced that it is. Fixating on the **“Written by robots? Y/N?”** question funnels us into a false “Real/Not Real” binary and encourages shallow-pass conclusions. If, in our dulling faculties, we stick to the deciphering side of communications, becoming uncritical consumers of the present Glorified Autofill/Rudimentary Chat Bot path that LLM use mostly follows, we succumb to the Fallacy of the Turk - mindlessly accepting checkmate at the hands of a herky-jerky turban-wearing opponent without ever knocking on the side of the cabinet and calling “Well played” to the human player we SHOULD know to be inside. By exploring the *generative* side of communication and the many ways LLMs can assist us in framing, testing, and developing ideas, we become true early adopters of the technology, not simply more adept and acclimated than most, but helping to shape how it evolves.

The **ZeroWidth Workbench** is intended to provide its users with just such a laboratory. Over time, we’ll detail the ways in which use of the **Workbench** doesn’t simply streamline processes, it can provide an array of cognitive jolts that improve and clarify the user’s thinking on a subject, expanding and deepening our capacities for prototyping and problem solving.