Mr Ernest Bazanye

They tell us AI can’t take our jobs because AI can’t do human touch. Only HI can do human touch. But this human touch, what is it? As in really?

That paragraph is an educational asset for lecturers with crooks for students; now you know how to nab them. Just insist that coursework be written in Uglish. You will know it is HI if it correctly follows our unique UG grammar. 

Those of Prudence and Allan and Omo? They don’t know the AI can’t deliver correct Ugandan English vernacular, because they don’t know anything useful. How will they ever get to know anything when all their schoolwork is being done by an app? Moreover an app that doesn’t even know what it doesn’t know? Chatgpt hallucinates more than Google maps and Apple Weather. They will ask it, “Is this Uglish?” and it will reply, “Brilliant question!”

Now that I have so deftly demonstrated how not to write like AI (Stream of consciousness, off-tangent rambles, non-standard syntax, just jazzing anyhowly) let’s get to the point.

When they speak of human touch, “they” being the internet pontificators with their pokey noses and drooping eyelids and that smug demeanour of elite authority they get from reading big words on Substack while you porcine plebes wallow in twitter swill — Am I taking this switching tones thing too far? Cos how do I go from Uglish to that? Okay, let me behave. The point must be gotten to.

They say “No matter how sophisticated AI becomes, it cannot replace the human touch.”

But you people, what touch is this?

They tend to speak with confidence, but they also tend to shoot their material from the wrong end of the bull, and when they speak of human touch it sounds like one of those things they have not considered deeply enough. They tend to feel that what they say is right and undisputable, but they don’t realise that if you delve deeper …

Delve. I said delve. Ooops. If you writee “delve” people will suspect you of conniving with AI to fake your authorship. The word delve is supposed to be another AI indicator and chatgpt uses it to mean “check” but in this case, I have an actual human need for the word delve. We have to delve into this stuff a bit.

In real life, delve means to look under: To remove the surface and see what is beneath. Delve into that pretty flower garden and you will find the bones of dead niggers who were slaughtered on that spot in 1948 when the colonizer was perpetrating human rights abuses.

Before we got independence and began to perpetrate them against ourselves. 

If we delve into the term human touch, we find not answers, but questions, like does it really even exist? Is there really something that distinguishes writing by human from writing by machine and where is it? 

Because, look:
“We’re thrilled to reach out and share an exclusive opportunity that we believe you won’t want to miss. Our latest offer is designed to help you take things to the next level and experience results like never before.”

Was that from AI or HI? Can you tell? Can you see the touch or lack thereof or is Chatgpt indistinguishable from the junk mail I pasted that from? 

There is no human touch in that insincere, plastic-smile-with painted-teeth waiter-serving-cold-posho version of prose those people insist on abusing my inbox with. No human touch. In fact, Chatgpt is often more personable than spam email. If that has a human emotion, it is in the bare kamanyiiro, the just very bad manners. With spam email and spam sms it is not human touch, it is molestation. Mtswwweee.

Thrilled my ass.

Anyway, we were saying, corporate communications such as marketing materials, official reports, corporate emails, even the more dull adverts out there, are produced the same way that the chatgpt composes stuff: We are prompted with a topic (Whether itbis Send spam to all the niggas whose phone numbers you can buy from those askari books or something at least kko respectable like my bank pretending it cares about my christmas) so we haul out the stack of sentences associated with the topic, pick out a few, and lay them out in order.

We just rehash the familiar phrases. we refabricate prefabricated prose.

It’s the same thing that AI does.

No touch.

Those jobs of writing corporate comms? AI is so taking those jobs. The fact that those writers already use AI anyway just shows you that it has already happened.

There are some days when it doesn’t matter if it’s H or AI. Honestly, when I read the article on Healthydays dot com about ten reasons to stay hydrated in cold weather, I don’t care whether Cody McCalister actually wrote that herself or just prompted Gemini. Do you, bubu. Me for me I now know how to put cucumber in my woha boho. We don’t need human touch in everything. When I get a notice from my pension account claiming it is “excited” to “share” a new investment tier I just qualified for, I won’t beef.

I actually prefer that to be AI because it’s predictable enough for me to know how many paragraphs to skip before I get to the point. We don’t need Human touch in everything.

But that doesn’t mean human touch is not there in anything.

Let me tell you about Bruce Springsteen.

There is an American musician called Bruce Springsteen. You may know him from the song Secret Garden which used to play on FM radio back when FM radio was a thing. For genzeds who don’t know what FM is like, let us say he is like Taytay but with 22 albums over a career of 50-plus years. 

Springsteen’s songs are introspective and poetic and relatable and inspirational and comforting in a way that, even if you aren’t from New Jersey, you still get what he’s saying. Like, I am sure, Swift.

Now, Springsteen has suffered from depression during his life. Mental health things kube even rich American rock stars. He was undergoing a bout when his first son, Evan, was born. On a summer night in a dusty room there came a bit of the Lord’s undying light. It was like all the beauty he could take, like the missing words to a prayer he could never make. He was searching for God’s mercy and he found living proof.

That, by the way, is the song. The lyrics. I reformatted them for you who is reading articles and not listening to youtube music.

The arrival of Evan broke his depression. His child renewed his faith and made him whole again. It was living proof of God’s mercy.

Springsteen and the E Street Band, his day ones, friends from the beginning fifty years ago, still tour. Their performances are legendary. People say it’s like church. 

There is a live performance of Living Proof on Spotify and Youtube. Bruce and the band are going hard. You can feel divinity in the sound, divinity, I tell you. This is not just music, not just dancydancy music, not just boogie boogie shake shake. No. This is ministry. It is beautiful in a profound and powerful and potent way, this man singing about how, in a world so hard and foul and confusing, he was searching, like many of us, like all of us, for a little bit of God’s acknowledgement, for a sign of God’s acknowledgement. We just want, need God to look our way and show us that He cares and that He loves us and that He will bring us out of it and save us. We are just searching for a sign, a word, a reason to hope, an assurance that we will be forgiven for being weak and damaged and huma n, and we will be restored. Just searching for Living Proof of God’s mercy. And these old men and women with their drums and guitars and keyboards and their souls are up there singing, so mightily singing, that they found it.

(You see how many words I am using to describe the song? It is because you have not heard it. If you hear it you won’t need all this.)

Now, just before he starts the song, he calls out into the microphone. “I don’t know if Evan is still around. Is Evan still around? Anyway, this is for Evan.” Bruce’s family sometimes attends his concerts but, of course, after all those I-don’t-know-how-many years, they won’t all go to every single concert anymore, and even if they do, they will sometimes leave early. So, Evan might have left before his song. He has heard it so many times in his life. It was no huge revelation; he is used to hearing that he saved his father from despair, that he is Living Proof of God’s mercy.

The band is bringing it, the crowd is taking it. It is such a moment. 

Now, you could ask AI to compose a song about how having a child can bring joy and it will compose one. You can even ask AI to sing it. There are AI musicians, and they sing. 

But dude, but bro, but sis, but you guy, gwe, you GUY, no listen. You. Listen: Evan exists! Evan is real! Evan is there! He has been there for thirty five years! What makes that song special is that Evan is there!

What makes Still I Rise special is that Miss Angelou actually rose.

What makes Stimela special is that Bra Hugh actually smelt the smoke.

If a machine made up James Baldwin, it wouldn’t be James Baldwin, it would just be some machine there there. What makes the words “No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark” are compelling, until you know that Warsan actually left home and then they are not just grammatically correct, they are meaningful and true. What makes Discovering Home special is that Binyavanga actually discovered home. You get? You get? When Bobi says “yannastan?”, there is someone who actually really sincerely honestly has something to tell you that you need to understand.

If you tell me the MCU Phase one and two were all AI from start to finish, I will not mind, personally. I won’t. I will be disappointed, because there are moments the enjoyment which hinge on the “Eh! Bakikola batya” factor, when  it’s impressive because it looks difficult to do, but I can get over that. Human Art is cooler, but AI art can be adequate.

AI can make clever, pretty, enjoyable, entertaining, satisfactory work and may be better, but… no. Not better. AI can be at least as good as a human training set.

Both AI and HI will write about the beauty of the pearl of Africa and use words kaleidoscope, thriving metropolis, blend of cultures, vibrant youth, melting pot and all that other fluff and you won’t be able to tell who wrote it. 

So, that stuff, the mechanical, the rote, the formulaic, the adequate, the satisfactory material, can and will be written by AI.

And humans will try to compete, but it will kick your ass because it writes faster. It took me eight days to write the first draft of this piece and the rest of the month to get this far.

But then, but then there will be, there will be other stories. With life behind them.

But then someone will be lonely and homesick in a cold city and hear the words, “singa nalina ebyoya singa nze nebuukidde nengw’eyo mukibuga Kampala.”

And it will be different. Better. Because Philly’ heart was actually here.