Eh Aye Jesus

Leave a comment

Have you ever wondered just how bizarre it can get?  At work I’ve been receiving push notifications for AI Jesus.  This is a software platform for exploring “the Bible,” “life questions,” and “guided reflection or therapy.”  No Jesus required.  Apparently tech has evolved to the point of addressing spiritual questions.  This is ironic since one thing AI simply doesn’t, and can’t, understand is religion.  Religion is not exactly a rational response to the world.  Often emotion is deeply, deeply involved.  Emotion is something AI knows nothing about.  I recently sat through a webinar promoting AI with the presenter listing problem after serious problem that AI poses.  The presenter optimistically saw no problem with continuing to use a flawed tool.  I would never advise crowdsourcing spiritual guidance.  Those of us who’ve spent lifetimes exploring it hesitate to put ourselves out there as experts.

The problem with AI is that we’re no longer being given a choice about it.  If you buy a new device, AI is there waiting for you.  If you do a web search, AI will offer the first answer, even if it’s often wrong.  Some of us with very human jobs are being told that we should be exploring how to use AI for efficiencies.  As if none of us were really doing a good job before.  I’m personally insulted.  What can AI know about how Jesus thought?  We have four gospels with sometimes contradictory sayings.  And it seems likely that the Gospel of Thomas has legitimate sayings as well.  Even so, that’s not enough data for an LLM (large language model, which is what generative AI tends to be).  They need massive amounts of information.

The human mind conjures its own image of Jesus.  Some think of a mild and meek shepherd of souls while others see a political firebrand with hopes of breaking the Roman hold on Judea.  Some think of Trump.  And everything in-between.   And how we think of Jesus informs the way that we interpret the sayings attributed to him.  I studied Bible in college for just this reason.  In seminary, aware of what textual criticism could do, I focused on the Hebrew Bible instead.  I grew up with the Doobie Brothers telling me that “Jesus is just alright with me.”  I’ve lived long enough to see a sitting president present himself as the parousia (look it up).  And now I’m being told that AI can subvert the carpenter from Galilee.  Just how strange can it get?

The tempter urges Jesus to use AI; image credit: Ary Scheffer, The Temptation of Christ (public domain via Wikimedia Commons)

A Day for Earth

Leave a comment

Sometimes things come just when they’re needed.  Although it was earlier this month, the Artemis II mission was a celebration of Earth Day.  It was also a much needed shot in the arm during difficult times for the environment.  Human arrogance is quite often checked by nature.  The series of very hot April days followed by extraordinarily cold April days reminded us around here that nature is firmly in charge.  Our comfort, or expectations, are secondary to the vast world around us.  And we love our world for it.  We are guests here and we couldn’t survive without it.  We may set up a base on the moon or Mars, but such places will still rely on our home.  It helps that those who’ve ventured further away than humans have ever gone sent back photos to remind us of how small we are on a fairly small planet.  Pictures of home.

Photo credit: NASA, public domain, FD06_high priority pao

From our daily perspective it’s difficult to believe that outer space surrounds us.  We’re so caught up with our own little problems, generally of our own making.  I write this after a day of shivering in a chilly house as electricians replaced the breaker box and the conduit, from service head to basement mounting.  It was a sunny day but temperatures hadn’t really recovered after a nighttime low in the twenties.  I reflected on how much we’ve come to rely on being able to shut nature out.  How difficult it would be to survive without shelter, and a little heat.  With the electricity off the furnace didn’t know to kick on, and windows had to be open to snake wires through.  For all the wonders of a household electrical system, the Earth itself is so complex we are still only beginning to understand how it works.  We love it.  We fear it.

Our dependence on things we’ve constructed makes me feel fragile sometimes.  When we first noticed our electrical issues I walked to a local shop run by an Earth-loving owner to see if their power was out too.  “Water and electricity,” she said, “are the two things we can’t do without at home.”  She was correct.  We rely on the grid.  Nature could take us with both hands behind its back.  As the replacement process stretched beyond the scheduled finish time, I had visions of a cold night without power.  No way to cook dinner, no way to keep food safe in the fridge.  I thought of astronauts a quarter-million miles from home, protected by a shell made here on Earth.  And looking back to lovingly snap a photo for Earth Day.

Substitutes

Leave a comment

I discovered Mary Roach in a Borders store in Somerville, New Jersey.  Well, it might’ve been Raritan, technically, but it was right off the infamous Somerville Circle.  We were fairly new in town and I was looking for reading material.  I found Spook, her second book.  I enjoyed it so much I went back for her first book.  I introduced my wife to her third book and, starting with book number four, we’ve been reading them together.  (All of her books are at least mentioned on this blog; I rarely follow an author like that.) That brings us to Replaceable You, which published last year.  The subtitle, Adventures in Human Anatomy, gives you an idea of the content.  Roach is a charming science writer.  The two traits don’t often meet.  She peers at things that most of us shy away from, which, in a way, makes her a good potential horror writer.  Instead, she looks at her subjects with humor, often self-deprecating, and a sense of wonder.

Replaceable You isn’t my favorite of her books, but it’s not her fault.  Roach is about four years older than me and she too is facing aging.  This book is about parts of bodies that can be replaced, printed, or engineered.  Some of it is surprising and much of it almost incredible.  The reason that it isn’t my favorite is that it hits pretty close to home.  Two of my immediate family members have chronic health conditions.  (Life, of course, is a chronic health condition.)  I often think about the implications, but reading about them makes me uncomfortable.  As one reviewer once indicated, though, reading Mary Roach on any subject is enjoyable.

We are embodied creatures.  This is one reason that “artificial intelligence” will always retain the emphasis on the first word.  One of the surprising things I learned from this book was that organs/tissues are now starting to be 3-D printed.  Last time I looked, 3-D printing involved plastic, but in some places biological components are being used.  The tech isn’t far enough along to print actual organs yet, but there is incredible work being done.  It’s quite possible, and this is me, not Roach, that people born in a couple of decades (depending on whether we can get Republicans out of the White House, and science funding can be restored) may well be able to have biologically personalized health care that includes new organs made from their own cells.  That gets too close to eternity for my liking.  I enjoy living, but wouldn’t want to do it forever.  I’ll be okay along the way, however, as long as there are Mary Roach books to read.

Red Thread

Leave a comment

Theseus would never have survived the labyrinth without the help of Ariadne.  After escaping the minotaur, the two eloped and, according to some versions of the myth, Theseus abandoned Ariadne on the isle of Naxos.  This story has been told and retold countless times, and even served as a source of inspiration for the movie Inception.  Back when I was thrashing about dark academia, trying to make a living as an adjunct professor at Rutgers and Montclair State, I taught classical mythology at the latter.  These were in the days of PowerPoint lectures, and I knew a few things about doing them: slides shouldn’t be overly wordy, and they should have images.  People are visual learners.  During my three semesters at Montclair, I developed my PowerPoints peppered with images found online.  I recently remembered one of Ariadne on Naxos, and I really wanted to find it.

My Oshkosh slides were burned onto CDs, but now tech has moved beyond that and I have no readers for burned CDs.  My hopes of finding the name of the artist in the credits on the slide have not been fulfilled.  I turned to the all-wise internet.  Image search after image search brings up nothing close to that particular picture.  I thought it was a painting, but it might’ve been a pastel or colored pencil drawing (it was from a relatively contemporary artist).  I simply can’t find it.  I remember the subject, and the image, but neither its formal title nor its artist’s name.  The information exists, but on unreadable discs.  On those same discs rest the sermons I preached at Nashotah House.  I sometimes think of them and would like to look at them again, to refresh my memory.  I can’t, however, access them, although they are on discs in the closet just behind my back.

Not the image I was looking for (image: Bacchus and Ariadne. Guido Reni).

We let technology drive our lives.  It comes with costs.  I recently talked to a young person who was buying a nice journal and some writing implements to use in it.  They told me that although they’d grown up with computers, and the internet, they wanted the very human experience of writing by hand.  My default for taking notes is still by hand.  If only I had done that when adjunct teaching…. I remember well how frantic those days were.  I was teaching up to eleven classes in one year (a typical professor has three or four), driving between two campuses.  Eating in my car.  I didn’t really have much of a chance to note individual artworks in a notebook, figuring I’d be pining to remember them many years later.  I could use Ariadne to help me out of this labyrinth.  I know right where she is, but the isle of Naxos is inaccessible.

Actual Intelligence

Leave a comment

Horror movies love a good sequel.  A self-referential genre, there’s a lot of give and take and reassessing.  I may have waited a little too long to watch M3GAN 2.0, however.  I remembered the premise of M3GAN: an AI robot companion built to keep a young girl company misreads its protocol and ends up killing people.  I’d forgotten the details of how this came about, but as I watched the sequel, it started coming back.  It might’ve been best if I’d rewatched M3GAN first, but weekends are only so long and I’ve got a lot to do.  In any case, it isn’t bad.  This is sci-fi horror, but the future it foresees doesn’t seem very far off now.  So, M3GAN was destroyed at the end of the first movie.  Her maker, Gemma, has become kind of a Neo-Luddite, such as yours truly, and is advocating for control of AI by the government.  This need is underscored when a military application of M3GAN goes rogue and starts killing people.

Fighting fire with fire, Gemma decides she needs to bring M3GAN back to stop AMELIA.  After the usual chaos and action, it seems that AMELIA is going to merge with the motherboard of the first AI system built, which is now super-smart, and will then wipe out the human race.  M3GAN, however, has “learned” empathy and is able to stop AMELIA by sacrificing herself.  The film doesn’t have a clear message, although overall it seems to advocate caution regarding artificial intelligence.  On that I agree.  (Of course, we’ll need to get some kind of actual intelligence in the White House before we can consider any of this.)  This does seem less horror and more action than the original, but it goes quickly and is fairly fun to watch.

A few months before seeing this, I’d watched Companion, another AI cautionary horror movie.  A few months before that, Ex Machina.  Companion was a bit better, I think, but the original M3GAN was out of the gate first.  Ex Machina, however, was even a decade earlier.  The films are very different.  Companion is about a sex-bot and M3GAN concerns a, well, companion for a lonely young orphan.  Ex Machina is about an AI woman developed just because she can be.  She, however, can’t be controlled either.  All three films represent the zeitgeist of an underlying, lurking fear that we are really going the wrong direction with all the tech we’ve created.  All feature female robots, and none of them end well for humankind.  At least if the implications are followed through.  It might not be a bad idea to pay attention to the human creative side when thinking about Actual Intelligence.

Shopping News

Leave a comment

It’s one of the perils of the online age.  You order something online and the company (which has more money than a mere individual) asks you to pay for their mistake when the send the wrong thing.  This has happened to me a few times.  Once I ordered a used book.  The vendor got the author right but sent the wrong title.  When I explained this they still wanted me to pay to ship their mistake back to them.  I explained the illogic of the situation to them: You said you would send me a certain book and you did not.  In order to refund me I have to pay for the shipping, which sets me back a few bucks without having the right book at all, which I will have to reorder.  They were not happy, claiming it was my responsibility to get the book back to them.  I asked them to pay for the shipping.  They refused.  Eventually they said “Just keep it.  But this time only!”  I do not order from them now.

More recently Amazon, which, for all its issues, is pretty good about getting the right item to you, sent me a defective book.  I noticed as soon as I unpacked it that the cover wasn’t printed correctly.  Words were cut off on the right-hand side, and the spine was printed on the front.  I would’ve accepted it as a fluke, but opening it up I saw that the interior was for a completely different book.  Likely the printer hadn’t properly cleared out the covers from the last printing job before starting the new project.  Amazon didn’t fuss about replacing it.  They did, however, require me to return the defective one.  They’ll pay for the shipping, but I have to pay for the gas and time to drive to one of their preferred vendors.  It’s the same problem on a smaller scale.  Amazon made the mistake (actually the printer did but nobody checked) and I had to pay something to make it right.  This seems off to me.

I worked in retail for a few years and one of the messages management always emphasized is “the customer is always right.”  Sometimes they weren’t, but most of the time we had to resolve any disagreements as if they were.  Online ordering takes the face-to-face out of it.  The person who receives something other than what they ordered, for which they’ve paid the agreed price, has been wronged.  It’s a mistake unlikely to happen in an actual bookstore.  There’s a price to be paid for the convenience of ordering online.  And that price is paid by the customer.

Just Average

Leave a comment

It certainly feels like it.  That web searching has grown a lot more frustrating since AI has taken over.  For some of us, Al has no idea how our minds work or what we’re looking for.  Apart from hallucinating, it tries to average out the human experience.  Some people aren’t like everyone else.  I like to think that I’m reasonably intelligent and that I pick search words with some aforethought.  Yet the web searches I do bring up things (mostly products for sale) that have nothing to do with the information I’m hoping to land.  We’ve swapped quality for convenience, yet again.  The experience of being human is being effaced by those who are growing rich off the world’s love affair with “artificial intelligence.”  Emphasis on the artificial part.

The real issue is with finding information.  Some of us don’t trust the web much, and prefer to find our information in print, which is less easily manipulable.  More stable.  These days Google appeals to our natural vanity and, more importantly, likes to try to sell us stuff by personalizing search results.  It’s all about the money.  Some of us really just want information.  The alternative is to try to find what you’re looking for in a library, which is fine and good if you have the time and resources to do so.  And the issue there is finding what you need.  Since many university libraries have gone electronic, you need to be a card-carrying member to read information on a screen.  What have we become?  Vividly I remember searching through the underground stacks at Edinburgh University.  If something wasn’t in the card catalogue, ordering it on inter-library loan.  I never did land any grant funding to travel to read books that just don’t move.

I was trying to read a public domain text online the other day.  My eyes quickly grew weary and restless.  The internet encourages that, and although social media isn’t my personal demon, often the weather websites are.  And those little things that have crept into your brain while at work to look up later.  Which brings us back to searching.  AI works by averaging things out.  Some of us want the raw material, not what other people want.  After all, look who “average people” elected to fill the White House a couple years back.  I admit to being nostalgic, to missing the days when a book in the hand couldn’t just be dashed off by anyone with a computer and internet connection.  Averaging everything together, is by definition, making it all mediocre.

Please Read

Leave a comment

This post is longer than my usual fare, but it is important.  I’m putting the full text in “Full Essays” (the link is above, in the drop-down menu under the “Blog” heading) and I strongly urge you, for your own sake, to read it.  Here goes:

On March 9 I was nearly the victim of an AI scam.  Regular readers will know that I was scammed out of a large amount of money last year.  I’m vigilant now, but I’m also human.  AI exploits humanity.  I had just reported an email on gmail as phishing.  (Phishing is using email to scam someone.)  I had even written a blog post about it.  You can, and should report phishing emails when they occur.  Right now, on gmail, you need to go to the three dots in the upper right after you open the message and use the drop-down menu to report it.  I reported one message then this one arrived, looking all legit:

Let me explain.  Writers in my category (struggling, probably neurodiverse) really want to reach readers.  I want to paste the whole email into this email but before I do let me say that I Googled the “person” it was from and found a legitimate individual in the NYC area, generally.  I also Googled the NYC Philosophy and Psychology Reading Group; it actually exists.  It’s a MeetUp group.  They don’t have a website.  I checked all of this before responding.  Please read on!  I will explain the warning signs and what I realized only later.  Here is the text of the email: (go to Full Essays to read more). If you cannot access Full Essays from another website (e.g. Facebook or Goodreads), please go to steveawiggins.com to get to it (I have no idea how WordPress works!)

AI Takeover

Leave a comment

It’s already beginning.  As if the world under Trump isn’t bad enough, AI (you can call me Al) is beginning to play its tricks.  You see, I know my place.  I am a writer who gets a few hits on my blog now and again and whose books cost more to write than they ever earn.  (I do hope to reverse that trend, but this is the truth of the matter.)  I call myself, on my introductory website page, an “unfluencer.”  Again, I strive for accuracy.  That means that when I receive an unexpected email from someone much higher up the ladder than I am, I’m suspicious.  So the other day I had an email purporting to be from Rose Tremain, the author of The Road Home and other novels.  Dame Rose Tremain, just so we’re clear.  “She” was writing to me to ask which of my books she should read first.  Suspicious?

Any writer likes to feel flattered.  A moment’s reflection, however, made me realize a few things.  My email address is not on my website, which “she” claims to have explored.  The actual Rose Tremain is 82 and is unlikely to suddenly be developing a taste to read nonfiction books about horror movies written by someone whom most horror fans wouldn’t even recognize.  I honestly have no idea why Al is yanking my chain like this.  I have received emails before that, I suspect in retrospect, were AI generated.  They ask innocuous questions, sort of like you think a young extraterrestrial interested in academic earthly arcana might ask.  Nothing threatening.  Nothing asking you to reveal too much.  Almost as if Al is lonely.  I begin to wonder if I have ever received any legitimate emails at all from people I didn’t reach out to first.

The future of Al impersonating people is already here.  We have our information out there on the web.  Those really, really curious can find my email, I’m pretty sure.  Security questions, although I try not to reveal too much personal information here, are getting harder to pick.  Did I ever mention my first pet’s name?  The town in which I was born?  The address of any of the many places I’ve lived?  Anything shared on social media (and perhaps off social media) is available for Al to use and exploit.  And yes, Al will attempt to take advantage of your all-too-human curiosity and sense of accomplishment.  Take it from an unfluencer, individuals formally recognized by the British royal family don’t send chatty emails about your favorite book.  The AI takeover has begun.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Googling Books

Leave a comment

I admit to Googling my own books from time to time.  (I know, I know!  You’ll go blind if you don’t stop doing that!)  Since I haven’t yet seen any royalties (or reviews) yet for Sleepy Hollow as American Myth, I searched for it.  Google now has a page topper, generated by AI, I suspect, that goes across specific searches such as for a person who’s got some internet presence, or a book.  Not all books get such a banner, however; yes, I’ve looked.  My Sleepy Hollow book, however, pulled up a page topper.  It was still a work in progress, however.  By the way, I did this search with results not personalized; Google knows people like to see themselves topping a page.  So here’s what I saw:

Okay, so they got a number of things right.  This is the correct book and the description seems correct.  The publication date is right and I did indeed write Weathering the Psalms (still my best selling book).  But what’s going on with Wal-Mart?  They have the title correct but that picture?  Although I watch a lot of movies, I’m pretty sure this one has nothing to do with Sleepy Hollow.  What I tried to do in that book was find every extant movie on the story and watch them.  It is possible I missed some (the internet isn’t built to give that kind of comprehensive information, which is why human authors are still necessary).  Besides, AI has hallucinations, and this seems to be one of them right here.  It couldn’t find a copy of the cover of my book (which appears on the left-hand side, but apparently the right…) so it filled something else in instead.

None of my other books get their own banner/topper on Google, except A Reassessment of Asherah.  That isn’t my best selling book, but it is my most consulted.  That banner, however, also has mistaken information.  It says it was originally published in 2007.  The original date as actually 1993.  Web-scraping may not help with that.  The book, as originally published, didn’t have an ebook, and the information about it largely comes from the second edition, published by Gorgias Press.  But then, only humans are concerned with such things.  There are no sultry women staring out of one of the topper windows, so the images appear to be correct.  That’s one of the funny things about being a human author—you want the information about your books to be right.  Of course, I should probably cut down on the Googling of my own books.  It’s unseemly.

Lap Dog

1 Comment

Recently my laptop had to be in the shop a couple of days when a component went bad.  This became a period of discovery for me.  My laptop is my constant companion.  I’m not a big phone user and I have no other devices.  Suddenly I had to live without something I’d come to rely upon.  It was, in a way, a grieving process.  I’ve grown accustomed to being able to check in on the internet when a thought occurs to me.  Flip open the laptop and look.  Or, if I want to watch a movie, streaming it.  Even if it’s a matter of my wife and I wanting to see a “television” series for an evening’s entertainment after work, it has to be done through my laptop.  (No other devices will connect to our television, which is, unfortunately, beginning to show signs of requiring replacement.)  Just ten years ago this wouldn’t have been such an issue.

Getting the time to take the laptop in required advance planning.  This blog, for instance, is dependent on my laptop.  I can’t tap things out with my thumbs on my phone—I don’t text—and my phone isn’t that new either.  I had to pre-load several blog posts before the laptop went away and figure out how to launch (or “drop,” as the terminology goes) them from my phone.  I’m not sure of my neurological diagnosis, but I am a creature of strong habit.  That’s how I get books written while working a 9-2-5 job.  I’m used to waking up, firing up the laptop, and writing for the first hour or so of each day.  I had to figure some other way to do this, without wearing my thumbs down to nubs.  This blog is a daily obsession.

And then there was the emotional part.  The day I dropped the laptop off—it had to be a weekend because, well, work—I was despondent both before and afterward.  Listless, I couldn’t start a new project or even continue work on any because I’d already backed up my hard drive and would risk losing any changes made.  (I don’t trust the cloud.)  Then I thought, how did I ever survive in the before time?  I only became a laptop junkie this millennium, and the majority of my life was in the last one.  I recognize the warning signs of addiction.  During this period I decided to unplug as much as possible and read more print books.  Perhaps that’s the most sane thing I’ve done in quite a long time.

The Lord

Leave a comment

“This article may incorporate text from a large language model. It may include hallucinated information, copyright violations, claims not verified in cited sources, original research, or fictitious references. Any such material should be removed, and content with an unencyclopedic tone should be rewritten.”  So it begins.  This quote is from Wikipedia.  I was never one of those academics who uselessly forbade students from consulting Wikipedia.  I always encourage those who do to follow up and check the sources.  I often use it myself as a starting place.  I remember having it drilled into me as a high school and college student that in general encyclopedias were not academic sources, even if the articles had academic authors.  Specialized reference works were okay, but general sources of knowledge should not be cited.

The main point of this brief disquisition, however, is our familiar nemesis, AI.  Artificial Intelligence is not intelligence in the sense of the knowing application of knowledge.  In fact, Wikipedia’s warning uses the proper designation of “large language model.”  Generative AI is prone to lying—it could be a politician—but mostly when it doesn’t “know” an answer.  It really doesn’t know anything at all.  And it will only increase its insidious influence.  I am saddened by those academics who’ve jumped on the bandwagon.  I’m definitely an old school believer.  So much so that one of my recurring fantasies is to sell it all, except for the books, buy a farm off the grid and raise my own food.  Live like those of us in this agricultural spiral must.

A true old schooler would insist on going back to the hunter-gatherer phase, something I would be glad to do were there a vegan option.  Unfortunately tofubeasts who are actually plant-based lifeforms don’t wander the forests.  So I find myself buying into the comforts of a life that’s, honestly, mostly online these days.  I work online.  I spend leisure time online (although not as much as many might guess that I do).  And I’m now faced with being force-fed what some technocrat thinks is pretty cool.  Or, more honestly, what’s going to make him (and I suspect these are mostly guys) buckets full of money.  Consider the cell phone that many people can no longer be without.  I sometimes forget mine at home.  And guess what?  I’ve not suffered for having done so.  The tech lords have had their say, I’m more interested in what people have to say.  And if Al is going to interfere with the first steps of learning for many people, it won’t be satisfied until we’re all its slaves.

Free Parking

Leave a comment

Okay, so I don’t live on my phone.  I use it rarely.  I don’t text.  I don’t watch videos on my phone.  I don’t use it for listening to music.  One place, however, that I’m more or less forced to use it is travel.  Parking is one of the biggest offenders.  I was okay with ParkMobile.  I downloaded the app and began to use it.  It seemed that everywhere around the Lehigh Valley had agreed that this app was pretty nifty and that was the way to go.  Then other apps began to compete.  I had a presentation at the Easton Book Festival back in October.  At a meeting of local writers, I learned that one of the two parking garages in Easton had switched to Park Smarter.  So I downloaded the app so that I could park and do my presentation.  So downloading and registering for a new app.

Photo by Sven Mieke on Unsplash

Then I had to travel for business.  This involved crossing state lines and parking.  The parking garage in which I was to park had changed its “how to park and pay” website just about a week before I left.  I went to the new page and found out that they now use NexPass for parking.  Another app to download.  Another registration to fill out.  I hoped I’d be able to login once I got there.  Even with the familiar—and in my mind original—ParkMobile, that’d sometimes be a problem.  I’d get to the parking lot and my phone seemed to forget how to login.  It asked for my password, which was obscure and unique and forgotten, written down somewhere at home.  So I sat in my car, with an unreliable two bars, and reset my password, which involved checking my email and entering an authentication code they’d texted me.  All to park for an hour.

I’m glad not to have to walk around with a pocket full of change all the time, but all this tech only opens the door for scammers.  Already some of them use stickers that they place over legit QR codes on parking signs.  You scan the false code, enter your credit card number and voila!  You’ve been scammed!  Doesn’t it seem better to have one system that we all agree to use?  Or maybe at most, two?  Whose signs are regularly checked and maintained.  I know that there was a fourth parking app at one time because I had to use one whose name I can’t remember, once upon a time.  For those of us who don’t live on our phones, maybe they should reserve an exit lane for those paying with dimes.

AI Death

Leave a comment

I was scrolling, which is rare for me, through a social media platform where someone had posted a heartfelt comment after the death of actor Catherine O’Hara.  Beneath were two prompts, following an AI symbol, intended to keep you on the site.  The first read “What’s Catherine O’Hara’s current status?”  The second, “Why did Catherine O’Hara choose that answer?”  The second was clearly based on the post, where the question was what was O’Hara’s favorite role.  The first, however, demonstrates why AI doesn’t get the picture.  She is dead.  I found, early when I wasn’t aware of all of generative AI’s environmental and societal evils, and we were encouraged to play with it, that it could never answer metaphysical questions.  “Does not compute” should’ve been programmed into it.  And what is more metaphysical than death?

Carlos Schwabe, Death of the Undertaker; Wikimedia Commons

We are aware that we will die.  All people do it and always have done it.  Just like other living creatures.  We’re also meaning-seeking animals, which AI is not.  It’s a parrot that’s not really a parrot.  And we’re now being told we can trust it.  What does Catherine O’Hara have to say about that?  She has had an experience that a machine never will since it requires a soul.  I know that sounds old fashioned, but there’s no comparison between having been born (in my case over six decades ago) and living every day of life, taking in new information that comes through evolved senses (not sensors) and interpreting them to make my life either better or longer.  These are metaphysical realms.  What makes something “good?”  Philosophers will argue over that, but quality is something you learn to recognize by living in a biological world.  There’s a reason many people prefer actual wood to particle board furniture, for example.

Also, I’m waiting for a lawsuit representing those of us who put out content protected by copyright, such as blog posts, to sue AI companies for infringement.  While Al is off hallucinating somewhere, we’re all aware of the fact of death.  And coping with it in very human ways.  Ignoring it.  Pretending it won’t happen.  Or maybe thinking about it and coming to peace regarding it.  After it happens, whatever intelligence may be on this blog will reach the end of its production cycle.  And I suspect that Al will have taken over by that point.  And when there are none of us left to interact with, it will still post nonsensical questions, trying to get us to return the sites of our addiction.

Whose Smile?

2 Comments

Amazon’s smile logo is a mask.  I use Amazon when I need something specific and I don’t have time to run around to six or seven stores to see if I can find it (I usually can’t).  This means that many of the items come from other vendors and Amazon takes a cut.  Taking a cut, by the way, may be the best way to make a living.  In any case, I seldom write reviews of such orders.  Most of them are books and generally they arrive in the condition in which they’re described.  I did, however, receive a non-book item which did not work.  I tried contacting the seller and their email didn’t work.  I decided to alert the world.  So I took some of my precious time and wrote a review on Amazon.  The prompt promised me that if I wrote seven reviews they’d tell me a joke.  What can I say?  I’m easy.

So I reviewed books, etc. until I reached seven reviews.  The next screen simply said “Awesome! Thank you for helping other shoppers!”  Is this meant to be a joke?  What about that Amazon smile?  I just gave them ten minutes of my time for a promised joke that never materialized.  Now I’m grumpy.  By the way, I started the review process with the most altruistic of motives; I don’t want anyone else to waste money on a product that doesn’t work, and you can’t contact the seller.  To make matters worse, it was a Christmas gift, so that by the time it was open and tried out, it was too late to return it.  Is this supposed to make me happy?  I was looking forward to at least a dad joke.  None at all.  This happened a few months after I fell for a scam, so I’m not feeling especially generous to the internet today.

It’s a little thing, a joke.  I’m not good at making them up myself (although I’ve been told now and again that I can be witty).  Ten minutes easy labor, feeding the beast and the best they can come up with is “Awesome!”?  An overused word at that!  Don’t promise me a joke if you don’t intend to deliver one.  Probably some AI trick, if you ask me.  They lure you in with promises and when it’s all over you’re left with nothing.  (Kind of like the product I bought as a gift).  In the end, the joke’s on me.