Equal Women

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It’s been so busy this year that Mother’s Day crept up on me.  We have a lot of spring birthdays in our extended family, and what with the weird weather this year and unexpected household expenses, it just kept slipping my mind.  I like to commemorate the day on this blog because I’ve considered myself a feminist for many years.  I’m very distraught that women still aren’t treated as equals to men.  This should’ve been a no-brainer over a century ago.  (Having an historian’s outlook, I realize that in the days when women tended to die young, in childbirth, it was difficult for many to rise to positions of social prominence.  Once we got to the stage that most women survived the experience, and then to the point that economics drove us to two-income families, the male-superiority charade should’ve been dropped.)  The fact is none of us would be here without our mothers.  Father’s day has never been a big deal for me, but Mother’s Day is important.

I did manage to remember to get my wife a card in advance, but this year the day itself kept slipping my mind.  Ironically, my wife and I had watched a biopic of Mother Ann Lee last night—I’ll post on that tomorrow—and it was only as I was preparing to write about it for today’s post that I thought, “Wait.  It’s Mother’s Day.”  (We do have plans for the day; I’m not a complete barbarian.)  My excuse is that we were set off yesterday by an early encounter with a brusque and condescending Verizon employee who would not help set up a new phone purchased elsewhere.  I hadn’t slept well the night before and it rained all day, none of which made for a productive Saturday.  The movie (tomorrow’s post) was longer than anticipated, keeping me up late.  Movies, strangely enough, are now starting to really influence my dreams.

My dream for today, however, is that women’s equality will become a reality rather than something we just keep talking about.  There can be little doubt that we’d be better off with a woman president than with the alternative.  A woman has traveled further from the earth than many billions of men have.  My doctor and dentist are both women.  They can do anything men in their professions can.  They are university presidents and CEOs.  Pilots, both civilian and military.  They are religious leaders.  And many of them do the job on top of being mothers.  I consider it a personal failing that it was only as I was about to post about Mother Ann Lee (tomorrow) that I finally realized today is a very important day.  Let’s make Mother’s Day count!

Eh Aye Jesus

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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)

Hopeful Reading

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Although I prefer independent bookstores, I happened to find myself in a Barnes & Noble between other activities on a recent weekend.  This ended up being good for my spirits, although I didn’t buy anything.  The reason was, perhaps, ageist of me, that I was buoyed up by seeing so many young adults there buying books.  Granted, it was a cold, gray Sunday afternoon, but I read so much about the death of reading that this particular trip gave a bit of balance to all the doomsayers.  There is still a reading public.  And many of them are a good bit younger than yours truly.  I do wish more people my age would spend time in bookstores as well, but the future is with those who know to put down their devices and pick up actual books.

I’ve had more than one academic tell me that they do not assign e-reading for their classes.  One of them was a decade or two younger than me.  The reason?  Students don’t retain well what they read on a screen.  I tend to agree with this.  The context of setting aside time to open a book with no interruptions from texts, emails, or social media, is sacred.  You shut out the world and concentrate.  I try to do this for an hour each day (most days more than an hour) and it has to be done with print books.  I have no great love of electronic “books.”  The experience is sterile.  Devoid of true engagement.  And I’ve even been forced to read ebooks with other people’s highlights left behind.  When I buy a used book I try to make certain it’s an unmarked copy (although some sellers don’t look very carefully).  Why would I want an ebook with somebody else’s notes?

The visit to a bookstore is a restorative one.  In the rare instance where I know the proprietor, it becomes a social visit as well as a financial transaction.  Books are a kind of currency among some of us.  Although I know none of the names of the young people that I saw at Barnes & Noble, I do know something about them.  They enjoy books.  That is one of the most hopeful thoughts I can have.  As long as we manage to survive as a species, there is hope for the future if young people are interested in books.  Reading is a mind-expanding exercise.  Our life together is so much more enriching when we invite others in.  And some of them we meet between the covers of books.

A Day for Earth

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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.

Machen’s Monstrance

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It was a coincidence worthy of a story written by a mystic.  Arthur Machen became famous for his novella The Great God Pan.  Descended from a clergy family, his interests were in supernatural stories, but Pan was considered extreme in his day, which, of course, made it famous.  I have the Oxford World Classics series volume of Machen’s stories and I had only a few minutes, not enough to read Pan.  Flipping through the table of contents, I noticed that the story “Monstrance” was brief.  I decided to read that one.  It’s about a German major-sergeant Karl Heinz, during World War One.  As he is trying, with several others, to set up a machine-gun emplacement unnoticed by the English, a vision he has been seeing leads him to cry out and die.  Through the discovery of his diary, it is learned that he’d committed a war atrocity at a church and the procession with the monstrance became a vision haunting, and ultimately killing him on the battlefield.

The coincidence grew even more appropriate when, reading about Machen, I learned that his probably second most famous story was “The Bowmen,” which also happened to be short, and which in the Oxford World Classics edition, is printed right before “Monstrance.”  Of course I had to read it also.  The reason I chose “Monstrance” in the first place wasn’t because of its famous neighbor, but because of the religious symbol of the monstrance and because it is brief.  Since I still didn’t have time for The Great God Pan, I was led to his second most well-known story by looking for something short and landing on the story immediately following it.

“The Bowmen” is also a war story in which a miracle occurs.  It led to the rumor that the event, which involves angels fighting for the British forces, actually happened.  It is, however, fiction.  As a result, “The Bowmen” became the second most popular Machen story.  I wouldn’t have read it—at least not any time soon—had it not been for its placement before “Monstrance,” even though the two stories are somewhat similar.  It’s easily imagined that God is fighting on your side, and it should be remembered that often the enemy believes the same thing.  That most futile of human activities, war, certainly spawns stories as so many lives are meaninglessly lost.  There is, however, a mystical element to these tales, in keeping with Machen’s outlook on life.  Not bad for having about 20 minutes to fill.

First, Kings

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Recently I sat down to read 1 Kings.  Of course, I used to teach Hebrew Bible so I have more than a passing familiarity with it.  This time, though, I was reading it through the lens of Game of Thrones.  I wonder how much George R. R. Martin drew inspiration from the biblical book.  Indeed, a movie could be made from it—sex, conspiracy, battles, deception, it’s all there.  Perhaps someone should novelize it.  If you read it without knowing that it’s holy writ, you might be surprised to learn that it is.  Of course, having been edited by the Deuteronomists (so it’s supposed), it’s a bit preachy, but the action is pretty much the same.  In fact, Game of Thrones has quite a few biblical tropes in it.  And 1 Kings, if excised from the Bible, with its chapter and verse format, is pretty gripping itself.

Another thing that occurred to me is how little politics has changed over the millennia.  Powerful families want to retain power and privilege.  They aren’t too concerned with religious niceties but they rely on the backing of religious authorities.  (The priesthood and monarchy were always a tag team for keeping power in “the proper place.”)  And a number of the characters are quite colorful, even if you wouldn’t want them in the Oval Office.  Outside that context they can be quite loved, or at least people love to hate them.  Immature boy kings, seductive queens, and armed conflict at the slightest provocation are parts of the story across the ages.  The truth of power in powerful families plays out even in democracies.  Consider father and son presidents from the Adams and Bush families, husband and wife (nearly), in the Clintons, and countless powerful families represented in the senate or in the house.

Politics never change. Image: Saul threatening David, by José Leonardo, public domain via Wikimedia Commons

Biblical tales are often more earthy than they might be supposed.  Viewed through the lens of faith, we’re willing to excuse behavior that wasn’t even condoned in that day: David’s adultery, (ahem) or literal political assassination (ahem).  Alas, poor Uriah.  The problem arises when these earthy texts are taken for something magical.  People still believe in magic.  Widely so.  This belief drives much of politics in two related nations far apart but bound together by a book.  Reading 1 Kings is a useful spiritual, and practical exercise.  We can learn much about how people behave.  The Good Book isn’t shy about the motivations either.  Sex, power, and fame drove leaders of antiquity even as they continue to do so today.  The Bible tells me so. 

Actual Intelligence

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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

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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.

Please Read

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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!)

Substantial

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Body horror isn’t my favorite, but The Substance was so widely acclaimed that I figured I needed to see it.  It’s easy to see why it was so well received—it is not only well done, it also packs a lot of social commentary into the story.  I hadn’t read about the plot before seeing it, and it occurred to me that the theme wasn’t dissimilar from Edgar Allan Poe’s “William Wilson,” but from the point of view of a woman who’s been celebrated for her good looks and finds herself aging out.  Elisabeth Sparkle has had a successful television personal fitness series for years.  When she turns fifty, however, studio executives decide she has to be replaced with someone younger.  The men in the movie are portrayed in an unflattering light, unable to curb their appetites, while Elisabeth has to stay in shape, remain “beautiful,” to find any work at all.

Then a doctor furtively informs her about “the substance.”  It comes with few instructions, but it causes a person to create a new version of themselves—younger, more attractive—but they must swap out their existence every week.  One week the younger body is active while the older body is comatose and then they keep on switching weekly.  The younger Elisabeth, named Sue, takes Sparkle’s job and becomes a hit.  Her fitness show, highly sexualized, quickly gains ratings.  Sue has boyfriends and glamour.  Elisabeth awakes to find the apartment a mess and starts to regret the doubling.  The advertising for the substance repeats the message, the two of you are one.  Then Sue starts to “stay out late,” taking a few extra hours before switching.  This causes Elisabeth to age, in pieces, very rapidly.  She takes her revenge on Sue by overeating and leaving the apartment a mess.

Of course this is building to a big finish, which I won’t describe here.  There are a number of themes the film asks us to ponder.  Women are expected to stay young to be valued by the men who control the money.  The divided self comes to hate itself.  And there is little recourse for those whose careers reward them richly for being young but who will live well beyond that with only the memories and regrets of what they no longer have.  Although the movie is deliberately comic in many respects, it is also a sad story.  Expectations are unreasonable and unrealistic, and women have to play by the rules set by men.   The Substance has depth and pathos.  And pointed social commentary.

The Lord

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“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.

AI Death

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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.

The Dismal Science

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I kind of resent it.  I was was having a conversation with a friend about retirement.  He knows our circumstances (my middling and muddling career) and suggested that we might retire, noting we’d need to ask ourselves “do we really need this?” before buying everything.  I don’t resent what my friend said, but rather the fact that economists get the final word on when we rest our weary bones.  Why do we insist on measuring an individual’s worth based on the amount of money they have?  There’s no denying that’s what we do.  And there’s no denying that we age the longer we maintain this mortal coil.  We are all slaves to capitalism.  We are owned by our jobs, and since corporations are legally people in this country, that means we are owned by a person.  Oh, we can quit, but there goes your food, shelter, and medical care.  Is it really a choice?

The problem is that many people, far smarter than yours truly, have proposed much better, more humane systems.  Universal living income, universal health care, fair use of tax money we pay.  Since governments have been suborned by the wealthy—both capitalist and communist—such fairness measures are unlikely to ever take place.  Why do we allow this to happen?  Sometimes such situations lead to revolutions, a new system that will be equitable takes hold.  Only to be taken over by those who have access to more resources and who hope to aggrandize themselves.  The other day when I was checking out from a department store, the person at the register had to be in her late seventies or early eighties.  Instead of enjoying retirement, she was scanning overpriced items for people who also wouldn’t likely retire.  Our system is broken.

Photo by Blogging Guide on Unsplash

More than a mere economic readjustment, we need a philosophical one.  Years ago the United States went off the gold standard.  Our system of values changed.  On the surface it stayed the same, but the slow eroding of services the government used to offer has led to the phenomenon of people who should be enjoying a rest from many decades of working continuing to work so that they can survive.  Should such a person’s ship come in, they’ll soon forget their concern, I’m guessing.  They may feel sorry for others, but they aren’t likely to be activists for change.  The friend I was talking with was retired.  He was younger than me.  And should he want to buy anything he doesn’t have to ask if he really needs it.  Some of us tire and others retire.

Laughing Matter?

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I sincerely hope AI is a bubble that will burst.  Some of its ridiculousness has been peeking out from under its skirts from the beginning, but an email I had from Academia.edu the other day underscored it.  The automated email read, “Our AI turned your paper ‘A Reassessment of’ into a shareable comic.”  Let me translate that.  Academia.edu is a website where you can post published (and even unpublished) papers that others can consult for free.  Their main competitor is Research Gate.  Many years ago, I uploaded PDFs of many of my papers, and even of A Reassessment of Asherah, my first book, onto Academia.  This is what the email was referencing.  My dissertation had been AIed into a shareable comic.  I felt a little amused but also a little offended.  I quickly went to Academia’s site and changed my AI settings.

I didn’t click on the link to my comic book for two reasons.  One is that I no longer click links in emails.  Doing so once cost me dearly (and I didn’t even actually click).  I no longer do that.  The second reason, however, is that I know Academia’s game.  They want free users to become subscribers.  They frequently email intriguing tidbits like some major scholar has cited your work and when you go to their website, the only way to find out who is to upgrade to a paid account.  They do the same thing with emails asking if you wrote a certain paper.  If you own that you did, they’ll tell you the wonders of a paid account.  Since I’m no longer an academic, I don’t need to know who is citing my work.  I’d like to believe it’s still relevant, but I don’t feel the need to pay to find out to whom.

I am curious about what a comic version of my dissertation might look like, of course.  I am, however, morally opposed to generative AI.  In a very short time it has ruined much of what I value.  I do not believe it is good for people and I’m disappointed by academics who are using it for research.  AI still hallucinates, making things up.  It is not conscious and can’t really come up with its own answers.  It has no brain and no emotion, both of which are necessary for true advances to take place.  My first book has the highest download rate of any of my pieces on the Academia website.  Last time I checked it had just edged over 9,000 views.  AI thinks it’s  a joke, making a comic of years of academic work.

That House

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In this season of deportations, thinking about what it means to be a refugee couldn’t be more important.  The horror film His House makes you do just that.  Bol and Rial are fleeing war-torn South Sudan with their daughter.  After a mishap on the overcrowded boat from France to England, their daughter drowns.  Kept in a refugee camp for months, they are finally allotted a council house in poor repair and a meager income.  If they violate any of the rules, which include living anywhere else or trying to earn their own money, they will be deported.  Bol tries to assimilate quickly while Rial is more tied to her traditional ways.  Then the ghost of their daughter, and other dead from the war and the crossing, begin to haunt them.  All the while they face the threat of deportation.  Some spoilers follow.

Rial recognizes the ghosts come from an apeth, a kind of witch that demands repayment for the crossing.  Bol sees the ghosts too, but denies it.  They will not go back, he insists.  When the social workers come to inspect the house, after Bol asks for a different place, Rial tells them a witch is causing the problems, causing the Englishmen to roll their eyes.  When Rial tries to escape, an alternative reality back in Africa shows that when Bol was denied a place on the overcrowded refugee bus, he grabs a random girl—their “daughter”—to get a place on board as the soldiers begin shooting.  The girl’s mother is left behind, screaming for her child.  The apeth is demanding Bol’s life for that of the girl he used to gain his freedom.  Rial, realizing that Bol will die for trying to make their life better, attacks the apeth and lets go of the image of their daughter.

This is a sad and thoughtful kind of film.  We seldom stop to think that refugees, in culture shock already, are stripped of everything familiar and made to feel as if continuing to live is itself a special favor.  They have their own ghosts too.  The real horror here comes through seeing the world through the eyes of someone who has experienced a high level of trauma.  To do so while Trump’s storm troopers are once again separating families, killing people at will, and deporting refugees, is not an easy thing to do.  Horror can be an instructive genre, and although the threat here is supernatural, as it often is in folk-horror, the real fear is all too human.