Peep

By in animals, books, foolosophy, the big sleep No Comments

At night, Bunky sometimes emitted a two-syllable ribbit, a sort of croaky hee-haw: the sound we’d heard over the baby monitor. We read that only male African clawed frogs made this sound, and that it was a mating call.

I often wrote late into the night. Bunky shared my circadian rhythm. For years—ever since Bunky’s aquarium had migrated from Henry’s room to the kitchen counter—I’d been going downstairs for a snack at 2:00 a.m., and there he’d been, softly calling for a mate he’d never meet.

— Anne Fadiman, Frog: And Other Essays

The other night, I was standing outside in the evening, enjoying air that was unusually cool for August, when I heard a strange sound from the weeds and overgrowth in front of the house.

Peep.

I thought, “What the hell was that?” Then I heard it again.

Peep.

I followed the sound and could just make out a small shape among the weeds. For a moment I thought it was a bird and wondered why it was on the ground. Injured, perhaps? Surely not a baby at this time of year.

Then it came into view. It was a toad, and a small snake had its right rear leg in its mouth. The snake was latched on near the hip. The toad would struggle occasionally, trying to pull itself free, and every so often it made that sound again. The snake held on.

I stood there watching for several minutes. Sentimentally, my sympathies were with the toad. But there was nothing useful for me to do, or at least nothing I could do without simply choosing one animal over the other. The snake had to eat too. What sense was there in taking sides?

Then, for some reason, the snake let go and zipped away into the weeds. Perhaps it finally noticed the large mammal looming nearby. The toad stayed where it was, its leg bloodied, breathing rapidly. I went back inside. When I came back outside twenty minutes later, it still hadn’t moved. The snake had not returned.

Had there been no sound, I suspect the whole thing would have been less affecting. It would have looked almost mechanical: jaws clamped around flesh, muscles pulling against muscles, predator and prey each executing behavioral programs vastly older than either animal. Nature doing what nature does. But there was that peep. What did it signify? Pain? Fear? Pleading for mercy? Begging for help?

Those questions are too human, but we can’t help but filter experience through words and concepts. A toad presumably does not possess cerebral concepts such as mercy, nor formulate a thought resembling Please, somebody help me. The sound may have been entirely instinctive, an evolved distress call produced when restrained by a predator. Perhaps it serves to startle an attacker. Perhaps it sometimes attracts another animal and disrupts the attack. One can describe the whole event without granting the toad anything resembling a human understanding of its predicament. But the next question is phenomenological: what, if anything, is happening for the animal while the sound is being made? The larger problem is that we can observe nervous systems only from the outside. We can measure electrical activity, identify nociceptors, trace neural pathways, watch behavior. But what, if anything, is it like from in there?

Bunky called at night for a mate who would never come. The poignancy of that image does not depend on imagining Bunky lying awake at two in the morning brooding over his romantic prospects. He did not have to understand loneliness in order for the scene to contain something we recognize as lonely. An organism issued a call into an environment in which the thing the call existed to summon could never appear. My toad’s peep seems like the darker counterpart. Something has me. Get away. Whatever those human words distort, whatever they add, the sound resists being reduced entirely to scenery. The toad is not saying “Oh, God, help me!” translated from Toadish. But maybe “peep” is the biological ancestor of that phrase, the single-celled organism of speech. We sense what he means. We know what our equivalent sounds would mean if a python had us by the leg.

The haiku poet Issa wrote, after the death of his daughter:

The world of dew
is only the world of dew—
and yet…oh, and yet…

That “and yet” is what makes the poem unbearably sublime. Issa knows perfectly well that the world is impermanent. He knows the Buddhist teaching. Everything arises and passes away. The world of dew is only the world of dew. And yet…

The world red in tooth and claw is the world red in tooth and claw. Toads eat bugs and are eaten by snakes in turn. The snake was committing no injustice. The universe had not malfunctioned. If I had rescued the toad, I would merely have substituted the snake’s hunger for the toad’s injury. Nature contains competing interests but no court of appeal. And yet…

Odds are fair that one day within the next few decades, I may find myself lying in a hospital bed, heavily sedated, reduced in outward appearance to little more than biological machinery. Opiates may have dissolved most of what an observer would recognize as personality. Death may have its jaws locked around one of my vital organs. Perhaps I will make a feeble groan. What would it signify? Pain? Fear? Pleading for mercy? Begging for help? A neurologist could conceivably point to a brain scan and explain that the sound was reflexive. The relevant networks were firing automatically. There was no evidence that the coherent person formerly known as “me” remained present behind the sound. Perhaps the doctor would be right.

The world red in tooth and claw
is the world red in tooth and claw—
And yet…groan. And yet…peep.

Obiter Scripta, no. 168

By in aphorisms, books, nietzsche, obiter scripta No Comments

Whoever writes in blood and aphorisms does not want to be read but to be learned by heart.

— Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Well, I have never written in blood, and I have only a smattering of Nietzsche committed to memory. But I did recently donate blood to the Red Cross, which netted me $30 in gift cards, promptly applied toward more of his notebooks from Stanford University Press, so I have at least managed the minor alchemy of turning blood into aphorisms. I like to think he’d be impressed by my dedication.

The Signal Has Gone Dead, All That’s Left Is Noise

By in ai, calvin and hobbes, foolosophy, writing 1 Comment

Juliette Ryan:

I can fairly quickly spot a piece of AI-generated writing but I know my judgement is not infallible. This is why I support Substack’s decision to integrate AI detection into their platform, a decision that was met with great uproar amongst many writers. To me, the backlash reveals how far the virus has spread. The loudest objections weren’t about the detection itself but what it implies: that the machine did the thinking.

The gist of Ryan’s argument is that LLMs have dramatically lowered the cost of producing misinformation by giving it the camouflage of fluent prose. Before LLMs, producing a polished 1,500-word argument required somebody to possess at least a certain amount of verbal skill, time, or money. That did not make the argument true, but it imposed a production cost. Now someone who barely understands a subject can produce a plausible-looking essay about it in minutes. The old signal has become noisier. True enough. But earlier in the essay, she writes:

After all, to truly understand something, you need to be able to explain it. And to explain it, you need to have assimilated extensive knowledge and the ability to synthesise it — to recognise where and how to build bridges over that dense knowledge so that they can be walked by the reader. Before AI, fluent writing signalled that someone had laboured for hours trying to collapse three-dimensional thought into a two-dimensional stream of words that could convey that understanding to another person. Good writing meant good thinking. Or it used to.

Good writing =/= good thinking. They are different skills. I know intelligent people whose prose is stilted and clunky. I know English majors who are astonishingly dumb. Rhetorical fluency is the ability to smoothly join a premise to a conclusion. It tells you nothing about the validity of either. Writing can be clear without being good in the sense of true or accurate. We know this from something as small as the aphorism. Her own post illustrates this.

Leaving aside her blithe assumption that detectors like Pangram work as well as their marketing copy would have you believe, her entire “mind virus” metaphor assumes a reading environment that I simply don’t recognize:

AI has fooled a large population of online content creators into thinking they know what they truly think. Their superficially fluent output is then read by unsuspecting others, unknowingly simulating (possibly false) understanding in their own minds, and they pass it along with a cursory hit of the “share” button. And so the virus spreads this pseudo-understanding, infecting the minds of all who say they don’t care whether they’re reading AI-generated content.

Here she seems to suggest that no one ever questions anything they read. It’s like she assumes that the interaction begins with a piece of writing and ends with its first impression on the reader. But most writing that makes an impression on me stays with me and gets chewed on for a while. Eventually, some vague dissatisfaction from early on makes itself known as a coherent objection. It sounded good at first, but something just didn’t feel right. I mulled it over, and finally, the problem becomes obvious.

She also acts like the author’s pseudo-profundity, once established, remains. But let’s assume that someone has pulled the wool over everyone’s eyes by using AI to cover up a weak thesis. Or perhaps the thesis is strong, but it’s not truly the author’s, because Claude supplied it. In either case, the solution is to follow up with pointed questions or criticisms, perhaps in live conversation. A person who truly doesn’t have command of the ideas will not be able to keep faking it. Eventually, you’ll notice the lack of true familiarity with the subject. We all know this from our days of giving book reports in front of the class. You always knew the kid who didn’t actually read the book, because he wasn’t capable of summarizing it or expanding upon it. (I may have even been that kid on one occasion in third grade; I know my subject from the inside, as it were.)

In both instances, she acts like first impressions are forever. Her model of the reader is strangely passive for someone arguing that people need to preserve active cognition. She wants authors to think strenuously, but readers apparently just absorb whatever washes over them. Yet reading itself can be a form of thinking. The reader can do the intellectual work the writer failed to do, which is exactly what is happening here. Her prose is fluent. The argument initially has shape. Then you keep turning it over, and the hidden assumptions start coming loose. The irony is that her essay is explicitly worried about fluent language creating the illusion of understanding, and “mind virus” is itself a fluent phrase that can create the illusion of understanding. It’s such a stupid, reductive way to describe what is going on in this context. It’s fine for polemic, but useless as analysis.

Online polemics

Sculptural Writing

By in ai, aphorisms, books, technology, writing No Comments

Machines are still only in their trial period. One day, perhaps, an electrophonic kaleidoscope will compose musical figures in their thousands — will invent whole series of rhythms and melodies. Man will have machines that create just as he will have machines for precision thinking — His role will be reduced to choosing. Combination factories.

The most intense feeling is only one combination among others.

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 3

The standard complaint about large language models is that they will make writers sound alike, and perhaps eventually think alike. But Valéry’s prescient suggestion makes me wonder about another possibility. What if these machines do not merely automate an existing kind of writing? What if they also call forth a somewhat different skill in writers?

We ordinarily imagine writing in painterly terms. The writer confronts a blank surface and begins putting things onto it. A word, then a sentence, then a paragraph. The work accumulates. Even when we know perfectly well that revision will follow, our basic picture of authorship remains additive: there was nothing here, and now the writer has made something out of his inner resources and aesthetic vision.

An LLM makes possible a more sculptural way of working. Instead of confronting a blank page, the writer can begin with an excess of material. The machine can produce the boulder of text. The writer’s task is to decide what, if anything, is inside it. That sounds close to Valéry’s prediction that our role will be “reduced to choosing.” But choosing may be doing a lot of work there. A sculptor also “chooses.” This part stays; that part goes. This line needs to emerge; that mass is obscuring it. The finished form depends not on the ability to manufacture marble but on seeing possibilities in it that someone else would not see. Two sculptors can begin with approximately the same block and end with objects bearing no resemblance to one another.

Give two people the same serviceable paragraph from an LLM. One may read it and think it’s fine as is. The other notices immediately that the opening sentence is unnecessary, the metaphor in the middle is the only interesting thing there, the conclusion merely repeats the premise, and one odd phrase suggests a better direction for the whole piece. This would shift some of the emphasis in writing from generation toward discrimination. An LLM can give you ten openings before you have finished thinking about the first. It can propose twenty metaphors, five structures, three counterarguments, a dozen ways of phrasing the sentence you are stuck on. Under those conditions, producing another possibility is nearly worthless, but knowing which possibility is promising becomes more valuable. That sounds less like the traditional ideal of the writer and more like the work of an editor.

I haven’t experimented with this yet. I don’t know how it might go in practice. It probably would not go one single way for everybody. But this seems more interesting than treating AI-assisted writing solely as a question of whether the machine has “done the writing.” That formulation assumes we already know where the important part of writing resides. Well, maybe. Or maybe abundance changes where the difficulty lies. The blank page tests one set of capacities; the overflowing page may test another.

Is There Anybody Thinking What I Am, Is There Any Other Alternative?

By in conspicuous crusading, identity No Comments

Alan Jacobs enthusiastically linked to The IndieWeb is Punk Manifesto. I read it, and while I agree with many of the basic principles — own your domain, publish without permission, don’t optimize everything for growth, make strange personal things, resist algorithmic incentives, keep control of your work — it mainly serves as a good example of what I mean about feeling like an orangutan among chimpanzees. “Community” language leaves me cold. I think, Great, another group of people in identical clothing knocking on my door, asking me to come worship with them.

Any consciously-formed tribe becomes increasingly homogeneous. Once the identity is established, the next step is consolidating territory and circling the wagons. I know people in real life who still identify with the old punk/alternative ethos. They appear to me to be stuck in amber. They haven’t had a surprising thought in forty years; all issues were settled back when they were adolescents. You already know what they think about any given topic without having to ask.

Also, I’m just suspicious of liberatory rhetoric in the first place. “You’re free! You can do whatever you want! You don’t have to do whatever the algorithms and platforms tell you to!” Well, experience shows that most of “what we want” to do is conform to our peer groups and defend our little patch of turf against outsiders. In this instance, that means that “we” will quickly acquire an official vocabulary and a list of approved opinions on the same old topics.

What do people actually want when nobody is ordering them around? Very often they want affiliation, recognition, status, reassurance, and protection against rival groups. They want to know who “we” are. And once they know who “we” are, they want to know who isn’t. Once a recognizable community forms, the social machinery switches back on almost immediately. People look sideways at one another. Certain writers become authorities. Certain phrases become passwords. Certain opinions become embarrassing to hold. Certain enemies become useful for defining the group. The platform’s algorithm may have disappeared, but the human algorithm remains.

The IndieWeb can genuinely decentralize infrastructure while its participants simultaneously centralize culturally. Ten thousand independently owned websites can still produce ten thousand essays using the same vocabulary, citing the same people, taking the same positions, and announcing the same enemies. I should know, because looking over the smallweb/indieweb aggregator sites like Bubbles, Scour, Blogosphere, etc. is precisely where I saw ten thousand identical posts about “AI is murderizing rare books!” The herd of independent minds was in full stampede. You can own your domain, hand-code your CSS, refuse analytics, reject social-media algorithms, syndicate by RSS, and still think almost entirely by contagion. Domains, domains everywhere, and not a thought to think…

Much of the “take back the web” rhetoric tends to locate conformity externally. “The platform made us do it; the algorithm trained us; the engagement metrics corrupted us.” Well, they surely helped, but remove all three and you are left with the organism that invented cliques, sects, fashions, orthodoxies, mobs, and political factions several thousand years before anyone wrote a recommendation algorithm. I hate to act like the Grand Inquisitor on behalf of the platforms, but I tend to think, “You fools! You think people want to be free? What on earth ever put that idea in your head? You think they want to be left alone with their own organic thoughts for thirty seconds? Turn them loose on the open web with no feed, no algorithm, no comforting knowledge that everyone else is looking at the same thing, and you would condemn them to the most exquisite misery and anxiety!”

O Lambda Truest, I Am the Newest Member of Your Clan

By in identity, jests japes jokes jollies, tribalism

Ed West:

Truth and justice are synonymous, or related, in the human mind, and it is actually quite unusual to care about truth in a literal, scientific sense, irrespective of the social consequences. It is a characteristic found in nerds, and especially those on the autistic spectrum; only a small number of people obsess about the objective truth, and they often repulse the rest of society as a result. For most, a sense of pravda is more important, as is the approval of peers, and they also tend to question the intentions of people making dissenting claims. If you’re seeking knowledge which might disrupt social harmony, you’re probably a bad person with ulterior motives, and your arguments will be mentally screened out by people who don’t wish to expend energy on issues that don’t concern them.

…I’ve met Cofnas on a few occasions, at various conservative-aligned get-togethers. He’s a slight, affable, dryly amusing figure and – forgive the racial stereotyping – quite New York Jewish in his mannerisms. He could almost be played by a young Woody Allen, if Allen cast himself as a race scientist hated by society for his controversial views. He’s obviously one of those unusual people who can’t bear to hear what he regards as fictions being repeated for the sake of social harmony or group cohesion; a nerd, in other words.

I was never a cool or popular kid; until late adolescence I was always small for my age and I was never talkative. But I could “pass” as reasonably sociable and naturally athletic; I didn’t have the Dungeons & Dragons autistic awkwardness or the aptitude for science. As an adult, I wouldn’t say I’m obsessed with objective truth, but I do like to refer to myself as an orangutan among chimpanzees for precisely the reason West suggests: fictions being repeated for the sake of social harmony or group cohesion cause my lip to involuntarily curl in contempt. I just don’t feel the same need for social belonging, or at least nowhere near the same intensity of it. I’m not trying to suggest that there’s any moral valence to this. It doesn’t make me better, only different. I have no desire to be a crusader for truth; I don’t mind if people are quietly believing dumb or bizarre things to themselves. But I loathe the combination of aggressive proselytizing and self-back-patting that goes with social causes.

A nerd, though? Here I was thinking I was this version of Ogre:

Only to find I’m the later version of him:

In a World of Machines, What Can I Do But to Serve

By in ai, the geist of the zeit, writing

Way back in the day, my mom had a part-time business typing up term papers and dissertations for university students. Well, I did say “way back in the day.” We’re talking about a time when grad students would come in with handwritten theses and manuscripts. They didn’t have their own typewriters, let alone word processors. And yes, I was alive to witness this. Phones were attached to walls and desks, restaurants had smoking sections, cars had paper maps in the glove box, and everything was sepia-toned.

Point is, I’m considering resurrecting the old family business with a modern twist. In ye olden times, students supplied messy handwritten intellectual labor and paid somebody with technological/clerical expertise to turn it into professional-looking typescript. Today they could supply immaculate machine typescript and pay somebody with humanistic expertise to put the mess back in. (I also bet “humanism” will start to acquire new connotations in the age of AI.)

Why not? We have apparently reached the stage where software companies sell machines that generate prose, other software companies sell machines that detect the generated prose, and still other software companies sell machines that make the generated prose look less generated. At some point the cheapest solution will be to hire a human who grew up in a sepia-toned world.

Fellatious

By in ohferfucksake

Beg your pardon?

A lot of people seem to think Kriss is a good writer, and you can see why here. He writes with panache, brio, and a lot of entertaining venom. But I’ve been encountering his writing off and on for the past decade, and the subject-beneath-the-subject is always the same: the scintillating brilliance of Sam Kriss.

He reminds me a bit of Edward Norton. I don’t mean in the sense that he’s one of the more talented practitioners of his craft among his generation, although you could argue for it. I’m thinking more of Norton as the narrator in Fight Club, particularly the famous scene where he viciously beats himself up in his boss’s office. In Kriss’s case, though, it’s more like he’s making an equally-shocking spectacle of sucking himself off.

I’m sorry to be crude, but I’m not sure how else to convey the carnal intensity of his self-importance. Look how brash this prose is! Look how full it is of blood and personality and righteous anger, anger directed at everyone from academia to the media to the individual voyeurs who gleefully enjoyed Arday’s fall from grace, pathetic small souls one and all, incapable of appreciating the greatness of his Promethean soul! But of course, this Promethean Arday is every bit as much a caricature of the man as the ones Kriss furiously condemns; it just happens to be one that’s useful as a prop in the neverending story of Sam’s brilliance. So, yes, I stand in disbelief as I watch him turn rhetorical somersaults through glass coffee tables and careen into bookcases, his head vigorously bobbing between his legs all the while.

The amusement fades when one asks what, beneath all the verbal vim and vigor, he is actually arguing. He plainly wants to condemn the public exposure and humiliation of Arday. There is a perfectly coherent argument available to him. One could say that the evidence of fraud and plagiarism deserved investigation; that journalists were justified in reporting it; that Cambridge had an obligation to enforce academic standards; and that none of this justified turning a human being’s collapse into mass entertainment. Wrongdoers retain a claim to humane treatment. Mobs are ugly. Cruelty does not become virtuous merely because its target has done something wrong.

But this argument is apparently too pedestrian for Kriss. It smells of bourgeois morality. One can imagine a clergyman or Rotarian saying it. He therefore has to find a more glamorous basis for objecting to what happened. Hence his attempt to transform Arday from compulsive fabulist into something like a trickster demigod whose lies represented imaginative largeness, self-creation, and resistance to the tedious literalism of modern life. This is where the essay begins gobbling its own knob.

A genuine prankster or performance artist stands, at least imaginatively, outside the social rules he violates. If Arday’s death was connected to the humiliation surrounding his exposure, that makes the romantic trickster interpretation harder to sustain. It suggests that the judgments of the supposedly-dreary bourgeois world mattered to him greatly. He was not serenely laughing at the bean counters. He appears to have been trapped inside the consequences of a public identity whose collapse he found unbearable. That makes him more tragic and more human, but also makes him less useful to Kriss.

Kriss accuses everyone else of turning Arday into a symbol. Cambridge made him the Inspirational Black Academic. The anti-DEI right made him the Fraudulent DEI Academic. Journalists and online spectators made him an object of fascination and ridicule. Kriss’s own sin turns out to be comparatively refined: he consumed too many articles, but more in sorrow and fascination than in vulgar voyeurism. He alone seems to have recognized what the others missed — that Arday was a gift, a figure of imaginative excess in a cramped world. The faux-collective confession thus leaves Kriss occupying his usual privileged location: inside humanity sufficiently to diagnose its sins, but outside it sufficiently not to share them in any vulgar form.

But he too needs Arday to be a symbol. His Arday is the Magnificent Fabulist, the chancer whose extravagant self-invention exposes the spiritual poverty of everyone who insists upon such dull concepts as factual accuracy. If Cambridge saw racial progress and the right saw DEI corruption, Kriss sees evidence that Sam Kriss possesses a more capacious imagination than the literal-minded plebs.

One way to see this is to notice the questions he is not interested enough to ponder. What did Arday’s family know? Did they believe his claims? Did anyone close to him tell him to stop? Did he tell different versions of his self-made myth to different people? Were people worried that something medically or psychologically was wrong? Banal normie that I am, my first instinct upon seeing a loved one accruing fame based on fabulism would be to stage an intervention. Did Arday have anyone like that in his life?

We don’t know the answers. That’s precisely the point. Anyone chiefly interested in the what and how would want to know them. They are the ordinary questions from which causal understanding is built. But banality is fatal to Kriss’s aesthetic. Perhaps there was no Promethean rebellion. Perhaps there was just family denial, financial incentive, self-deception, ordinary dishonesty, or mental illness. Perhaps Arday was neither saint nor trickster nor emblem, but a deeply flawed man caught in a web partly of his own making and partly maintained by people who found the web useful. But that would not furnish Kriss with an elevated platform from which to sneer at everyone else. His real subject, as usual, is not Jason Arday. It is Sam Kriss being less naïve, less literal, less provincial, less blinkered than everybody else.

In some versions of the myth, Narcissus drowns in his own reflection. I fear that Kriss may eventually succumb to, well, a more literal variant of autoerotic asphyxiation.

It Seems Strange How We Used to Wait For Letters to Arrive

By in ai, the statusphere, writing

Giles Crouch:

When a human has written something, as I am writing this now, there is a cost (I’ve got a ton of other things on my to-do list), and we inherently know this cost. Just as we are, when reading something, paying a cost with our attention. We like good writers, something I am striving for, because they have thought something through, done the research, crafted and organized the story. If they are good at it, we like that. It’s why we have the Pulitzer Prize or in Canada, the Giller Prize. Most nations have them, or a lucky writer becomes a best-selling author. We are rewarding the cost of their attention to the writing because we are happy to pay the cost of reading their works. Part of Mauss’ gift economy idea.

The labor theory of value was dubious enough when economists used it. I see no reason to resurrect it as a theory of writing.

Years ago, the Lady of the House and I did some freelance corporate copywriting. This was the golden age of SEO, when every business needed a steady supply of “fresh content.” The work was excruciating for me because there was absolutely nothing that needed to be said. It was the ne plus ultra of bullshitting. Good spelling and grammar were important, but every other rule of writing as I understood it was irrelevant. I was simply required to manufacture several hundred new words about an old subject. There was no fact-checking. Hell, there was no audience but Google itself. We were basically just offering generic words up in mass sacrifice to the inscrutable algorithm so that anyone Googling “how do u use dental floss” would find a post for Dr. Yankem’s dentistry services somewhere in the first few results. I labored mightily, but the resulting prose did not thereby become meaningful.

Crouch’s argument about AI writing rests heavily on this connection between effort and value. Good writing costs the writer attention; the reader reciprocates by spending attention on it. AI supposedly disrupts this “gift economy,” a concept he borrows from anthropology, because the machine allows the writer to avoid paying his share. But effort is a fact about production, not a measure of value. We don’t know how many hours a Pulitzer winner spent on a particular chapter. We don’t reduce our estimate of a novelist after learning that he writes quickly; we might even see him as a natural genius. Conversely, my old SEO copy could absorb hours of my attention without becoming worth anyone’s time.

Crouch also describes an “uncanny cognitive valley”: AI prose feels almost human but somehow off, and once readers recognize its tells they resent the writer for not offering them genuine attention. I have heard this complaint before. Writers used to complain about email, text messages, and social media in the same way. In 2010 I wrote about people who called online communication cold and impersonal. My explanation was less exotic: most people are simply unskilled writers. Plenty of intelligent, interesting people are poor at turning their thoughts into nuanced sentences that capture the flavor of their personalities. Their emails were brief, awkward, misspelled, utilitarian. The problem wasn’t email; they just weren’t good at prose.

Sixteen years later, the same people have better equipment. An LLM can remove misspellings, fix grammar, supply transitions and produce sophisticated-looking sentences. What it cannot automatically supply is judgment. A weak writer may not recognize that a metaphor is awkward, a paragraph redundant, an argument too neat, a phrase unlike anything he would actually say. He now produces something different from the clumsy email of 2010: polished generic prose. The underlying problem is the same. What Crouch identifies as machine uncanniness may only be fluency without discrimination. Like the sorcerer’s apprentice, the animated tool has gotten out of the pedestrian writer’s control. He isn’t skilled enough to shape and direct the output, and the reader can tell: “This doesn’t sound like him.” People who aren’t good at shaping their own thoughts are also not good at shaping prompted thoughts. It’s not because an LLM inherently makes it impossible to produce good prose, it’s that most people aren’t good at it even if an LLM gives them a leg up.

So, if we don’t need elaborate theories from anthropology to explain the extraordinary agitation about AI writing, what would suffice? A cold look at basic human psychology seems good enough to me.

People are conservative in the elementary psychological sense: radical novelty makes us uneasy. Most of us also lack the time or inclination to investigate complicated new subjects deeply, so we glean a basic sense of what our peer groups think and conform to that. Add a nonstop barrage of posts and articles telling us that AI will steal our jobs, drink all our water, eat all our books and perhaps terminate civilization, and a certain amount of reflexive hostility is unsurprising.

But writers, academics, journalists, editors, and other people whose self-conception is bound up with verbal facility have an additional problem. Fluent prose has long functioned as a status signal. It suggested education, wide reading, practice, professional competence, cultivation. You could often locate somebody roughly within a cultural hierarchy after reading a page of his writing.

AI has has abruptly cheapened a form of cultural capital, and the people who accumulated that capital are understandably unhappy. Someone who once advertised his limitations through awkward sentences can now produce something resembling educated professional prose in seconds. The old distinction has become harder to see at a glance. Hence the sudden emotionally-charged obsession with restoring provenance: AI detectors, mandatory disclosures, watermarks, “human-written” certifications, threats to stop reading anyone caught using the machinery. If the clothes no longer reliably identify rank, somebody has to start checking invitations at the door. It’s a linguistic version of sumptuary-law anxiety: “Wait, how am I supposed to know who is entitled to wear the velvet now?”

A Life, Allegedly

By in identity, jests japes jokes jollies

Tyler Austin Harper:

Yesterday in London, Jason Arday, the controversy-plagued British academic and author, was found dead. Made famous as the youngest Black professor in Cambridge’s more than 800-year history, Arday had been dogged by weeks of scrutiny amid accusations of plagiarism, fake qualifications, and a fabricated backstory filled with hard-to-believe details.

He claimed to have been mute until age 11 and illiterate until 18, disadvantages that did not deter him from getting a Ph.D., which he earned by age 30. He claimed, too, that he had suffered from various medical conditions throughout his life, including autism, epilepsy, locked-in syndrome, testicular cancer, and a brain tumor. He was, by his account, a world-class endurance athlete who had racked up a variety of impressive feats, including running 600 miles in six days. Then there were his academic accomplishments: Arday was billed as a once-in-a-generation talent, whose research in his field—the sociology of education—was “the best in the world,” according to Hilary Cremin, the head of Cambridge’s faculty of education. He claimed to have received a book advance of 1.4 million in unspecified currency for his memoir, released this week by Simon & Schuster. It was a meteoric rise, until it wasn’t.

I admit that my first thought was, “Wouldn’t it be something if he turned out to have faked his own death too?” I don’t say that to be provocative. It’s just that once a story has accumulated enough disputed biographies, implausible achievements and shifting details, the imagination starts looking for the one escalation still available.

Picture it: he comes out of hiding after an indeterminate period of time, reveals the deception, and it turns out that he was playing the long game all along. I can see the headline now: “People thought this was a clear case of academic fraud. It was actually the most daring artistic experiment of the 21st century.” The exposés would suddenly become unwitting components of the artwork. The credulous profiles, the university press releases, the furious defenders, the skeptics digging through old claims, the institutional investigations, the denunciations of the skeptics, the denunciations of the defenders, the obituaries — all of it turns out to have been participatory theater. Nobody knew they had been cast.

The magnificent part would be the retroactive reinterpretation. The alleged fabrications weren’t CV padding; they were interventions into credentialist epistemology. The inconsistent autobiography was an investigation of socially constructed identity. The extraordinary endurance claims interrogated the neoliberal fetishization of measurable achievement. Institutional reluctance to verify anything demonstrated the dependence of elite knowledge production upon narrative legitimacy. And faking his death exposed the final credentialing authority: the obituary. Everyone’s opinions would automatically change positions, like a do-si-do: the conservatives who lambasted him as the epitome of DEI fraud now love him for exposing DEI fraud. The progressives who lamented him as a victim of white supremacy are now wishing they could kill him themselves. Crucially, the audience’s reactions become the medium. Your anger, credulity, sanctimony, opportunism, delight, and abrupt ideological pirouettes reveal something about you.

His explanation? He had been testing how much of institutional reality consists of people taking their cues from what other high-status people have already agreed is real. Once Cambridge says remarkable scholar, journalists see a remarkable scholar. Once journalists say inspirational life, audiences see an inspirational life. Once critics say fraud, suddenly everyone remembers having had doubts all along. Then death arrives and produces yet another instantaneous reassignment of roles: villain, victim, persecutor, mourner. And the fake death would supply the experimental control. Everybody would have publicly committed themselves before discovering that the subject was still standing backstage taking notes. The eventual documentary would have to be called Professor?

Better yet, in true Andy Kaufman fashion, Arday never explains everything even after returning. He confirms enough to prove the “death” was staged, denies that the project was merely a hoax, gives three mutually incompatible accounts of what he was trying to demonstrate, then disappears again. Half the academy writes papers about the epistemology of institutional trust; the other half insists the papers themselves are part of the work. At that point “academic fraud” would be the philistine interpretation. The enlightened interpretation would be: a decade-long durational artwork using Cambridge, journalism, DEI politics, social media, and his own public identity as found materials.

In all likelihood, this story is just as sad and sordid as it appears to be. But I like to think that I’m “holding space” for the possibility that this entire thing is actually an unprecedented piece of conceptual art and that, somewhere, Jason Arday is chuckling, watching everyone rearrange themselves around each new revelation.

Harmony’s Gone, the Rhythm Remains

By in ai, aphorisms, religion, writing

An obvious first question: which religion? (Orthodox Christianity, in her case; condolences to all you heretics.) An obvious follow-up question: what about the excluded middle option, that we decided “religion” was useful despite considering and rejecting the possibility of its truth?

And the possibilities aren’t limited to “true” and “useful-but-false” anyway. A religious tradition might contain some true psychological observations, some effective social technology, some beautiful mythology, some destructive doctrines, some historical falsehoods, and some metaphysical claims whose truth remains undecidable. “Is religion true?” is absurdly underspecified.

As much as I love aphorisms, epigrams, etc. as a form, I can never fully relax around them. Their rhetorical tidiness, which makes them so attractively quotable, also makes it easy to overlook all the flaws. We can be swayed by the seemingly-self-contained presentation to think that the matter has been settled. In reality, the compact saying might be a little Procrustean bed, with all the important details littered on the floor around it.

Even there, though, it’s too broad to complain about “aphorisms, epigrams, etc.” There are multitudes of good and bad examples. I’m mainly just inherently suspicious of rhetorical confectionery. Certain formulations arrive pre-glazed. The antithesis is perfect, the cadence closes neatly, the conceptual roles are cleanly assigned, and the reader gets the little reward of understanding before he has actually had to understand very much. The sentence gives the sensation of intellectual completion. When you’re younger, the sweetness itself can register as intensity: Christ, what a line! After enough reading, you start tasting the corn syrup, and your aging taste buds revolt.

A useful distinction might be between compression and reduction. A good aphorism is compressed: there’s more in it than the sentence can explicitly contain, and unpacking it makes it stronger. A bad one is reduced: inconvenient possibilities have been removed so that the sentence can achieve its pleasing shape. Unpacking it makes it weaker because you discover that the apparent depth depended on nobody asking obvious questions.

We have acquired this strange retrospective suspicion that polished symmetry is somehow an artifact of generative AI, when humans have been mass-producing parallelism, antithesis, metaphor, repetition, and strategic omission for centuries. No transformer required. All you need is an ear for cadence and a willingness to let the melody carry you along.

The old anti-sophistic suspicion is that persuasive form can become detachable from truth, belief, or character. Give the skilled rhetorician a proposition and he can make it sound weighty; give him its opposite and, with enough ingenuity, he can make that sound weighty too. The listener experiences the force of conviction without knowing whether any conviction exists behind the performance. This may explain some of the anxiety around LLMs. They demonstrate clearly that the external signs we associate with thought — fluency, balance, confidence, elegant qualification, apt metaphor — can be generated without anything resembling human conviction behind them. But that revelation cuts backward too. We were already too willing to treat those signs as evidence of depth when humans produced them. The clankers merely industrialized a snack food humans had been making at home for millennia.

Maybe He Isn’t

By in aphorisms, books, bricolage, foolosophy, nietzsche

But I have found strength where it is not sought, in simple, mild, and accommodating humans without the least inclination to rule — and conversely to me the inclination to rule has often appeared as an inner sign of weakness: they fear their slave’s soul and cloak it in a king’s robe (in the end they become the slaves of their followers, their reputation, etc.). Powerful natures rule, it is a necessity, they will not lift a finger. Even if during their lifetime they bury themselves in a garden house!

— Nietzsche, Unpublished Fragments from the Period of Dawn (Winter 1879/80–Spring 1881)

****

As we shall see, a characteristic of our times is the predominance, even in groups traditionally selective, of the mass and the vulgar. Thus, in the intellectual life, which of its essence requires and presupposes qualification, one can note the progressive triumph of the pseudo-intellectual, unqualified, unqualifiable, and, by their very mental texture, disqualified. Similarly, in the surviving groups of the “nobility,” male and female. On the other hand, it is not rare to find today among working men, who before might be taken as the best example of what we are calling “mass,” nobly disciplined minds.

— José Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses

****

It would be a good thing (but nothing’s more difficult to do seriously) now and then to assume that all the ideas to which we have given most thought, the fruit of long and studious meditation are false or absurd—even though we cannot see at all how this could be.
One should treat severely everything for which one has an innate preference.

— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14

****

You Scurvy Scalawag!

By in ai, calvin and hobbes, jests japes jokes jollies, writing

I don’t want to make bruising fun of this poor girl. It’s mainly just sad that she seems to feel she’s committed a mortal sin against the sacred craft by having AI do basic proofreading. But it does make me genuinely chuckle to see her itemize by nationality the fifty-three people she “deceived” like casualties in an international incident. You can practically hear the cello as the map slowly darkens country by country. If she had simply written, “I realized my ‘100% no AI’ statement was technically inaccurate because I used ChatGPT to proofread one post, so I’ve changed it,” there would be nothing to laugh at. Instead she has imagined a blast radius. Fifty-three people walked innocently into her website, believing themselves to be in a pristine human-text environment, and emerged with invisible synthetic shrapnel lodged in their souls. Even funnier, the odds are good that they were mostly search crawlers, link-preview bots, or other automated scanners rather than a solitary Dane sitting thoughtfully by a window, coffee cooling beside him, devastated to discover that the author had used ChatGPT for proofreading. It may instead have been a server in Copenhagen requesting the page for 0.14 seconds.

But as I said, it’s more sad than anything. The “contamination” model has overpowered an individual conscience. Grammarly? Word’s grammar checker? The red spelling squiggle? An editor who changes a comma? Those are presumably compatible with “100% me.” But ChatGPT correcting precisely the same comma introduces some tiny metaphysical admixture of Not-Me. This is how you know a purity regime has really taken hold: you no longer need inquisitors. The prosecution is internalized. Congratulations to all the self-appointed Torquemadas of the online world; your fanatical efforts have made a difference.

Antonette, dear, you’ve done nothing wrong. If I can offer one bit of advice, it would be not to make grand oaths about how you will or won’t write, especially if you’re new at it. Just practice, experiment, and enjoy yourself. Use AI or don’t; that choice is yours, and you’re free to change your mind tomorrow. But don’t let an imaginary audience of suspicious readers turn writing into a purity test, with every new tool or bit of assistance treated as a possible moral failure. You’re learning how you want to work. Give yourself room to find out.

Watching Over My Own Shoulder

By in alan watts, books, foolosophy, spiritual-not-religious

All I can say is Finally. I have been inept at all these things all my life. You wouldn’t believe what a mess I make out of trying to sit down. “Wait, so I bend my knees like…this? And then lower my butt…? And…oh, it’s no use, I’ve tied myself in a knot again!” And don’t even get me started on trying to put one foot in front of the other…

There is something irresistibly funny about reducing these Buddhist subjects to titles that sound like instructions written for a recently assembled android. I especially like the escalation:

How to Sit — remedial
How to Walk — intermediate
How to Eat — advanced coordination
How to Relax — frankly, graduate-level work
How to Love — whoa there, Thich. I’m still trying to get into this chair.

Flipping through the volumes, they all had that vaguely-Hallmark feel to them, the rhetorical equivalent of incense. Which can itself be a vibe the self-consciously “mindful” or “spiritual” person starts chasing. Brad Warner wrote a funny post about this once. Suddenly an activity that required no conceptual apparatus at all has acquired a little supervisory bureaucrat in your skull. Am I sitting correctly? Am I walking mindfully? Am I sufficiently present while eating this sandwich? Was that loving enough? Shit, I forgot to relax properly.

“Mindfulness” starts as an attempt to remove mediation and often ends by supplying a whole new layer of mediation: the vocabulary, the posture, the tea, the breathing exercise, the self-monitoring, the little internal narrator saying, I am now eating this raisin mindfully. You are no longer merely eating the raisin; you are watching yourself play someone who eats raisins correctly. As Alan Watts said, “In the midst of enjoying myself, I examine myself to see if I am getting the utmost out of the occasion. Not content with tasting the food, I am also trying to taste my tongue. Not content with feeling happy, I want to feel myself feeling happy — so as to be sure not to miss anything.”

In a lot of popularized spirituality, a temperament gets smuggled in as an anthropology. Calm, deliberate, unhurried, observant, undistracted consciousness becomes what human beings are supposedly like when they have stopped doing life incorrectly. Then the restless person, the daydreamer, the enthusiast, the obsessive maker, and the person whose mind wanders while his hands work all become defective versions of the sage. But absence is also part of consciousness. Fantasy, reminiscence, anticipation, abstraction, or getting carried away by an idea while your body performs some dull task aren’t necessarily failures to inhabit your life. They are your life. Some of humanity’s better products were almost certainly conceived by somebody who was doing a lousy job of being present while washing a plate.

Obiter Scripta, no. 167

By in aphorisms, books, jests japes jokes jollies, obiter scripta, socmed

At last, after talking for thirty hours on end and instructing me in all man needs to know, the Sage concluded:
“Now I shall sum up my teaching. It is contained in two axioms:
“‘All different things are identical.’
“‘All identicals are different.’
“Ring the changes in your mind on these two propositions and you will see, firstly, that they are not incompatible; next, that thought can formulate only one or the other and can only move from one to the other. There is a time for one of them and a time for the other, and the man who thinks the one will think the other. That’s all.”

— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14

I believe the Sage later became editor-in-chief of Engagement Today, where these two axioms remain the entire editorial manual. He’s teaching the manufacture of takes:

“All different things are identical.”
→ “Actually, Weightlifting and Reading Are the Same Activity.”

“All identicals are different.”
→ “Why Reading Is Nothing Like Weightlifting—and Why Confusing Them Is Dangerous.”

“There’s a time for one and a time for the other.”
→ Publish the second one nine months after the first.

Come Back, Signal, Fill This Void

By in ai, art, foolosophy, music, writing

Me, I’ve been existentially depressed ever since people stopped making music purely by vocalizations and started using artificial “instruments” that don’t exist in nature. It’s all been downhill ever since clicks, hoots and whistles. An animal gut stretched across a resonating box?  Suspicious. Somewhere in the Upper Paleolithic a cultural critic looked at the first bone flute and thought, So this is it. We’re outsourcing the human larynx. That first flute was Big Tech’s war on hooting.

Seriously, though, he seems to feel that either humans “produce” culture or machines do. The actual situation is already spreading itself across a huge continuum. Someone can type “write me a song about heartbreak” and upload the first result. Someone else can write the melody and lyrics, use AI to generate an orchestration, reject half of it, rewrite the rest, sing the vocal himself, and mix the recording conventionally. Somewhere else a musician may improvise against an AI-generated part and discover a musical idea neither input contained straightforwardly beforehand. Which of these is “no longer produced by human beings”?

There is also something revealing about the nostalgia implicit in that phrase. Produced how? Apparently there exists some blessed technological moment at which human cultural production was sufficiently pure. Was electric amplification all right? Photography? Word processors? Photoshop? Sampling? MIDI? Spellcheck? Search engines? Dictionaries? Editors? Session musicians? Ghostwriters? At some point the natural human apparently fell from grace and began cheating with artifacts. AI may be an unusually powerful and strange extension, perhaps strange enough eventually to require new ideas about authorship. But “artificial means entered the creative process, therefore the result ceased to be human” would condemn an astonishing amount of civilization.

A musician may say, “I invented this chord progression,” but in one sense the progression was always latent in the combinatorial space of tonal music. What he really did was discover it as meaningful for this song. Likewise, an aphorist does not invent the English language or even all the conceptual relations inside a sentence; he notices that certain words, placed together under the pressure of a certain thought, suddenly become exact.

AI can widen the field of discovery enormously. But widening the field does not tell you what to notice. If ten people ask for “an unusual chord for the bridge,” they may receive overlapping suggestions. But they will not hear those suggestions identically. One person hears pretension. Another hears melancholy. Another hears the exact pivot the song needed. Another thinks, “Interesting, but if I lower the third and move the bass note…” The machine output becomes raw material the instant it encounters judgment.

The creative act often consists in selection under pressure from a particular project. The musician hears or encounters something and thinks: that. There. Which means the genealogy of the input is often secondary. He might find the chord in a theory book, steal it from Coltrane, stumble into it by mis-fingering, hear an HVAC unit hum a strange interval, or have an AI propose it. Those routes differ historically and perhaps ethically, but they don’t necessarily differ in the part that matters artistically: the musician perceives a fit between an external possibility and an internal intention. The refrigerator compressor making a weird noise is not “collaborating” in any ordinary sense. It has no conception of the song. Yet it can still trigger something decisive because the artist already has a receptivity shaped by the work in progress. A thousand other people hear the same noise and hear only an appliance. One person hears the missing texture in the bridge. That seems very close to what inspiration has always been. The world throws off material constantly; the artist’s mind is a selective field.

AI may be to intellectual and artistic work what the Industrial Revolution was to material production: not the abolition of human agency, but the mechanization of tasks that once consumed large amounts of it. A writer once had to search books, wait on memory, or labor through dozens of possibilities to find the right metaphor or rhetorical device; a musician might spend hours experimenting before stumbling onto the right chord or texture. AI industrializes that search. It can generate possibilities at machine speed and scale, just as machinery multiplied the output of physical labor. That does cheapen some forms of accomplishment and may displace particular skills, but it also shifts the scarce resource elsewhere — from producing possibilities to judging, selecting, combining, and directing them.

The deeper continuity is human temperament. Industrial machinery did not make craftsmanship, ambition, laziness, ingenuity, or mediocrity disappear; it gave them new conditions in which to operate. AI will likely do the same. Some people will use it to avoid effort and become little more than approval buttons. Others will use its abundance as cognitive leverage: more examples, more counterarguments, more metaphors, more experiments, more practice — and thereby enlarge their own capacities. The machine can make fifty suggestions; it still cannot decide which one belongs in this particular human project, or why the project should exist at all.

A chainsaw and a violin are both elaborate artificial extensions of the body, but their social and psychological effects are completely different. A typewriter, a search engine, and an LLM all intervene between thought and finished prose, but they intervene in different places and alter different capacities. So the useful questions become more local: What does this tool make easier? What does it make unnecessary? What skills does it cultivate or atrophy? What new possibilities does it create? What dependencies does it introduce? What kinds of people and institutions tend to form around it? That’s much more difficult than saying “technology went too far after X,” because you lose the clean moral geography. You can no longer live conceptually in the Good Village on one side of the river while the Satanic Mills smoke on the other.

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