Taming the Tongue

James’s writing on the tongue suggests that taming it is part of the dominion mandate:

For every kind of beast and bird, of reptile and creature of the sea, is tamed and has been tamed by mankind. But no man can tame the tongue. It is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.

Even though he says here that taming the tongue is impossible, a few verses earlier he says this:

If anyone does not stumble in word, he is a perfect man, able also to bridle the whole body.

In other words, the perfect man rules himself as he rules horses (v. 3), ships (v. 4), and all other created things. I don’t think it’s going to far to say that self-governance is one of Adam’s original tasks.

The Man Who Has Never Fought For His Country

There's part of him that sighs
The Fourth of each July
At all the noise and fuss
Which feels superfluous.

The hymns and songs of praise,
The pageants and parades,
The patriotic quirks,
The garish fireworks.

The old red, white, and blue
We pledge allegiance to
Seems like some graven god,
Uncivilized and odd.

But then gunpowder reek
Blows across his cheek.
Despite his squinted eyes
His blood begins to rise.

His courage pulls him towards
Imaginary swords
The musket in his mind
Is cocked and aimed and primed.

In stubbled field or mud
He'd gladly spill his blood,
Impatient to have died
With brothers at his side.

However he may try
When sparks light up the sky
To treat it as a game
It stirs him all the same.

All this is right and fair,
For every man should bear
In part, if not in whole,
A patriotic soul.

A Bevy of Links on AI

This list is reproduced from the latest issue of my newsletter, Time’s Corner.

You may have seen articles about the copyrighted text and images that AI models spit out. I believed AI companies were guilty of massive copyright theft, until this article by Cory Doctorow calmed my outrage somewhat. He explains that Midjourney (an image generation site) keeps only about one byte of info from any given image it sources: “If we’re talking about a typical low-resolution web image of say, 300kb, that would be one three-hundred-thousandth (0.0000033%) of the original image.”

Why AI will never topple the film industry: “To put it as plainly as possible, every single time that Shy Kids wanted to generate a shot — even a 3-second-long one — they would give Sora a text prompt, and wait for at least ten minutes to find out if it was right, regularly accepting footage that was subprime or inaccurate…”

Mary Harrington explores the scary idea that, thanks to artificial intelligence, using social media may become a form of social activism.

Robin Sloan asks whether large language models are in hell: “The model’s entire world is an evenly-spaced stream of tokens — a relentless ticker tape. Out here in the real world, the tape often stops; a human operator considers their next request; but the language model doesn’t experience that pause. For the language model, time is language, and language is time. This, for me, is the most hellish and horrifying realization.”

Related to the above, James Bridle asked ChatGPT to design him a chair and, unsurprisingly, discovered that AI has no idea what an actual chair should be like.

And lastly, Samuel Arbesman suggests we explore the “story world” of AI, since so much of the language input is in story form.

Artificial Artificial Intelligence

This is yesterday’s issue of Time’s Corner. Subscribe here.

One of the creepiest services I’ve ever come across online is an Amazon service called Mechanical Turk. The service is named after a sideshow curiosity from the 1700s, a turbaned robot that could beat any human at chess. It was touted as a marvel of mechanical engineering. The trick was that there was a small person inside the Turk, controlling its movements.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk lets you remotely hire people to do menial tasks for miniscule sums of money. Let’s say you have a task so repetitive and boring that your mind gets numb just thinking about it—e.g., changing every “5” to a “6” in an Excel spreadsheet. Through Mechanical Turk, you can hire someone else to do it at a tenth of a penny per change. A Pakistani worker changes a thousand 5’s to 6’s and you pay him a dollar. What looks like an automatic system from the outside is actually a guy frantically clicking and typing on a computer. Unlike their eighteen-century counterparts, Amazon doesn’t try to hide the fact that there are humans doing the work. In fact, the tagline for the service (now removed from the website) is “Artificial Artificial Intelligence.”

Every machine in human history needs to be operated by a human at some level. An ax helps you cut down a tree, but you need to swing it. A BMW gets you quickly from here to there, but a person has to design it, build it, maintain it, and drive it. No matter how automatic or magical a manmade object seems, it always draws on human power to function. The ones that seem the most magical are the ones that keep the human operator most hidden, like the Eternal Engine in Snowpiercer that’s actually powered by small children stuffed between the gears.

An AI tool is an elaborate machine that hides its human human operators so well that it seems to be thinking on its own. This is true on the input side, where thousands of workers in Kenya crawl through the opioid palaces of the internet and flag content that’s deemed “too toxic,” and the output side, where thousands of remote workers review the “choices” of self-driving cars.

It’s incredibly important for us to remember this. The worst part of AI tools is that they absolve people of their wicked deeds, or at least provide them with plausible deniability. Matthew Butterick aptly describes this as “human-behavior laundering”:

If AI compa­nies are allowed to market AI systems that are essen­tially black boxes, they could become the ulti­mate ends-justify-the-means devices. Before too long, we will not dele­gate deci­sions to AI systems because they perform better. Rather, we will dele­gate deci­sions to AI systems because they can get away with every­thing that we can’t. You’ve heard of money laun­dering? This is human-behavior laun­dering. At last—plau­sible deni­a­bility for every­thing.

What AI really provides is an excuse. We’re not stealing your stuff. AI is. We’re not driving your car into an eighteen wheeler. AI is. We’re not whipping a crowd into a frenzy. It’s artificial intelligence. In other words, no individual person is responsible. It’s bureaucracy at its finest, the Orwellian passive voice writ large.

Alternatives

I don’t really like WordPress. It’s clunky. Too malleable in some areas and too stiff in others.

I’m intrigued by alternative blogging platforms like Micro.blog, Bear, and Montaigne, and yet I continue to use WordPress, despite the fact that I don’t really like it all that much. Why? Mostly apprehension, I think. Things that have lasted a long time (21 years, in the case of WordPress) tend to continue lasting, a weird phenomenon called the “Lindy effect” after the diner in New York where comedians first started discussing it. (Not made up.) In all likelihood, WordPress will still be chugging along in two decades. For all their youthful charms, where will Micro.blog, Bear, and Montaigne be in 2044?

The irony of it all is that the whole point of having a website and a blog is to “own your turf,” as they say. Small platforms tend to make this easier than large ones. With Montaigne, for instance, you write and store all of your posts and pages in the Notes app on your iPhone. So if the service does collapse, none of your writing goes away. I honestly have no idea what would happen to my blog posts if WordPress went away.

Maybe WordPress makes it easier for people to find your site. But these days, almost nobody finds a blog via a web search. They arrive via links from social media, mostly. So that point is probably moot.

WordPress pros, then:

  • Reliability
  • Longevity

Cons:

  • Annoying to use
  • Opaque (to me, at least)
  • Cookie-cutter
  • Not sure what would happen if it died

It may be time to learn some basic coding so I can build my own site from the ground up. Can’t be that hard, right?

Update: The other day I learned about Pika, another simplified blogging platform. Man, now I’m really starting to reconsider WP.

Mixed Feelings

As the author, I’m thrilled.

As the publisher, I’m trying to figure out how to get a rush order from China.

The Essayist

The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each new excursion of the essayist, each new “attempt,” differs from the last and takes him into a new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.

E. B. White

The Stag in the Woods

The naked eye—

Do you see him, antlered there,
Part shadow and part briar,
His foreleg feeling out the air,
Cautious, stepping, tense as wire,
Dappled, out into the glade?

The magnifying glass—

Look, his nostrils storm with ticks
And blackflies lash his eyelids—
Mangy haunches, antlers split,
Limping, fleetness checked by pallid
Illness barely kept at bay.

The microscope—

Insect bodies glow like naves
With stained glass in their chapels,
While microbes deck the cloistered caves,
A riot spotted, prismed, dappled—
Beauty even in decay.

Adventure and Hope

Adventure requires courage to keep us faithful to the struggle, since by its very nature adventure means that the future is always in doubt. And just to the extent that the future is in doubt, hope is required, as there can be no adventure if we despair of our goal. Such hope does not necessarily take the form of excessive confidence; rather, it involves the simple willingness to take the next step.

From Stanley Hauerwas, “A Story-Formed Community: Reflections on Watership Down“