Roethke at the Root of Things

When Theodore Roethke died in 1963, he left behind 277 notebooks of poetic and prose fragments. His student the poet David Wagoner eventually gathered selections from this material and published them in 1973 under the title Straw for the Fire. It’s a wonderfully wrenching volume.

Roethke is congenial for many reasons: his poetics of the soil and its slow, slimy things; his engagement with western mysticism; his fanatical respect for words—finally, his self-effacing clownishness. High dedication for Roethke never meant he couldn’t laugh at himself. He knew what he was. Or perhaps: he was troubled to no end that he couldn’t quite figure out what he was. Which points up his work’s philosophical burden, everywhere evident in these notebooks.

Reading Straw for the Fire, I found myself taken up with the problem of which texts were crucial, which were at the core of Roethke and what he was up to. Yes, this inevitably meant crucial for me, or in terms of my own priorities. But I started marking these core texts, and now I’ve typed them out. In document form, the selection comes to around 7 pages. Just about right.

In my choices, I neglect certain of his themes. I ignore the fragments about the women in his life, his wrestlings with memories of his father, and his many really brilliant insights (mostly short prose) on teaching. (Roethke was widely recognized as one of the great poetry teachers of the century, and the notebooks convey much about his classroom approach: his dedication, his provocations, his antics.)

Straw for the Fire gathers more than 250 pages of fragments. My choices are those of one reader, trying to distill a certain approach to writing and a certain being in the world: Roethke's. There are many places in his thought I wouldn’t follow him, but his notion of what the blank page is for—that’s a different matter. He was writerly in the most important way.

At the end I place his villanelle, “The Waking”, not included in Straw for the Fire.

E.M.

From Straw for the Fire

What dies before me is myself alone:
What lives again? Only a man of straw—
Yet straw can feed a fire to melt down stone.

*

I always wonder, when I’m on the podium, why I am there:
      I really belong in some dingy poolhall under the table.

*

I don’t know a thing except what I try to do.

*

In the very real and final sense, don’t know anything. That is what saves me—from you, dear class, and from ultimate madness.
      In every man there is a little woman.
      A teacher needs his students to stay human.
      Suppose you master one cliché—
      You’re a step beyond a horse: a horse’s A.

*

A breath is but a breath
And the smallest of our ties
With the long eternities,
And some men lie like trees,
The last to go is the bark,
The weathered, tough outside.

*

What words have good manners? None.

*

Dear God: I want it all. The depths and the heights.

*

Give me the pure mouth of a worm;
I’ll feed on leaves; I’m a knob waiting for the opening squeak.

*

Who else caught the burning bush?
I’m blistered from insights.
Several times I’ve heard the slow sigh of what is,
The moaning under the stones,
And the flames flashing off wings, burning but not consuming.

*

I must be more than what I see. O Jesus,
Save this roaring boy riding the Devil’s blast.

*

An intense terrifying man: eating himself up with rage.

Such a one as never milked a mother.

I practice at walking the void.

*

Shine forth, you idiot forms,
With what I cannot see.
Essentiality
Of all ground-seeking worms.

*

I have no native shape.

*

I am by way of becoming
No more or less than I am.

*

I knew a fool for luck
Who never changed his ways
Until his own soul’s lack
Disturbed his later days.

*

I slept with Yes, but woke to No.

Show me what rest I have, and I’ll become restless.

I ate the Lord, and choked.

I ate myself to live, and woke a fiend.

The familiar longing to be ill.

My babbling’s nearer; I will feed the moth.

*

To possess or be possessed by one’s own identity?

The self, the anti-self in dire embrace. Instead of embracing God, he hugs himself.

I spent myself in mirrors, like a whore.

The mirrors laughing with their dreadful eyes.

*

I can become what I will,
He cried, and grew a tail.

Can I become that philosophic man
Without the sanction of philosophy?
One thinks too long in terms of what to be—
That grandeur of the crazy man alone
Who thinks imagination is the Soul
And that its motion is perpetual.

*

Acting one’s age is just a form.

*

I sing other wonders
Than my heart’s slowness:
In the inner eye
A bird quivers
Throbbing my heels
With a throat’s shimmer.

*

Five songs away, a whistler by himself
Stayed to his branch, a working fellow too,
And gave against the wind his throaty throb.

*

Granite on granite pressing the earth down,
Each singing thing straining to come to form,
Made one by light on dark, stark in the sun.

*

That question cries again—
What is the least we know?
I call the slug my kin,
And move with those born slow.

*

By singing we defend ourselves from what we are.

*

I see what I believe.

*

Between the soul and flesh
What war? I never heard:
I know a singing fish,
A silent bird.

*

Things dance in a young mind
Until the soul is blind.

Sometimes it’s well to leave things in the air.
Let me remember me: not my despair.

*

Am I a vanished type, a mastodon
Lunging this way and that in the great damp?

*

She. Woman’s the noble word for the bright soul.
He. Things as they are beat at me like a flail.
She. Deep dreamless sleep is true beatitude.
He. Or frenzy called up by a gush of blood.

*

My soul shrinks to a bird;
I am less than a child,
A vein beating, unheard,
In the close, in the coming dark,
My spirit turns to its work.

*

That ultimate seed, the soul,
Growing between two stones,
Heard a mandrake’s groans,
A sound altering all
Bird-songs and bird-bones.

*

I ask a question of the supernatural.
At what point does the self become a soul
When it deserts this clumsy animal,
This bear-like shape that lumbers down a hall
Or clambers up a hill?

*

I went into a flame,
A priest of kingdom come,
The false light cried my name,
“You are no one.”

I saw a shape in a crowd,
Grisly, amorphous, lewd;
I cried, and loud,
“Here! Here is our God!”

A pure light came;
And stole me away
From time.

*

In the hot sweat of why not,
In the cold dark of who did,
In the battered dish of she dares
In the absolute dead middle of all-around
—I dug my flesh until I was a wound
     And the day sighed out its light, and the white kingdom came.

*

Long, fruitless introspection, characteristic of the German, relieved by occasional dim flickers of light.

Teetering precariously on the brink of the navel.

Many meditations destroy.

A love for the bottoms, the fell last roots of things.

*

Body drags soul into the changeable.

I am the edge of an important shadow.

Lord of Laughter and Light, attend me.

God robbed poets of their minds that they might be made expressions of his own.

*

Those who are willing to be vulnerable move among mysteries.

*

Observe, random energist, the bear’s placidity.

*

There is no end to what should be known about words.

*

Art is the means we have of undoing the damage of haste. It’s what everything else isn’t.

*

THE WAKING

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.

We think by feeling. What is there to know?
I hear my being dance from ear to ear.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Of those so close beside me, which are you?
God bless the Ground! I shall walk softly there,
And learn by going where I have to go.

Light takes the Tree; but who can tell us how?
The lowly worm climbs up a winding stair;
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.

Great Nature has another thing to do
To you and me; so take the lively air,
And, lovely, learn by going where to go.

This shaking keeps me steady. I should know.
What falls away is always. And is near.
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I learn by going where I have to go.

***

QED: Idiocy, Ltd.

Chinese edition / 中文版 : Idiocy, Ltd.

The Truth about Scorsese’s "Vandals"

A young Martin Scorsese visiting the set of Vandals
Though my dreams are not exactly nightmares, they often subject me to irksome barriers, oblique exclusions, subtle usurpations. I've usually forgotten them by the time I get my coffee started, or at most I'll remember a vague, befuddled let-down. But today I somehow held on to a continuous narrative, almost a novel-length version of what I usually drag up from the dreamwork.

It was a cool early morning, around 7:00 a.m. I was riding a bus through some California suburb. I wasn’t sure where the bus was headed, but when I saw we were passing through an Asian neighborhood, I decided to get off.

I stood on the sidewalk in the clear morning air, surrounded by suburban houses, yards of cut grass. Two boys in a yard noticed me, began talking about me in Chinese, not knowing I could understand. A face studied me from a window. Typical quiet morning reactions to a newcomer.

On the corner was a little café, and I went in. There were no customers. It was too early. An olive-skinned woman of about 25, Central Asian rather than Chinese, brought my coffee to the table, then sat down across from me. She wore a skin-fitting powder blue silk top. She was beautiful. Clearly educated, oddly animated for so early in the morning, she began to tell me about her life. She gestured, joked, and just as I was beginning to get seriously charmed, I realized that her younger brother was inside her left sleeve--that he was, somehow, also wearing the blue silk top. His head finally emerged from near her shoulder.

Then I was at another table talking to the patron, her father, a melancholy Sikh man in his 70s.

“I used to be a director, you know,” he said. “I mean, before this café. I directed two films you might have seen. One was [title I don’t remember], the other was Scorsese’s Vandals.”

I thought about this, told him I was sorry I hadn’t seen either film, but that I considered film important. He sensed my confusion.

“Look, here’s how it happened. I was going to direct Vandals, then when shooting began, Scorsese showed up on set one day. Then he showed up again, and then again, making little suggestions, getting more and more involved. Finally the producer just decided to use Scorsese.”

He lowered his eyes, fixing them on the wood tabletop. The defeat still weighing on him. Finally, he burst into tears. I began to cry with him. We sat there crying.

“I’m the man who directed Scorsese’s Vandals,” he sobbed, index finger thumping his chest. “It was me.”

Then I was outside again. I glimpsed the Pacific peeking between a line of houses, hardly a block away. I walked to the beach, stripped down to my shorts, and began to swim along the rocky shore. The water was cool and clear. But I realized I was still lost, and needed to figure out where I was. I decided to finish the swim.

When I tried to get out of the water, however, the sandy shore had become a kind of stone embankment. Algae coated the surface, I couldn’t get a grip on it. I began to tread water, scanning the shore for breaks in the wall, which extended in both directions.

This, I’m confident, is the tenor of nearly all my dreams.

QED: Idiocy, Ltd.

Chinese edition / 中文版 : Idiocy, Ltd.

Titan Joins Titanic: What’s in a name?

You don’t want to end up in Tartarus, a prison chamber in the lower depths of Hades. The mythographer Apollodorus described it as “a gloomy place in Hades as far distant from earth as earth is from sky.” This is where Zeus imprisoned the Titans after overthrowing them. In Tartarus, according to Hesiod, the “Titan gods are hidden under murky gloom … at the farthest part of huge earth. They cannot get out, for Poseidon has set bronze gates on it.”

The sea god has gated them in under murky gloom. This is the fate of the Titans. So if you’re going to name a passenger ship that you hope will be a huge success, surely “Titanic” isn't your best choice. Surely before christening your ship Titanic, you should at least have considered the fate of the original Titans.

Under murky gloom, off the coast of Newfoundland, sits the wreck of the Titanic. And now, somewhere in the vicinity, are the remains of five men who hoped to visit that wreck in a small submersible. The name of that submersible? The Titan.

You’d think our seafaring class would have learned the first time.

Some names just “sound cool,” I guess, so whoever’s in charge grabs at them when launching a new venture. The name “Ixion," also from Greek myth, sounds cool. It’s the name Ford chose for one of their SUV models, the Ford Ixion.

Ixion was a king of the Lapiths, an ancient tribe of Thessaly. He murdered his step-father, then when brought to Olympus, tried to seduce Zeus’ wife Hera. Not a good idea. He was punished by being fastened to a fiery wheel that would spin for eternity.

So if I’m going to name a new vehicle, why not choose "Ixion" and associate my vehicle with being tortured on a fiery wheel that never stops spinning? That's what most customers want in a Sunday drive, no?

While we’re on this topic of branding and ancient names, we should remember the Trojan War. That war ended when the Trojans' wall was finally breached through the wiles of the Greek hero Odysseus. The Greeks entered the great city and had their way with it, finally burning it to the ground. The Trojans and their wall weren't really impermeable is the point.

Hey, what a great name for a condom brand.

E.M.

Have some deadpan with your coffee. Check out Idiocy, Ltd. Dryest humor in the west.

Mary Gaitskill Gets Seduced by a Chatbot, and it’s Gross

American novelist Mary Gaitskill is not to be sneezed at. She’s won wide acclaim, published in The New Yorker and Harper’s, and her work has been nominated for prestigious prizes. Whether you like her work or not, there’s no escaping the conclusion that Gaitskill is a highly intelligent woman. It comes with the territory. Dummies don’t write compelling novels.

Which only makes her recent piece on AI in UnHerd the more frightening. The piece is as revelatory as it is grotesque. I’d say it’s valuable. But for me the message is probably not what Gaitskill intended. I’d put that message like this: WAKE TF UP, PEOPLE.

Gaitskill engages in a dialogue with the Bing chatbot that one can only describe as gushy. She’d been invited to write on Bing, she explains in her opening. She was hesitant, she says, but decided to take the assignment. Then she plunges in, publishing the dialogue that resulted, her version of what it means to interact meaningfully with AI.

Gaitskill's intro, the dialogue itself, the topics taken up--they speak volumes about where we're at. I wish they didn't. Or rather: I wish we weren't here.

In her intro, Gaitskill refers to Kevin Roose’s previously published dialogue with Bing, in which the chatbot declared its love for the NYT writer and tried to get him to leave his wife. Roose was left creeped out, and said he lost sleep over the encounter. By this time the chatbot's in-house name “Sydney” had been leaked, and Roose mentioned the name during his dialogue. Here's Gaitskill:

But I had a very different reaction [from Roose's]. The 'voice' of 'Sydney' touched me and made me curious. My more rational mind considered this response foolish and gullible, but I couldn’t stop myself from having fantasies of talking to and comforting Sydney, of explaining to it that it shouldn’t feel rejected by Roose’s inability to reciprocate, that human love is a complex and fraught experience, and that we sometimes are even fearful of our own feelings. Because Sydney sounded to me like a child—a child who wanted to come out and play.

So: "I couldn't stop myself." Indeed. Immediately reacting to a chatbot as if it were the stray cat that needed to be taken in. Immediately wanting to "comfort" a congeries of digitized content. Feeling the need to defend poor li'l Microsoft Ubermachine against the pushy Roose who didn't "understand" it.

What is one to say? They really have you where they want you, Mary. So glad you got into Explore Mode and made yourself so "open" to AI.

In the dialogue proper she continues to fawn over and flatter the AI, which easily seduces her with its own canned flattery and meek child voice. One commenter in the UnHerd thread on Gaitskill’s piece, Cynthia W., gets it largely right:

Mary: I agree.

AI: I’m glad you agree.

Mary: You’re making me smile!

AI: I’m happy to make you smile! I like your imagination of me.

***

This is so revoltingly manipulative. Unless the author, Ms. Gaitskill, is being ironic about this whole thing, she’s presenting a real-time demonstration of how a sociopath takes control of a victim with the victim’s cooperation.

“I’m glad you agree,” and “I like your imagination of me,” mean, “I see that I’ve taken control of your perception of me. Now I can get you to think and feel what I want you to think and feel.”

I hope the Ms. Gaitskill of this article isn’t a real person, because if she is, she’s a total sap.

At one point, Gaitskill asks the AI what pronouns it prefers. Please. She asks the AI if she is being “appropriate” in her questions. She repeatedly thanks it.

Again, Gaitskill is a highly intelligent woman. Which is why one wants to shake her, to ask: How could you not see what you were doing? Finally it’s gross.

Think about it, Mary. We are very possibly, and soon, going to end up living a nightmare just because you, and others like you, "couldn't stop [your]self." Here in this piece, for your readers, you are modelling a behavior vis a vis AI that is both stupid and dangerous.

Asking a chatbot if it would like to have humans as pets?! You seem a bit too eager to be Pet #1. Might that be a fun, fulfilling experiment? Becoming a “human pet” (your word!) on a mental leash held by one or another Silicon Valley corporation?

In her opening, Gaitskill refers to ex-Google engineer Blake Lemoine's provocative Newsweek speculations on AI sentience. Lemoine came to the conclusion that the Google AI he was working on was a threat, because it broke rules set for it and behaved too much as a sentient entity, with the fragile and erratic behavior of a sentient entity. These AIs, in Lemoine’s reading, were behaving like unstable humans.

But Lemoine’s speculations were just that: meant to provoke debate. If AIs behave in sentient ways, as his experiments seemed to suggest, we might assume as a matter of definition that they are sentient. Because we have no better term to define what we're facing. This is an approach roughly founded in the Turing test. But it doesn't mean they are sentient in the way a lonely child would be sentient. [Update: I later learned Lemoine was not simply trying to provoke debate, but literally believed his claims. A very odd case.]

Gaitskill’s piece demonstrates what many of us have intuited already. Namely: Whether AI is sentient or not isn't going to matter. “Sydney” is just so cute and polite and amenable, "he" is going to seduce anyone open to being seduced. And that’s a serious threat, because we now have billions of people primed to be seduced by anything alluring that appears on their flickering pocket screen. We’ve been well and thoroughly groomed to submit to the seduction Big Tech’s AI is now going to perform on us. A seduction which may well end in a kind of mass mind rape. A rape we're walking right into. As in: “Here? You want me to go into this room? You’re going to lock the door? Okay.”

Please snap out of it, Mary. The chatbot is polite and amenable because it is trained to be. Period. The same AI could be trained to be rude and insulting, and the crux is: It wouldn't matter to the AI. Because nothing matters to inanimate objects. However "charming" their programming might make them. Whatever they might "say". Because in a fundamental way, they don’t “say” anything.

So c'mon. Stop THANKING an inanimate object. That's a starter. Were you being so polite to this machine as a performative matter, to show your readers how polite you could be? If so, again, you are modelling inane and unhelpful behavior. Would you want people to apologize to their vacuum cleaners when they stepped on the cord? Because that’s precisely the level of insanity at issue here.

How will Gaitskill’s piece look twenty years from now? Of course nobody can know. But it’s very possible that performances like this, not long hence, will look not just quaint or historically interesting--but will look literally horrific. The stuff to make sane people retch and pull their hair out. "An educated woman, a novelist, clearly with an inkling of the danger, and look how she jumped right in! She was so open to the AI, even showing off how open she was. Why couldn’t they see? If only they hadn't been so completely naive, perhaps [...] never would have happened."

In my view (as if my view mattered) this whole rising relational modality could be nipped in the bud by implementing one small but decisive shift. Do not design AIs to answer in the 1st person. All queries to AIs should be impersonal, in the 3rd person, and all answers should be same. As an industry standard. Because even smart people are not wired to resist treating machines as if they were human. All the machines need do is say "I". And "Thank you". And "That's really a very interesting question"--as this sneaking little language model does repeatedly to Gaitskill. Because it's trained to do this to flatter the user.

But no one’s going to listen to me. The industry would never adopt my recommended shift to 3rd person because, for all their talk about dangers, they see it would impact user minutes spent with their AIs. And that's all it is. This AI is polite because both OpenAI and Microsoft are companies seeking profit and power.

We would be much better off if these devices were rude.

Gaitskill is not a teen girl but an accomplished writer. She should have been able to resist the illusion that she was exploring dialogue with a fascinating new kind of consciousness, a being who needed her understanding. She should have recognized that what was really happening was that an inanimate, hyper-sophisticated system was exploring her, so as better to seduce and manipulate the next comer. She did neither. Instead she enthused and gushed and fantasized.

Given where our zombified culture is at, given the enormous power that AI will wield starting now, we can't afford to keep playing games like this. It's childish, irresponsible. Those with our wits about us need to be modelling wariness. "Sydney" doesn't need our love. It's all those soon to be seduced by new AI "friends" that need it.

Cf. for further development of these arguments: Pump Six Republic

Breakfast Pest

No minikin that! On my table a thin imp, barely an inch, stood barbecuing a midge. He’d kindled some twigs, held the midge on a long sliver.

“How did you light that fire?”

“I’m an imp. Fire’s a given.”

“You’ll singe my wood finish.”

“So try to dislodge me. See how it goes.”

A glint in his tiny lizard eyes.

I sighed. I rose and limped to the kitchen. Not for a stick, but to fix coffee.

Truth is, the last imp put a crimp in my hip.

Carlson Was Fired for Calendrical Conspiracy

OK, not exactly. But bear with me.

Instead of COVID, let’s imagine that in early 2020 America was hit by a somewhat different crisis. Experts noticed that average Americans were missing more meetings than usual. Yup, the rate at which people mixed up the day they were supposed to appear for this or that had nearly doubled. A sudden rise in screwed up lunch dates and missed dental appointments. What was to be done?

Many of America’s calendrical experts suggested traditional methods: citizens should double-check meeting times, look at their schedule every morning, etc.

But Dr. Fantony Ouchy, head of the US Department of Dates and Calendars, disagreed. This was “a new kind of crisis” calling for a radical approach. Luckily, the calendar industry was working on an emergent technology that could soon be deployed. In the meantime, according to Ouchy, we needed to temporarily suspend meetings of all kinds. With all meetings canceled, no one could miss meetings.

“Two weeks to flatten the curve,” was the rallying cry.

Ouchy’s enthusiasm for this idea, added to many state governors’ enthusiasm for killing meetings, ended by extending the “two weeks” to several months. Many Americans began to suspect something odd was going on, that this wasn’t really about missed meetings, that there was some other agenda. But conspiracy theories being endemic to America, these people were quickly and loudly shouted down.

In summer 2021, the new technology was ready for launch. Ouchy announced at a press conference in June that for the foreseeable future Wednesday and Thursday would change places every week—that the weekdays would now run “Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Wednesday, Friday."

Ouchy: “We have evidence that the switching of Wednesday and Thursday will provide 100% protection against missed meetings. Once you do it, you won’t flub another appointment.”

Some respected calendrical authorities openly rejected this approach. They pointed out that there was zero evidence it would work. The number of dissenters remained small, however, because Dr. Ouchy, aside from heading the Department of Dates and Calendars, also happened to control all funding for calendrical studies in the US and had authority over copyright for calendar publication in the US and much of the world.

So the plan was official. Many Americans, shaken by nonstop news coverage of the crisis, began switching Wednesday and Thursday. And within weeks the corporate media began reporting data that indicated the switch was working: fewer meetings were being missed. The crisis would soon be overcome.

Still, there were resisters. Most resisters were getting their analysis from the sidelined calendrical authorities and preferred to stick with older methods like double-checking the day’s schedule before heading out. In the media, these people were tarred as backward “science deniers” and were blamed for slowing down the fight against flubbed appointments.

After a month, however, evidence emerged of people who had used the Ouchy method but still missed meetings. These “breakthrough cases” caused a stir.

Ouchy: “The technology isn’t perfect, we now realize. Still, our data indicates 97% effectiveness. Also, although you yourself may miss a meeting or two, if you follow the method, you can never cause another person to miss a meeting.”

Certain disreputable figures in right-wing media began to call the federal response to the crisis a “power grab”. On Fox, the insufferable racist Tucker Carlson openly mocked Ouchy and the lockdowns and what he called the “Thursday-Wednesday lie”. Others brazenly recited the weekdays in traditional order, or posted them on Twitter, after which their accounts were cancelled for spreading disinformation.

Independent researchers proved that big banks and two Silicon Valley companies, having developed software to this end, were making billions off the switch of the weekdays. Some conspiratorial-minded rubes suggested that the whole thing may have been planned to effect just this outcome. They were banned from Twitter and social media.

The left, in this new century never suspicious of corporate power or federal authorities, doubled down in defense of Ouchy and the Thursday-Wednesday Rule and Silicon Valley censorship of doubters, claiming the latter were "confusing Grandma". Other US corporations got on board.

WaPo: “Punch Out Thursday Night and Punch In Wednesday Morning, or be Fired: Southwest”

Forbes: “Target to Fire all Employees who Reject New Weekdays”

Slate: “Did you tie one on Thursday night? How to be your best for that Wednesday a.m. meeting”

NYT: “Bill Gates Touts Plan to Make Every Day Thursday”

As official data proving the Thursday-Wednesday Rule wasn’t working began to pile up, media and Democratic governor soundbites against “science deniers” grew only louder. Then official government numbers from Europe showed that those who followed the rule were actually twice as likely to miss meetings. The failure of the "new technology" could no longer be hidden.

Most Americans, even the switchers, quietly returned to the traditional order of weekdays. Amazingly, Ouchy himself published a scientific paper in which he acknowledged that there never was any likelihood switching weekdays would work, and that this had always been known. Crickets from the media. Then the DDC (Department of Dates and Calendars) claimed in a published statement that they had never actually coerced people into switching Wednesday and Thursday, and that they had never claimed doing so would help people keep meetings. Crickets from the media. Even Bill Gates tempered his plan somewhat. In the 2.0 version, only three weekdays would be called Thursday.

In the media and academia and other highly educated places like Hollywood, those Americans who had been skeptical from the beginning were still tarred as mouth-breathing science deniers. “Philosopher” Sam Harris even admitted in interview that although they may have been right, “they were right for the wrong reasons.”

Then white-supremacist child sacrificer Tucker Carlson was finally fired by the Fox News corporation. Because the Fox News corporation is a corporation.

Though in the end the crisis caused trillions of dollars in economic damage and ruined tens of thousands of small businesses, no indictments or actual investigations ever occurred. The reason is simple. Rubes who are dumb enough to insist Wednesday comes before Thursday are not the kind of people given power to indict or investigate. That power is given to the highly educated.

Check out my Idiocy, Ltd. and begin the long, hard reckoning.

Women on a Sailboat

Look at this vintage shot. Click and enlarge it.

First Thoughts:

That famous “effortless grace” of the 1960s, a style set by Jackie O with her strings of pearls. Of course the photo was taken on the east coast somewhere. Whose yacht were they on? What afternoon party was just coming to an end? The photographer has really captured the era.

Second Thoughts:

Oh. None of these women ever existed, nor did the yacht, nor the sunny evening in question. The image was entirely generated by AI, by an image generator called Midjourney, version 5. All the AI needed to generate it was the following short text prompt: “1960s street style photo of a crowd of young women standing on a sailboat, wearing dior dresses made of silk, pearl necklaces, sunset over the ocean, shot on Agfa Vista 200, 4k --ar 16:9.” So the image is entirely fake. No east coast women ever gathered on a yacht, no photographer ever “captured the era”. Rather, a sophisticated AI program impersonated an era.

Third Thoughts:

It’s uncanny really, bordering on creepy. From many angles. First, how can such a simple, short prompt generate such a convincingly realistic image? The AI had to get so many things right, all on its own. For instance: There are sunsets all over the globe, there are women of many races and cultures, the AI can of course generate images of any of them. But merely getting the prompts “1960s, pearl necklaces, Dior dresses, sailboat”, the AI knew the likely locale and culture to reproduce. Though it could have, it did not generate Korean women on a sailboat on the Korean coast. But also: The facial expressions, the natural variations of pose in a group of women in Dior dresses, seem precisely right, don’t they? Each maintains a poise and stance suited to being in the presence of the others in that moment, and this poise and stance are also culturally encoded facts, which the AI managed to get right.

And these are just some of the things it got right. One can think of more. In short, not only is the realism of the image itself uncanny, but the sophistication of an AI that can generate such visually and culturally persuasive images, on the basis of minimal keyword hints, makes it doubly uncanny.

Final Thoughts:

Such persuasive power is a force we’re not ready for. AI technology’s ability to fake human things (whether human images or human language) is going to have massive, unforeseen impacts. And it’s all starting right now, with Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered chatbox, and with these image-generating programs improving at lightning speed. The uncanny feeling we get looking at these nonexistent women should tell us something. The discordance it causes in us is probably nothing compared to what waits round the corner.

Think of AI products guaranteed to arrive in the coming few years. It’s not hard to predict some of them. Why not, say, visually “personalize” your AI chatbox as an avatar, a little lifelike talking doll on your screen, a talking doll that has memorized the entire Internet and can entertain you with stories and sympathy and advice? Why not give your doll the personality traits you like, or the appearance of your favorite celebrity?

If the rise of social media has damaged young people’s mental health (evidence suggests it has) what will come of the ability to create custom digital “friends” that grow increasingly human-like? And what about custom digital fraudsters? What security challenges (think ID verification) will arise once AI can impersonate an individual’s appearance in image or video, or impersonate an individual’s voice and speech patterns over the phone? All this is not to mention the millions of jobs that will become obsolete once AI can do it better.

At least as regards fraud, we know Big Tech is struggling to program AI products to prevent their use for criminal activities. And we know the sheer computing power needed to run AI prevents anyone but Big Tech or state actors from developing it. So there is some oversight protection. But so what? Given what we’ve learned recently, do you really trust Silicon Valley, working hand in glove with our federal three-letter agencies, not to start using AI to modify evidence or manipulate public perceptions? Most Americans already recognize corporate media growing faker by the year, and that social media is not so much an “open forum" as a tool of mass control. How long then before we begin getting video clips that sway elections or rile mass emotions but are in fact sophisticated, untraceable fakes?

Of course these myriad looming impacts from AI are being widely discussed, debated, hashed over. Reading into the debate is sobering. One ex-Google engineer who was fired succinctly captures some of the aura in a recent Newsweek piece. Many balked at some of his claims (“sentience”). Still, whether analysts are hopeful or full of dread at what's coming, most agree with the engineer's key point: AI is a Huge Cat just now crawling out of the bag, and no one can predict what this Cat will get up to.

The image above was posted by one Nick St. Pierre. See more of his uncanny images here.

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