Horrors and Hopes

Not a great week. But also, a great week?

This newsletter is where I come to try to make sense of something on my mind and share it with others in a sufficiently interesting way to draw the interest and audience that allows me to keep doing it. I suppose this is an accurate - if reductive - way of categorizing any work that relies on the attention of others.

There’s too much on my mind this week to focus down to a single point of inquiry.

I am thinking of Mahmoud Khalil, a Green Card holder married to a U.S. citizen who is being literally disappeared by the United States government despite being accused of no crime. When directly asked multiple times by NPR’s Michel Martin on what basis Khalil had been arrested and sent to detention in Louisiana, a deputy secretary for Homeland Security repeatedly lied about Khalil’s status (saying he was in the U.S. on a student visa) and then refused to answer, because there is no crime.

I am thinking about how Columbia University was complicit in serving up Mahmoud Khalil to DHS agents, and how the university, under illegal threats from the Trump administration has been busy kicking out students and rescinding degrees, rather than standing up for the right to free expression places like universities are meant to protect.

I am thinking about the failure of Senate Democrats to use their one opportunity for at least a little bit of leverage to rein in Elon Musk’s wanton destruction of government capacity. I’m thinking about how Musk, an erratic, Nazi-saluting, Hitler excusing maniac now has his sights set on the National Security Agency and Social Security Administration.

I am thinking about how in the span of a two minute and eighteen second video, the new EPA administrator Lee Zedlin changed the mission of the EPA from protecting the environment and public health to instead “lower[ing] the cost of buying a car, heating a home, and running a business.”

I’m thinking about this dipshit UK tech secretary who has outsourced his job to ChatGPT.

I am thinking about how Sam Altman has declared that OpenAI now has a model that’s “good at creative writing,” which is a predictable bit of hype coming from him, but then Jeannette Winterson says she finds the model’s output “beautiful and moving,” showing that even accomplished writers can have failures of taste.

Count me in with Audrey Watters who said of the AI-produced story, “I was moved for sure: absolutely fucking disgusted.”

It’s not that this AI “story” is objectively “bad.” As

Max Read

observes “If a 19-year-old wrote this I think I would be impressed, though I would suggest they delete their Tumblr account and go on a strict diet of real books.” But a 19-year-old didn’t write it. That’s important to me.

Read suggests we should take LLM outputs more seriously as objects worthy if critical engagement, saying “Even if you think the story is unreadable dogshit, we might at least examine the dogshit,” to which I say, go nuts, but also, leave me out of it.

I do not dismiss LLM outputs in this realm as bad so much as simply irrelevant. As a reader I am interested in the exchange between unique intelligences that happens when a reader intersects with a writer. I am tired of giving my time over to nonsense, especially when the purveyors of this nonsense are using their hype to soften the ground for our eventual acceptance of a godlike super intelligence that is supposed to obviate human cognition.

Kevin Roose

of the New York Times is convinced this “powerful AI” - not quite godlike, but better than most of us - is close.

Ezra Klein

agrees.

I don’t, but what do I know? (

Gary Marcus

who knows much more than me doesn’t think so either.) I don’t get to cozy up to the people who run these companies and who advise governments or have them on my widely listened to podcasts which rarely seem to platform dissenting voices. (Why is that, by the way? Why won’t Kevin Roose and Ezra Klein talk to me? I know for a fact they’re both aware of my book and my work.) Instead, I talk to teachers and students and readers and writers about why that powerful AI is not a replacement for your unique intelligence, and anyone who tells you otherwise is asking you to just give up on your own humanity.

Last Sunday I was delivering a public talk at the Barrington White House cultural center when I choked up while articulating my objection to historical chatbots like one trained to emulate Anne Frank that would not condemn the Nazis.

I was surprised by this sudden upwelling of emotion given that I’ve spoken about this stuff at many events now, but in the moment I was thinking about

Ruth Franklin

’s The Many Lives of Anne Frank and my review which had appeared in the Chicago Tribune that same day and I just thought, how dare they? How fucking dare they do this to a real person who lived, who wrote, who died in the Bergen-Belsen camps of disease mere weeks before the liberation? The thought of it filled me with disgust because it is disgusting, and for a moment or two I could not control my own simmering outrage.

We should not be allowing this anymore than we should be allowing Elon Musk to axe thousands of jobs he does not understand or for Mahmoud Khalil to be torn from his family for the very American act of speaking one’s mind.

I felt a little embarrassed at my loss of composure in that moment at my talk, but why should that be embarrassing? What is the value of composure these days?

Amidst all of these dark thoughts I am also thinking about the people of The Barrington Writer’s Workshop who were part of Sunday’s event and who made it clear that AI-produced writing is no threat to what they wish to accomplish. I am also thinking about my visit to Middlebury College later in the week where I met so many people who are absolutely trying to figure this stuff out in a way that ensures students have the kinds of lives and opportunities we should wish for them.

At the end of my talk in Middlebury I was approached by a mom/dad/daughter trio. The high school-aged daughter was visiting campus as part of her college tour and they had chosen to come see my talk to get a better understanding what kinds of things might await her at a college like Middlebury. They thanked me for the talk and I asked them some questions about the college search process and whether or not the young woman uses ChatGPT (A: No. Not interested).

I think of this young woman and about the world that Kevin Roose and Ezra Klein anticipate where we are going to be told that the AI can do everything better than you. We don’t need you to be a doctor or engineer or architect or poet because the machine has that covered.

But I know this is not true. I know that this technology will not be better at being the unique intelligence that is this young person I met at Middlebury, but we seem to have lost our enthusiasm for developing humans as unique intelligences and replaced it with enthusiasm and wonder over machines that gobble up our humanity and reflect it back to us as an amorphous, syntactically correct word slurry.

And as

Brian Merchant

reminds us, these companies are cynically lobbying the Trump administration in order to gain retroactive authorization for their wanton theft of human-generated material for their training data. We the people will never be recognized or compensated for our contributions to this technology, which we’re told will obviate human cognition.

How rich is that?

They were such lovely people, this family, so nice. I wish you could’ve seen them, the enthusiastic mom and dad with their curious daughter with the ponytail and glasses. Sometimes, when I was teaching, and the students were busy on some work I’d given them during I class I would look out at them and be suddenly overwhelmed by their potential. Everyone of us in the room was entirely ordinary, and yet at the same time, the possibilities contained within us were endless.

Why are we ruining the world that awaits these ordinary, perfect people?

When I was writing More Than Words I would sometimes think of the book in the future serving as a kind of obituary for the things that have given me so much meaning and pleasure - reading, writing, teaching - these private and public acts of human exchange, the challenge of corralling one’s own thoughts and sharing them with others. This may sound morbid, but I found it motivating. I pictured a future human in the post-apocalyptic wasteland that would maybe come across a copy of the book in a pile of refuse, and before using it as fuel for the bonfire providing necessary warmth and light they would crack it open and read the last hopeful dispatch from an earlier time.

This is one of those weeks where I have few hopes for a good future, but that family with the daughter who wants what any of us want: interesting work, reasonable material security, a life among people who matter to us, makes me want to keep fighting.

Links

At the Chicago Tribune this week I wrote about a study showing that students may benefit from reading more large print books. We old people with degenerating eyesight might benefit too.

At Inside Higher Ed I was able to simultaneously air two grievances, my irritation at Sam Altman’s serial hyping of his company’s products and how Rolling Stone Magazine declared every Rolling Stones album a masterpiece before retroactively downgrading it just in time to declare the next album a masterpiece.

If you’re looking for more worthwhile thoughts on AI and creative writing, I recommend this piece from

Rob Horning

.

Lincoln Michel

explored the “shrinking” bibliographies of millennial writers as compared to previous generations. I think he’s largely on target as to the causes. I suppose my bibliography is reasonably big, nine authored books (a tenth book killed by a threatened lawsuit) and another three as a co-editor, but the rather bizarre array of books I’ve published makes me an outlier under any circumstances.

How many people have a first book done primarily in colored pencil and a most recent book that’s attempting to defend the importance of the deep experience of reading, writing, and human communication?

The Tournament of Books continues to chug along with just two more matchups left in the opening round.

Please don’t miss my Q&A with Ruth Franklin about The Many Lives of Anne Frank. There’s no spoilers, and if you don’t want to read the book after this, I don’t know what’s wrong with you.

From my friends

McSweeney's Internet Tendency

“A Memorandum from the Newly Established Department of Grammar Efficiency” from the unique intelligence of Janine Annett.

Recommendations

1. Encyclopedia of Mythological Objects by Theresa Bane
2. Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis by Robert D. Kaplan
3. Replay by Ken Grimwood
4. Chocky by John Wyndham
5. The Caretakers of the Cosmos: Living Responsibly in an Unfinished World by Gary Lachman

Michael S. - Beacon, NY

For Michael, I’m recommending a time travel, philosophical mind-bender, Version Control by Dexter Palmer.

1. An African History of Africa by Zeinab Badawi
2. Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon
3. River of Books by Donna Seaman
4. Shy Creatures by Clare Chambers
5. Vanishing Treasures by Katherine Rundell

Autumn M. - Chicago, IL

Autumn should take an hour or two some open afternoon and enjoy Mrs. Caliban by Rachel Ingalls.

I’m not saying that buying a copy of More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI is an act of resistance against those who would like us to abandon our humanity, but I’m not, not saying that either.

I hope you all have the best week possible wherever you are.

John
The Biblioracle