Tag Archives: artificial intelligence

Authors, Non-fiction, Religion, Uncategorized

Surprised by A.I.

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I found this video on YouTube. It seems to me both wonderful and troubling.

First of all, Jack Lewis is using “my” microphone. It’s a Blue Yeti, and I have one exactly like it, even unto the color. (Or “colour,” as he would have spelled it.)

Secondly, it’s pretty well done, except for a couple glitches. The voice appears to be cloned from Lewis’ well-known The Four Loves recordings. (On the downside, I’ve read a statement from one of Lewis’s friends, who says that that was not his normal speaking style.)

The troubling aspect is – of course – just that this is A.I. I’m almost obligated to hate A.I., which took a much-needed job away from me.

The very idea of resurrecting actual humans through A.I. is just disturbing to many of us, whether it’s affected our bottom lines or not. It seems creepy, like necromancy. However, I’m not sure that creepy feeling is to be trusted. When radio was a new technology, there was a fair number of sincere Christians who denounced it as demonic – voices coming through the air; that has to come from the domain of the Prince of the Powers of the Air! (For our young readers, that’s a biblical reference to the devil (Ephesians 2:2 in the King James Version).

But the bottom line, for me, is that I found it kind of fun.

I’d like to see more of this sort of stuff, and no doubt I will. Maybe somebody can recreate Moody preaching, or Jonathan Edwards declaiming “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” (contemporaries reported that he read it from a manuscript, in a very rote voice).

The best thing about A.I. might be that it could kill Hollywood. We can bring back the great actors of the past and cast them in new movies, bypassing Wokeness. I’d love to see a young Clint Eastwood playing Travis McGee, for instance. Authors could have total control of film adaptations. Who wants to do an A.I. production of The Year of the Warrior for 50 bucks? I might be able to spring for half of that.

Uncategorized

Driven to extremes

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Photo credit, Why Kei, whykei. Unsplash license.

From time to time in this space I’ve announced exciting new developments in my employment history. I’m afraid I may have bragged a little, boasting about translation jobs and books (self-) published.

Today I must humble myself, as is appropriate in Lent. My delusions of grandeur are past. My pomp has taken physic. I have signed up to drive for Uber Eats.

I complained of my financial challenges to the guys in my Bible study, and one of them kept urging me to try UE. “You can work when you want,” he says, “and pick your jobs.” Also, you don’t need a very nice car, like an Uber driver, which matters in my case.

So I did it. My understanding was that the vetting process would take a few days, but I got approved in one. I was not prepared for this; I figured I’d have more time to summon up my blood and play the tiger. However, the YouTube videos I’ve been watching suggest that you really ought to have a hot bag to keep your orders warm (or cold), and my order for one of those won’t show up till Thursday. So I’ll hold off till then.

On Thursday, I’ll probably come up with another excuse for delay. I am, to say the least, a timid driver.

The great joke of it has not escaped me – I lost my translating gig due to Artificial Intelligence, and this job is likely to go the same way. Even as I write (according to news reports), Uber is testing out self-driving delivery vehicles.

I suppose we all wonder where this will end. What job is safe from our digital overlords? I’m convinced that AI will never do creative work to match human art. But what it can do is work cheap. It’s the ultimate illegal immigrant, undercutting wages for the natives.

But if nobody has a job anymore, who’s going to buy all those cheap products? And how will mere humans subsist?

Perhaps after the Great Revolution, every human will be assigned a personal robot. That robot will do the human’s work, and the human will be paid for it, being legally responsible for the maintenance of the machine.

But what will we do with our spare time, then? Judging by our current behavior in the first stages of AI, I’m not optimistic.

Blogs, Socials, Uncategorized

Are we all Ned Ludd now?

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When you do a web search for “Ned Ludd,” this is the only picture our computer overlords have to offer.

On Wednesday, my Close Personal Friend®, Gene Edward Veith, posted an article describing a recent report out of Microsoft Corporation, predicting which jobs are most threatened by Artificial Intelligence. Ed’s post is subscription only, but the report itself can be found here, if you care to read it. It includes the following list of endangered jobs, in order of endangerment:

  1. Interpreters and Translators
  2. Historians
  3. Passenger Attendants
  4. Sales Representatives of Services
  5. Writers and Authors
  6. Customer Service Representatives
  7. CNC Tool Programmers
  8. Telephone Operators
  9. Ticket Agents and Travel Clerks
  10. Broadcast Announcers and Radio DJs
  11. Brokerage Clerks
  12. Photographers
  13. Technical Writers
  14. Tour Guides
  15. Copy Editors and Proofreaders
  16. Librarians
  17. Museum Technicians
  18. Archivists
  19. Event Planners
  20. Public Relations Specialists
  21. Marketing Coordinators
  22. Social Media Managers
  23. Conference Coordinators
  24. Advertising Sales Agents
  25. Travel Agents
  26. Court Reporters
  27. Paralegals
  28. Insurance Underwriters
  29. Claims Adjusters
  30. Survey Researchers
  31. Market Research Analysts
  32. Fundraisers
  33. Grant Writers
  34. Instructional Coordinators
  35. Human Resources Specialists
  36. Compensation and Benefits Analysts
  37. Training and Development Specialists
  38. Executive Assistants
  39. Office Managers
  40. Data Entry Keyers

This will be, of course, a troubling list for many people. For me, it’s already kind of old news, as I, in my old gig, translation, (Number One on the list), have already been “made redundant,” as the English say.

Nowadays I find myself in sympathy with the legendary Ned Ludd, an English weaver who supposedly broke up a “knitting frame” because the technology threatened his traditional job. (In fact, his legend seems to be older, going back to a boy who was disciplined for sloppy work and smashed the machinery in a fit of pique. Later on, when mechanization arrived, the people opposed to innovation were labeled “Luddites.”)

A better hero for us enemies of progress would probably be John Henry, the hero of the folk ballad, who raced a job-threatening steam drill and beat it, but worked himself to death in the effort. I remember that even as a boy I viewed John Henry as emblematic of something that was going on in the world – little did I guess how high the stakes would get in my own lifetime.

(Continued on page 2)

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Blogs, Socials, Fiction

Fiction Throwdown: Can Chat GPT Tell a Better Short Story?

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Bestselling fantasy author Mark Lawrence asked three established fantasy authors to write 350-word short stories along with him and let his blog readers compare them to four similar stories produced by ChatGPT. He ran this experiment two years ago and concluded Team Human still had the edge. This year, not so much.

Read the eight stories here and keep your own tally on whether a story is written by AI or author and what rating you would give it out of five stars.

I read through them today and had hoped for better results at picking out the AI writing. I picked half of them correctly: two human written, two AI. I didn’t score the stories high in general, giving only one five stars and another four. Three I gave three stars. The remaining three earned twos and a one. It’s a little embarrassing to say my two high ranking stories were AI written. Two of the ones I disliked the most were manmade.

Jon Del Arroz, another fantasy author, reacts to the poll in this video.

Blogs, Socials, Coffee, Tea, Drinks, Fiction, Non-fiction, Reading

Let The Words Wash Over You

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Reading Passively: “One of the problems of shouldering one’s way through books—worldview machete in hand—is that we become the kind of readers who get from a book only what we bring to it.” Professor Jermey Larson writes about reading for experience and enjoyment and letting active learning take a back seat. He leans on C.S. Lewis’s effort to equip readers of medieval literature to stay with the story instead of looking at commentaries every other page.

And the Gulag Remains: The Gulag Archipelago in English is 50 years old this year. Gary Saul Morson writes, “Before Solzhenitsyn, Western intellectuals of course knew that the Soviet regime had been ‘repressive,’ but for the most part they imagined that all that had ended decades ago. So it was shocking when the book described how it had to be written secretly, with parts scattered so that not everything could be seized in a single raid. Solzhenitsyn offered an apology for the work’s lack of polish: ‘I must explain that never once did this whole book . . . lie on the same desk at the same time!’ ‘The jerkiness of the book, its imperfections, are the true mark of our persecuted literature.’ Since this persecution is itself one of the work’s themes, its imperfections are strangely appropriate and so, perhaps, not imperfections at all.”

The Past that Binds: Gina Dalfanzo reviews The Blackbird & Other Stories by Sally Thomas. “Our pasts are always part of us, shaping who we are, and that includes the people in them.”

Remembering How We Cooked: Writer Megan Braden-Perry talks about authentic New Orleans gumbo and how strangers change historic recipes. “To me, the composition of gumbo is a topic serious enough to invade my dreams. Recently I had the most awful nightmare, that I made gumbo and forgot all the ingredients and spices. It was just a roux and broth.”

The Steel Man Cometh: How the music business can course correct on artificial intelligence. “I guess training AI to replace human musicians is evil—unless they can make a buck from it.”

Photo: John Margolies Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008), Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Blogs, Socials, Non-fiction

Nostalgia for that Long Ago Galaxy

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Whenever I think of Star Wars in a general sense, not a particular scene or story line, but when I’m recalling the essence of it or imagining myself walking as an unknown Jedi through the parking lot to my speeder, the music I imagine is The Force Theme or Ben Kenobi’s theme from the original movie score. Most often, it’s the slow, mourning arrangement you hear in this sunset moment.

The Force Theme from Star Wars: A New Hope

Until today, I thought this was Luke’s theme, but Mark Richards corrected me with this post.

I loved Star Wars growing up. My primary toys were several action figures and an awesome Millenium Falcon, like the kind they don’t make anymore. We had a two-record set of the first movie’s score, which I played regularly. When I had a friend two-houses down, I remember bringing over the records and running around the room with our X-wings. He may have had a tie-fighter—details, you know. I didn’t have one of those.

I was never the biggest fan by a long shot. (That category just isn’t my thing. I’m reluctant to pick favorites of anything even though I’ve played the fan for many things.) I have not read any of the novels, though I may pick up the Thrawn trilogy this year. I’ve heard they are the best of the 381 novels the breeders have spawned. I watched the original movies several times, but the new ones—I may find time for three new ones I haven’t seen (episodes 2, 3, and 9).

I write this today because early in the week I watched Jenny Nicholson’s lengthy video about her experience at Disney’s Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser Hotel. It was billed as immersive and interactive, like being a character in a Star Wars story. They closed it last September after an 18-month run. Hearing Nicholson’s story provoked sad feelings for what might have been, not just with that failed venture but with many of the new Star Wars stories lately.

I remember enjoying The Force Awakens. I said so here, though I can’t find the photo I used to fully express my feelings. I’ll just have to recreate it.

Star Wars figures stand in solidarity

Thinking back on The Force Awakens, I see it wasn’t a great story, but it wasn’t terrible. It set up something that could have been great fun, but the people in charge either don’t know how to tell fun stories like this or actually hate the property. (Let’s hear a variation on The Force Theme to soothe our angst.) That theme could be a dirge for all of the promise Star Wars offered us and didn’t deliver. Maybe the dark side has clouded our vision for the past some years–likely throwing the galaxy out of balance. But if the Tao of the Force means anything, it means the Jedi will return to restore balance.

Could be a long time coming.

Sciency Writing: “The old Scientific American that I subscribed to in college was all about the science,” an evolutionary psychologist told City Journal. “By the time Trump was elected in 2016, he says, ‘the Scientific American editors seem to have decided that fighting conservatives was more important than reporting on science.′”

Monsters, Us Men: Author and professor Thomas Fuchs writes in The New Atlantis, “… we increasingly believe in the superiority of our own artificial creatures. We begin to be ashamed of our existence as all-too-earthly beings of flesh and blood. And the grandiose self-exaltation ultimately turns into pitiful self-abasement.”

Discovering a Great Writer: Patrick Kurp writes about the one magazine issue that lit a fire in him.

Photo of Millenium Falcon entrance by Josué AS on Unsplash

Blogs, Socials, Coffee, Tea, Drinks

A Con Artist, Betrayal, and Artificial Intelligence

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If the Christian life is one of continual repentance, then what do we do with a minister who has lived in sin for many years, justified his sin with spiritual abuse, and disqualified himself from ministry–most of which was learned after his death?

One of my friends brought up an apologist who recently passed away and was subsequently exposed as having lived an abusive life for years. Before his death, we thought he was a great Bible teacher. Now, we slough off his books at the used bookstore. Aren’t his books still as good as they were before? He compared the apologist to King David, who sinned far more extensively than we usually give him credit for. We overlook Solomon’s gross sins too.

I didn’t say anything this time. I’ve argued my case before, and maybe it doesn’t sit well with me.

The comparison to David doesn’t work. He and Solomon are categorically different. We look to them and see the Lord’s saving grace unbound.

Should we reject a man’s published work for a pattern of sin mostly uncovered after his death? Does known sin raise any theological questions? The man wrote a book on living the faith we profess, and we should consider its merit on the words of the books, not the life of the author? If this were a local pastor, would we continue to distribute his books, studies, and recordings as if it’s all academic? No. If he were a local pastor, we would expect him to be excommunicated were he still alive. The filth of his sin touches everything.

But that argument doesn’t sit easily with me, because I think of readers down the road who won’t know of the sin. They’ll only know the books, and perhaps the Lord will demonstrate his unbounded grace yet again.

I assume you know whom I’m talking about. It still hurts to remember it. Why do I feel betrayed by someone I didn’t know personally? I don’t know. It isn’t academic for me.

What else do we have today?

Deception: I recently listened to the first season and a little more of a well-produced podcast by Brian Brushwood called “The World’s Greatest Con.” Brian is a good storyteller, and this show is dynamite. The first season is on Operation Mincemeat, a scheme from WWII to deceive the Nazis into thinking the Allied would attack Italy.

Artificial Intelligence: “With every passing day, OpenAI looks more like Napster or the many defunct piracy platforms—it relies on the creativity of others to make a buck. And there are plenty of laws against that.”

This rings true to me. Microsoft’s Bing AI presents itself as if you’re talking to an intelligent friend, but it doesn’t give answers any better than regular search results. Microsoft seems to think we all want to search as if we’re talking to someone IRL, but if it doesn’t understand us like a friend could, it’s pointless.

Orthodox Church: St. George’s Church in Drohobych, Lviv Oblast (west Ukraine), is a gorgeous work. It “is a unique monument of Galician wooden architecture of the late 15th – early 16th centuries. It is one of the best preserved monuments of old Ukrainian sacral architecture.”

Also, St. Andrew’s Church in Kyiv (via The Cultural Tutor).

Coffee: I don’t mind pumpkin spice, but I don’t drink it either. “Six bucks is a small price to pay (apart from still being scandalous and highway robbery) for the appearance of agency.”

Photo by Matthew Henry on Unsplash

Religion

AI-Driven Bible Knowledge

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Writing for Christianity Today, Adam Graber suggests problems with artificial-intelligence-driven Bible reading software.

“As a digital theology expert, I believe these kinds of ‘BibleGPTs’ will continue to advance, proliferate, and eventually become proprietary systems. And as this happens, the church and its leaders will be prompted to make some momentous decisions about the Christian canon. This will, in turn, influence how we interpret the Bible and impact the future of our faith and practice.”

He goes to describe how AI-driven research tools could become like the knowledgeable friend who always has a ready answer for any question but who isn’t grounded enough in the Word to answer wisely every time. It may become another easy way to quickly survey the Bible, thinking we understand more than we do.

If you read the whole article, it doesn’t end as sensationally as it begins. He concludes saying we need to understand the Bible for ourselves, but the tone of the whole leans too much on people’s laziness. That isn’t new. We’ve always been lazy. I doubt AI will usher in more lethargy than we already indulge with the Internet.

Blogs, Socials, Fiction

No Fear of Sleep, the Internet Gone to Pot, and Hollywood Noir

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Lee Yong-ju’s 2021 film Seo Bok is a standard sci-fi thriller about a cloned man with telekinesis. It opens with an ex-secret service agent, Min Gi Heon, being offered an outside job, one that’s dangerous enough to require deniability if it goes wrong. He’s asked to deliver an asset, and when he arrives at the lab to pick it up, he learns the asset is a young man, Seo Bok, whom the scientists introduce as undying. He is a lab-created human being who will not die if properly cared for. They say his cells are the key to healing many, if not every, human disease. Not only that, his brain waves are off the charts, enabling him to push and guide material around him. But, what could go wrong with that, eh?

I could tell you more of the plot, but I bring up this movie because of a couple minutes that appear right before the final act.

At one point, Seo Bok reveals he doesn’t need to sleep. Later, when exploring part of his backstory, he and Gi Heon go to a Christian mausoleum. With several crosses on the walls and light shining through stained glass, Seo Bok asks, “Do you believe dying is really like sleep?”

“Maybe,” Gi Heon replies.

“Then how come people aren’t afraid of falling asleep? It’s like dying a little while.”

“Because they’ll wake up the next day.”

“How do they know that?”

“They just believe it. They believe they will wake up in the morning.”

In the context of the story, that dialogue had me wondering if this was the seed for the whole. The scientists think they’ve created a cure for disease and even natural death in one man, and in the mausoleum another man suggests we can wake up after death if we put our faith in the cross. It’s subtle but stands out as the moral of the film.

Let’s move on.

Internet: 30 Signs You Are Living in an Information Crap-pocalypse. Here are the first two.

  1. “Create a society that rewards influencers more than truth-tellers—and turn every digital platform, large or small, into a boosting pad for these influencers.
  2. “Make plagiarism, cheating, and deception totally acceptable, so nobody gets fired from a media job, even for the most egregious violations of journalistic ethics.”

Also from the signs above, over 33% of people hired to train AI for better, more truthful output are using AI software to do the training faster, folding in errors that will be baked in if they aren’t removed soon enough.

Democracy: “This spring marks the 30th anniversary of the paperback release of Francis Fukuyama’s controversial book, The End of History and the Last Man.” How has his argument that democracy had and would continue to win over world civilizations panned out?

Hollywood: Brian Patrick Eha recommends the work of Alfred Hayes. “Money promises to give substance, in Hayes’s novels, to those without it; for those with it, though, material wealth proves unsatisfying, even oddly insubstantial. The vast sums that flow from the movie business have a ‘phantasmal quality.’ . . . Laboring for America’s dream machine, his men and women are made to bear, in the end, too much reality.”

(Photo by Hammad Siddiqui on Unsplash)

Blogs, Socials, Bookselling, Publishing, Reading

One War Began a Year Ago, And Bots Are on the Way

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The Brandywine Tradition: “A Wolf Had Not Been Seen at Salem for Thirty Years,” an illustration by Howard Pyle for Harper’s Monthly, 1909.

Ukraine: February 24, 2022, was the day Russia invaded Ukraine. Yesterday, Polish Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki five lessons Western countries should take into the coming years.

The distance from Kiev must not be used to appease our conscience. I am sometimes afraid that the West is indeed populated by many for whom having a lunch in a favourite caffe or watching a Netflix series is more important than the lives and deaths of thousands of Ukrainians. We can all see the war happening. No one will be able to claim that they did not know about the genocide in Bucha. We are all watching the atrocities being committed by the Russian army. This is why we must not be indifferent. Russia’s imperial plans go beyond Ukraine. This war concerns us all.

Art-Intel: Lincoln Michel notes ChatGPT doesn’t have to generate good writing to cause problems for writers. The sci-fi/fantasy magazine Clarkesworld stopped taking submissions this week after receiving a glut of AI-written submissions. They shared a graph on Twitter of the number of users they’ve banned from submitting since 2019. Just eyeballing it, they seem to have averaged only a handful per month. This month, they banned over 500.

Art-Intel: Amazon is selling AI-written shlock on its Kindle store, books that may or may not acknowledge ChatGPT as an author. Reuters describes one YouTuber who is selling his e-book for $1. “In the video, White says anyone with the wherewithal and time could create 300 such books a year, all using AI.”

In completely unrelated news, the U.S. Copyright Office has decided it won’t copyright AI-generated images. “To justify the decision, the Copyright Office cites previous cases where people weren’t able to copyright words or songs that listed “non-human spiritual beings” or the Holy Spirit as the author — as well as the infamous incident where a selfie was taken by a monkey.”

Publishing: Roald Dahl’s publisher has announced it will also publish the author’s original text in a new Classic Collection after publishing its bowdlerized one (HT to Lars for reminding me of the word “bowdlerized”).

Reading: Is it better to have a reading plan, like the great classics starting with Homer, or to read as chance would have it? “My reading has always been happily chaotic, governed more by whim than central planning.”