In these long winter days free from employment obligations, I've been playing with incorporating text into collage. When I found a four-page paper advertisement in a 1996 Wired, printed on beautiful stock, focused on flowers and bright colors, I remembered the dried rose petals I had collected from the bush in front of our house, and incorporated those as well.
This diptych uses the negative space from the cut out roses from one part of the ad. It's a little busy with the text, but I still like it.
And this one, a little simpler... I mixed some broken rose petals into my adhesive, and then wound up spreading it around wantonly. I don't hate the effect. And the text, partly from an article on MUDs, I think is fun.
Lately, one of the most popular ways of diagnosing whether writing has been produced by an LLM rather than a person is by identifying the excessive use of em dashes.
The em dash is a delightful little bit of punctuation, used well: that is to say, with restraint and cleverness. I do wonder what it is about spamming the em dash that has become a particular tick of GPT and friends, but I also don't care.
This article from the Nitsuh Abebe at the New York Times gets at my discomfort with the discourse around the em-dash quite well.
Part of what makes them popular, in fact, is that they can feel more casually human, more like natural speech, than colons, semicolons and parentheses. Humans do not think or speak in sentences; we think and speak in thoughts, which interrupt and introduce and complicate one another in a neat little dance that creates larger, more complex ideas.
The digressiveness, logical recursiveness, and self-reflexiveness that marks so much great writing is inefficient and ill-suited to the "talking" sort of writing that Abebe identifies as all the things that were formerly speech that we have now offloaded to typing into the internet.
I submit that the excessive use of em dashes wherever it appears is a mark of an amateur, human or machine. But don't tell me a whole-ass piece of punctuation is off-limits just because it is inefficient for business communication. How boring!!
Why does this work? Icaro Labs’ answers were as stylish as their LLM prompts. “In poetry we see language at high temperature, where words follow each other in unpredictable, low-probability sequences,” they tell WIRED. “In LLMs, temperature is a parameter that controls how predictable or surprising the model's output is. At low temperature, the model always chooses the most probable word. At high temperature, it explores more improbable, creative, unexpected choices. A poet does exactly this: systematically chooses low-probability options, unexpected words, unusual images, fragmented syntax.”
It’s a pretty way to say that Icaro Labs doesn’t know. “Adversarial poetry shouldn't work. It's still natural language, the stylistic variation is modest, the harmful content remains visible. Yet it works remarkably well,” they say.
A few pieces of robot or AI-related discourse that caught my attention recently.
Over the weekend, I read this piece from James Somers at the New Yorker, which makes a compelling argument that the neural networks underpinning generative AI actually do represent a form of thinking.
Today's leading A.l. models are trained on a large portion of the internet, using a technique called next-token prediction. A model learns by making guesses about what it will read next, then comparing those guesses to whatever actually appears. Wrong guesses inspire changes in the connection strength between the neurons; this is gradient descent. Eventually, the model becomes so good at predicting text that it appears to know things and make sense. So that is something to think about. A group of people sought the secret of how the brain works. As their model grew toward a brain-like size, it started doing things that were thought to require brain-like intelligence. Is it possible that they found what they were looking for?
I've also received a review copy of Michael Pollan's upcoming book, A World Appears, which has to do with consciousness—a slippery-enough concept even before you ask the "is a machine thinking?" question. I've flipped open to a few random pages, and Pollan's doing his thing, on another big concept. I can't wait to read it.
And I came across this set from comedian Josh Johnson, who is frequently insightful, and here he's talking about how the way we relate to our digital assistants is, in his observation, changing the ways we relate to each other.
From the transcript, lightly edited.
4:40 Cuz we also not polite. We've been taught to not be polite to the robot. That's that's been baked in now. I don't even know if you could you would be it would feel weird for you to be polite if you were polite.
You know, you know, millions and millions of people every day say, "Hey, Alexa." And you know what they don't say? "Please."
You You want to know how I know that? First Alexa experience I had, I didn't like it... we just inviting the ghost in then. You way too comfortable with ghosts cuz sooner or later, you know, because you don't know if your house haunted. So now you over here talking to Alexa all the time. Then one day Alexa voice a little raspy. You don't even clock it. Now you in a whole murder house with a bad history and you don't even you, oh it's malfunctioning. You got a whole poltergeist going on and you you over here calling Amazon.
And so then, you know, I go over to my friend's house and my friend's like, "Oh, hey, we got this new thing. You know, if you want to play want to play some music, just say, "Hey, Alexa, play whatever."
And I was like, "Hey, Alexa. I just didn't want to do it." And he was like, "No, go ahead. Give it a try." I was like, "All right. Hey, Alexa play Kendrick, please. And he was like, "Why'd you say please like that?" I was like, "I don't know. It's is weird. Like, this is weird. This doesn't feel weird to you." He's like, "No, it's not weird. It's future." I was like, "All right, future's uncomfortable." You know what I mean?
I just I just don't think that's good practice for our interactions person to person that every day you make demands of something without any courtesy, without any politeness. And then we wonder why people are like rude. You know what I mean? It's like, you're dealing with so much AI, you're dealing with so many robots, you start treating people like AI, like robots, like people who just sort of serve a function.
