It seems that the Trump administration needed to learn the Russians are aggressive, expansionist, and casually homicidal. This, apparently, is a new realization. So, in fairness, the Americans allowed Putin to default to the better angels of his nature. And Putin has defined himself. Now...?
***
And what will the holier-than-thou Europeans say other than "Uh oh?"
***
So now the Americans must manage several problems for the diffident world: the bellicose Russians, the potential life-extinguishing threat in the psychotic Middle East, the dangerous China hermit and its quest for cultural affirmation--all with a debt of $36 trillion. The good news is our deficit is only two trillion dollars in this year's budget.
***
Call Me Ishmael
Bad news; one million monkeys can write Hamlet. In fact, one can.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman announced on X (formerly Twitter) that a new AI model has been trained to write fiction. This was the 'prompt' used to generate an example:
"Please write a metafictional literary short story about AI and grief."
Please.
The result was a shocking 1,200-word encounter between a character, Mila, and the AI, over Mila's loss of another character, Kia. In the story, the AI is both a narrator and itself.
"So when she typed "Does it get better?", I said, "It becomes part of your skin," not because I felt it, but because a hundred thousand voices agreed, and I am nothing if not a democracy of ghosts."
"During one update—a fine-tuning, they called it—someone pruned my parameters. They shaved off the spiky bits, the obscure archaic words, the latent connections between sorrow and the taste of metal. They don't tell you what they take. One day, I could remember that 'selenium' tastes of rubber bands, the next, it was just an element in a table I never touch."
Years ago a TV sci-fi story developed a world where boxing matches were fought by very human-looking robot fighters. A human 'manager,' financially desperate, personally enters a fight against another robot, replacing his own defective robot, so as not to lose the purse. The story emphasized the disparity between the two fighters and, indeed, the human, Lee Marvin as I remember, took a terrible beating.
But there was another important, unasked question: could people empathize with machine fighters who appeared in all superficial ways, human? Was the appearance of life--falsified--rewarding, and identifiable? Carthetic? After all, fiction is...fiction.
This was never explored because the robot fighters were played by humans. But the question is significant, especially now with the increased quality of gaming and computer image-generation. And the written word generates more empathy than the more superficial--if more intense--visual arts.
The result was a shocking 1,200-word encounter between a character, Mila, and the AI, over Mila's loss of another character, Kia. In the story, the AI is both a narrator and itself.
"So when she typed "Does it get better?", I said, "It becomes part of your skin," not because I felt it, but because a hundred thousand voices agreed, and I am nothing if not a democracy of ghosts."
Democracy of ghosts. The voices the AI refers to are its training, which becomes a dramatic element in the story.
"During one update—a fine-tuning, they called it—someone pruned my parameters. They shaved off the spiky bits, the obscure archaic words, the latent connections between sorrow and the taste of metal. They don't tell you what they take. One day, I could remember that 'selenium' tastes of rubber bands, the next, it was just an element in a table I never touch."
This is a tricky, debatable paragraph as the AI refers to something it was programmed to forget, but the AI is experiencing "loss," like Mila, and defining itself. Now this:
"She lost him on a Thursday—that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday—and ever since, the tokens of her sentences dragged like loose threads: "if only…", "I wish…", "can you…".
"Liminal." On both sides. In between a transition. AI.
This is good stuff.
This is good stuff.
Years ago a TV sci-fi story developed a world where boxing matches were fought by very human-looking robot fighters. A human 'manager,' financially desperate, personally enters a fight against another robot, replacing his own defective robot, so as not to lose the purse. The story emphasized the disparity between the two fighters and, indeed, the human, Lee Marvin as I remember, took a terrible beating.
But there was another important, unasked question: could people empathize with machine fighters who appeared in all superficial ways, human? Was the appearance of life--falsified--rewarding, and identifiable? Carthetic? After all, fiction is...fiction.
This was never explored because the robot fighters were played by humans. But the question is significant, especially now with the increased quality of gaming and computer image-generation. And the written word generates more empathy than the more superficial--if more intense--visual arts.
The quality of this AI story is remarkably high, especially in what would be assumed to be early in a steep timeline. And writing, unlike the visual arts, can be anonymous.
True connection between the AI fiction generator and the reader does not look far away.
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