GAS
A number of years ago, Canadian professor Anders Henricksson submitted a small essay to the Wilson Quarterly. Titled “Life Reeked with Joy,” it is a collection of “educated” guesses gleaned from college students’ term papers and exams. This essay is one of the most widely read of all the Wilson Quarterly’s considerable collection; it includes such gems as:
“In the 1400 hundreds most Englishmen were perpendicular. A class of yeowls arose…The Middle Ages slimpared to a halt. The renasence bolted in from the blue. Life reeked with joy.”
Please do yourself a favor and follow the links in the footnote for some fun (1).
Do you ever wonder if some of the things you hear people say (or encounter on the internet) come from the university I call MSU (Make Stuff Up (2))? We all are likely guilty. I know I am. Especially in the heat of the moment, when to make a point I may present a fact only loosely supported by references. I may not realize this until it’s pointed out to me. Has that ever happened to you?
Here’s a question for you: How can you tell when someone’s joking or telling what they think is the truth? After you’re done laughing your way through “Life Reeked with Joy,” ask yourself — were all those students just making things up that sounded good? Were they trying their best? Did they know what they were doing?
What if, confronted with “the right answer,” they said something like, “Well, I knew that — I was just joking”? What if they really were joking? What if they didn’t care about their grade and just invented something?
How do you judge the information you’re receiving? How do you determine the sincerity of the intent of the giver of that information?
Certain politicians lately have relied on “just joking.” First, they make an outrageous remark. Then, when there’s a certain level of outcry, they “walk it back,” claiming they were misunderstood or were “just joking.”
By now, of course, whatever outrageous thing they’ve said has taken wing and is circulating widely and wildly, while the disclaimer likely isn’t.
Of course, sometimes they “double down” (to use a phrase I find particularly irritating), knowing that if the lie is declared loudly and forcefully and often enough, it will substitute for truth. You can rewrite history this way; many have, giving rise to that chestnut, “History is written by the victors.” (3) Many are trying rewrite history today, protesting their sincerity even as their accusers jeer at them.
Such fun!
Over the last several months, we’ve been exposed to the onslaught of artificial intelligence. AI. More specifically, Generative AI, a specific type of AI that uses mind-bogglingly sophisticated algorithms to barrel through mountains of data. Depending upon your query, GenAI assembles and regurgitates what appears to be (and often is) a reasonable response.
We can use GenAI to conduct research on our behalf, to write query letters and term papers, to report on the significance of the latest news, and so on. No doubt useful. And I’m not intending to disparage the efforts of many highly intelligent people as they work (more accurately, scramble) to provide us with the latest new tech.
Still, I have a feeling that for me, GenAI is the latest in a long string of developments aimed at convincing me that the world I knew is, alas, a world in which prior, stale and irrelevant conversations were held. Conversations, I dare say, of the pre-GenAI world.
I kind of liked that world. A world where you had the opportunity to explore things on your own. Where content of character (4) made up at least a portion of the trust we gave to information.
Now, it’s GenAI this and GenAI that. GenAI will be the future, same as blockchain, quantum computing, tech this and tech that. A lot of that is true.
As has been said before, “this one feels different.” I suspect it is. GenAI will either nudge or lurch us down unfamiliar paths. The future is like that.
Along the way, we’re hearing the same arguments — which is not to say that these arguments aren’t valid; far from it. There are those who say GenAI will positively transform our lives. Those who are afraid that GenAI will destroy our ability to think for ourselves. That it will create a dystopian future (again). That it will create a brilliant future. That it will expose our private information in unintended ways.
All true. GenAI is but the latest atomic bomb we’ve created, and we can’t figure out what the heck to do with it. All we know is we’d better get “there” (without having defined what “there” is), before the next group of ambitious, profit-seeking (and therefore profit-taking from us) folks gets there first. (5)
Let’s pause.
The first thing to consider is the “I” in AI. Where, pray, does the intelligence come from? Other machines? Perhaps, in the future (and in some cases today, from other AI engines.) But for now, guess where it mostly comes from?
Us.
Look around, when you’re not changing diapers or paying the mortgage or struggling through eldercare or marrying or divorcing or entertaining guests or slogging your way to and through and back from work and burning the roast and leaving the ring around the tub for another day.
Us. Full of promise, full of dreams, full of desires, and doing our best. And (I’ll raise my hand here) doing and saying both some wise and some stupid things, sometimes within the same hour.
Take a look at the statements those students made for professor Henriksson. Statements that illustrated one or more of:
A general ignorance of the topic
Dismissal of the topic as unimportant
Willful pulling of the professor’s leg
An attempt to write beyond one’s abilities, using words that “sound right”
An early attempt to “fake it so you can make it”
Of course, Henrickson’s essays are all nonsense, even if there are grains of truth in statements like “Civilization woozed out of the Nile about 300,000 years ago,” the infamous opening line of “Hindsight Into the Future.”
So, back to the “I” in GenAI. How do we know this is intelligence we’re sifting through? If, as we generally believe, we’ve been moving (with lots of hiccups) along a continuum of progress (Plains! Trains! Automobiles!), how are we measuring the progress of intelligence?
OK, you’re probably rolling your eyes. Not another tired observation of confusing tech with genuine social progress (pretty good at one, not so good at the other). Not another demonstration of how we really don’t understand that much about what goes on between our ears — or perhaps some of us do, and tirelessly manipulate the rest of us down avenues of propaganda-inspired behaviors to achieve their selfish outcomes. There, I’ve said it.
All true.
And, of course, there’s the endless worry about misinformation — and how AI, deepfakes, machine learning, intelligent gadgets and so on may be targets for exploitation, so that you, poor little sheep, are manipulated into believing that, among other things, your smart toilet may be lying to you. (About what is another matter.)
So, in the spirit of innovation, I submit that Generative AI is but a tiny part of the potential we can tap into here. With human stupidity taking large and small stages throughout the millennia (6), there is room in the marketplace for a product sure to be wildly successful (trust me, says the vox populi market deity): Generative Artificial Stupidity, or GAS.
After all, the basis for GAS is everywhere.
Here’s the most unsurprising observation I’ll make in this ramble: There’s no shortage of stupidity out there. I certainly do several stupid things every day, and I imagine that you do as well. (Don’t lie — nobody’s looking.) For every flawless Influencer in whatever visual medium is popular today, there are a thousand folks picking at themselves, burning the toast, putting on wrinkled clothes, putting off cleaning the toilet, and so on. Every damn day. Odds are overwhelming that these thousand people are doing some pretty stupid things — they’ll even admit it.
Like the guy who decided to cook a squirrel for dinner and ended up burning down several apartments, leaving his girlfriend with a $2 million bill for damages. Plenty of stupidity there (7). Robert Fulghum tried to be nice about it, writing in his wonderful book, “It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It,” that we do things knowing we’ll get in trouble, knowing that the bed is on fire when we lay down on it (8) — but we lie down anyway. Ditto the observations of some more serious works as well (9).
I cringe when I read things my younger self (10) wrote, wondering how I could have concluded thus, given additional facts and experiences that have come to light. We shy away from the notion of “paralysis by analysis,” but when is the collected information sufficient truly to conclude anything? After all, the road of progress is littered with the corpses of blasted prior conclusions. This is, as we often say, the scientific method (11).
“Oh, you weren’t stupid,” kinder folks will say (to which others, especially relations, counter immediately with, “Oh yes, he was/is!”): “You were just a bit naive.” (12)
So tell me. Were the French simply naive when they trusted in the Maginot Line as their defense against Hitler in World War II? Or was that stupid? Is it naive to believe that a two-state solution can be achieved between Israel and Palestine, or just stupid? Or, heaven forbid, sincere but misguided?
Which side do you choose, in which war, insurrection, election, or family skirmish? And does that choice make you smart or stupid, and to whom?
The point of all this is this. We’re a massive assembly of personalities, actors, acted-upons, smart and stupid and kind and cruel and everything else; we’re people, rolled up into one roiling mass, a seething mob of individual souls collectively burdening the planet.
And we’re recording ourselves. Constantly. Ever since someone took up a reed and scratched marks on clay, we’ve been busy chronicling everything we do — good-bad, up-down, east-west, smart-stupid, you name it. And just as quickly, someone else discovered that you can cover up information with other stuff. That’s called steganography, and it’s centuries old (13). However, today our steganography is more clever — we layer alternate facts atop older facts, repeat lies to drown out truth, some claiming the high stage as though mere volume imparts merit to them, thus authenticating their voices and solidifying their of-the-moment truths. Who can challenge these out-shouters, coating the bedrock of our wisdom with fresh and often false gloss?
Of course, now we’ve transferred whole gobs of this stuff onto that gargantuan collection of connected storage media we call the Internet — a massive, messy maelstrom we can funnel into the 2 by 5 inch window of a smart phone, so it can quietly push its self-declared truths into our skulls, every connected moment of every day (14).
Think about it: the latest here today-gone tomorrow fashions; half-baked history; equally half-baked and / or divisive analyses of each hour’s moments; the latest burp and fizzle in the markets; what you / your spouse / your kids / your extended family / your company / your state / your nation ought / ought not to have done; various the-world-is-going-to-end-unless-you-donate schemes; look-the-other-way silence regarding inconvenient people and their tragedies; on and on.
But wait, you say. GenAI isn’t concerning itself with all this stuff. Is it? Well, maybe not. But then again, how do we determine what the serious, high-quality stuff is on the Internet? Past papers? Learned articles? How far back? Do we include when the earth was flat, and North and South America couldn’t possibly have existed, for example? Which view of the solar system? The universe? Our place in it? How we’ve decided to refer to each other, the victors and the vanquished, oppressors and oppressed? The laws we’ve crafted to protect the rich, the poor, the young, the old, corporations, individuals, nations? Is it what we’re continuing to learn about about life teeming all the way from under our feet to the earth’s core, or is it everywhere simply turtles all the way down (15)?
When does information once thought brilliant become less than that? What’s the yardstick? Is this essay smart, or stupid?
Then there’s AI hallucinations — where for all its sophistication, the tool returns answers divorced from reality. Add to that the fact that the quality of results degenerates over time as the engines increasingly rely upon their own regurgitated information to generate more material — a subtle reinforcement of living in the past masking itself as a way forward into the future, with self-limiting choices already made, biases already ossifying.
Now, there are elegant technical explanations for both of these phenomena, but I prefer to summarize the situation more succinctly: AI occasionally goes crazy and frequently gets stupider over time. Kind of like a lot of people you probably know. (16)
So we could conclude that (a) stupid people exist (no surprise there); (b) stupid people are recording what they do and shoveling it onto the Internet; (c) people often judged as intelligent can make all kinds of stupid statements, especially when they transfer their intelligence to fields they know nothing about; (d) people tend to be proud rather than humble, and therefore they double down on all kinds of questionable assertions; (e) some people find that BS is easier, more profitable and more enjoyable to manufacture and spread than dull and boring facts.
In other words, people everywhere are spreading sincere and critically argued information; politically expedient interpretations; stupid stuff; brilliant stuff; lies and assorted cons; propaganda; and pleas. Among other things. Good luck trolling through all of that.
I could go on, and so could you. Now, given this, it’s pretty obvious that a lot of what passes for intelligent discourse on the Internet is anything but. Further, since these AI models learn from each other and then opine on all of this, it’s very likely that the end result will be a noisy slog through the accumulated detritus of human endeavors, sublime, so-so, and downright stupid. How, then, can you expect to train a GenAI engine to be inspiringly intelligent while resting on such a morass of mediocrity?
You can’t.
Thus, GAS.
Best to acknowledge this and go about creating a far more powerful tool: Generative Artificial Stupidity. At the very least, it’ll be more honest. We’ll recognize it for what it is — a promise to deliver that which, after all, makes us human. And since human clans also contain scalawags, interested in conning the rest of us, we ought to develop (or at least recognize) an equally powerful tool: Generative Artificial Bull, or GAB.
So to complement GenAI (GAI), I give you GAS and GAB. Perhaps not as aspiring as the “reach for the stars” potential governing the discourse today. But, I humbly assert, more realistic — and more likely to be true.
You may passionately disagree with everything I’ve said here. You can show me that I’ve got it all wrong. Perhaps I have. But I, like you, have one thing in common: we are the most exquisite learning creatures we know of, devised by nature or whatever sort of creator we choose to believe in, and populating a planet which (today at least) still harbors the best we can ascertain about life. We can have flashes of insight, strokes of genius, suffer greatly, and hold each other in hope, pain and joy.
We must therefore respect our human experiences and nurture these exquisite gifts, relegating tech to where it belongs. Enhancing and ennobling, rather than enslaving and inhibiting. Inquiring and exploring, rather than pushing buttons and waiting for results.
In short, we must think.
Our challenge will remain what it always has been — how to find the gold in the ore, the sparkle in the straw (as opposed to the turkey), the truth in the ashes. In other words, more than ever we need to determine when the conveniences of new tech will help us and when they should be avoided. We’ll need guardrails for all of this stuff, to protect ourselves from our own creations.
GAI, GAS, GAB — or even something else. It’s up to us to figure it out.
And this, dear reader, is enough Generated Human Words for today.
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(1) What started it all for me: “Life Reeked with Joy” — https://www.wilsonquarterly.com/quarterly/winter-2014-four-decades-of-classic-essays/history-past-life-reeked-with-joy followed by this gem: https://www.thefreelibrary.com/Hindsight+into+The+Future.-a059227645
(2) Apologies to “real” MSU’s, like Michigan State University. Please don’t take offense.
(3) Itself of dubious origin; see https://slate.com/culture/2019/11/history-is-written-by-the-victors-quote-origin.html
(4) Lest we forget: Martin Luther King, "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
(5) You can find examples easily enough, but think of DNA, automobiles, electricity, the space race, the race to get the atomic bomb, quantum computing, internet of things devices, blockchain…
(6) Oh, just search your favorite bookseller for titles that contain “Stupid.”
(7) You must think I made this one up. Au contraire: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/man-cooking-squirrel-lunch-sparks-fire-destroys-eight-apartments-flna1C6421348 And Traveler’s Insurance went after this guy’s partner, because she signed the lease and was legally liable for his deeds. Your homework assignment is to list out as many examples of stupidity as you can here.
(8) From the book by the same delightful name: “It Was On Fire When I Lay Down On It” — Robert Fulghum,
(9) Dexter Dias: “The Ten Types of Human” — reflections on why we do what we do. A marvelous read. In the context of this snarky article, I would counter (in some cases) with, “Because we’re stupid! That’s why!”). Also Robert Sapolsky: “Behave” — a brilliant exploration asking the same question.
(10) OK, don’t get smart: everything I’ve written, even this, has been written by my younger self. Sheesh. You know what I mean.
(11) Often widely criticized, with some merit, when we treat science more simply than the discipline demands. On another note, I have this weird image now of blasted former conclusions littering the road of progress like so much roadkill — is anyone going to clean this mess up?
(12) There’s a pretty endless supply of substitutes for “naive.” Play this game among friends. How many can you come up with? Misinformed, ignorant, unenlightened, operating with old information. Of course, there’s the tried-and-true “stupid” — which is, after all, what much of this article is about.
(13) Ever heard of steganography? You have, if you’re in information security. It’s information hidden beneath other information. You can hide secret information, for example, in a picture of a jar you put on ebay. Someone else, who knows you put it there, can extract it. Anyone viewing, copying, using the image will have no clue of this — unless they have a strange personality bent on decoding everything they see. For more, see: https://www.simplilearn.com/what-is-steganography-article
(14) All the more reason to disconnect, take a walk, and find things out on your own — see “The Joy of Finding Things Out"
(15) Next time you’re walking on the everyday world of your front lawn, the neighborhood part, or the nearest woods, consider this: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/more-than-half-of-earths-species-live-underground/
Or, to give a twist to the philosophy of recursion, perhaps it’s easier to think of the wisdom and life underfoot as turtles all the way down: Wiki on this famous reference and all its variants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down
(16) I’m old and getting older, to boot, so don’t go thinking I’m into an age discrimination thing here.
