AN ARTIFICIAL-INTELLIGENCE POLICY.

We see a lot of AI policies these days, and we’ll see more of them for a while. These policies are published in magazines and literary sites in a flailing attempt to define the limits of acceptable use for artificial intelligence. Some fora ban AI altogether. Others try to draw lines around the permitted uses of AI—you may use it for brainstorming and editing, but not composition; you may use it on Tuesday afternoons, but not Thursday mornings.

Here, for example, are AI policies for the Yale Review (427 words), Elsevier journals (2,653 words, but they have a separate policy for books), and Bloomsbury Publishing (2,432 words).

Dr. Boli predicts that these policies will multiply for a while, and then gradually recede and vanish as AI becomes the normal means of producing text, and the small number of eccentrics who still think for themselves begin to realize that the world has moved on. In the future, in fact, human composition will be restricted by similar policies, because it will be considered unprofessional and even dangerous to release text to the public if it has not been composed by a reliable bot. For example, the European Union has put laws in place that require disclosure of AI-generated content if it is published to inform the public on matters of public interest—unless it has gone through human editorial review. This will seem backwards in ten or twenty years, and regulations will start to require that human-generated content be disclosed unless it has been reviewed by a competent bot.

Meanwhile, in this brief moment when AI policies are the expected norm in literary publications, Dr. Boli has decided to publish one for his own Magazine.

It may surprise some readers to find that Dr. Boli will not just ban AI outright, even in his own publication. But he has no objection to the use of AI where it is beneficial. For Dr. Boli in particular, AI is beneficial in a small number of circumstances, such as transcribing text from a scanned page, or translating a language he does not understand. Composing written text is not one of those beneficial uses. It will always be easier for Dr. Boli to write what he means than to explain to a bot how it should write what Dr. Boli means. But there may come a time when Dr. Boli will have a bot write an article so that he can mock the bot’s writing style. For example, he had briefly thought of having one of the bots write this AI policy, just because the results seemed likely to be amusing, and because it would be “very meta,” as they say. As a rule, with the exceptions mentioned, the main uses Dr. Boli can see for AI bots are uses that lead to mocking the bots, and he reserves that liberty for himself and will not deprive himself of it by a hasty promise not to use AI.

It is Dr. Boli’s prediction that artificial intelligence will be used here seldom if at all. But a prediction is different from a policy. The latter is a promise to readers, not just a guess about what Dr. Boli’s mood might be on some future occasion.

So here is Dr. Boli’s policy for artificial intelligence in his own Magazine:

We will never make use of artificial intelligence to compose text or to create illustrations without clearly stating that we have done so.

That is the whole policy. It is brief, and its brevity is made possible by its simplicity. It ignores the question of which uses for artificial intelligence are legitimate, and it can afford to ignore that question because a strict application of the policy makes it possible for readers to decide the answer for themselves.

It also meets the strictest European regulations. There is probably a lesson here: instead of combing the language of the law to see what we can get away with, every once in a while it is less effort to understand what the law is for.

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TONIGHT ON DUMONT.

Space Carrack (science fiction).—When routine maintenance of the hyperjump confabulators goes awry, a wormhole opens up that sends the Mary Rose and all her crew into a strange parallel universe where everything is tangerine and aqua instead of orange and teal. 9 p.m. (10:23 Newfoundland).

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A FAMILY TALK.

Come sit down here with mommy, Olivia. We have to have a little family talk. Would you like a cookie? You can have a cookie. Pick any one you like. I know they’re not your favorite, but pfefferneuse are all we have right now. Or you could have a grape. Grape? Okay. Here you go.

Now, you know that, when you’re an adult, you have a lot of responsibilities. That’s why mommy goes to work every day, and daddy builds model airplanes. Daddy actually doesn’t have a lot of responsibilities, but then calling him an ‘adult’ is a bit of a stretch, so there you go. But mommy has a lot of responsibilities, and one of them is managing your Google account. No, I’m not saying you did anything wrong with your Google account. Not this time. I think you learned your lesson that time the Secret Service came to talk to you in Mrs. Dacy’s class. But the thing is, Google made some changes to the Google Play Terms of Service, and they sent me an email saying, ‘If you use Family Link to manage a Google Account for someone else, please take some time to talk to them about these changes.’ So I’m taking the time to talk to you, because I think it’s important for you to understand what to expect from Google Play—and what Google expects from you—when you use Google services.

You see, what happened is that Google updated the definition of Content in the terms to make clear that it includes system services (including, but not limited to, those provided by Google Play services). And it’s important for you to understand that, by continuing to use Google Play after these changes, you agree to the new terms. So if you don’t agree that Content should include system services (including, but not limited to, those provided by Google Play services), then you should stop using the Internet and go back to board books.

You’re okay with Content including system services (including, but not limited to, those provided by Google Play services)? Mommy thought you would be, but we had to make sure. Google has our best interests at heart, so when Google tells us to have a family talk, I think it’s important to do what Google says. Have another grape.

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WHY PRE-MODERN ART IS EVIL.

A few days ago, Dr. Boli wrote about the plaques that usually accompany works of art in museums these days—the plaques that tell us what we ought to think of the art, as well as who the artist was and what kind of art this is. He had noticed a distinct trend in those explanations: “Art from before the Im­pres­sion­ists” (he wrote at the time) “is likely to come with an explanation of why it is morally wrong, but an artist with ‘Modernist’ credentials seems to be exempt from moral examination.”

Why is that? It does not seem immediately obvious that it should be so. It is true that the past is evil in trendy intellectual circles, but the Im­pres­sion­ists and the Fauves and the Cubists and anyone else before about 1968 lived in that era of pure evil. Why are their paintings not tainted by their era?

Dr. Boli has been thinking this problem over, and he has come up with a hypothesis. It is just like every other hypothesis you hear on the Web or in social media of various sorts, in that it comes straight from the brain to the keyboard without any intermediate fact-checking or reconsideration. Where it differs from the others is in that it comes straight from the brain of Dr. Boli, and thus earns a place in his Magazine.

It seems to Dr. Boli that the use of the term “moderns” for everyone from the Im­pres­sion­ists on accurately reflects a fundamental change that came over the art world. This change, in turn, causes museum curators and other second-rate art critics to approach the art from before and the art from after in two fundamentally different ways.

Let us take a look at this delightfully amusing painting by Jehan Georges Vibert, An Embarrassment of Riches:

Un Embarras du choix

This was one of the Academics who sneaked into the “French Moderns” show at the Frick in Pittsburgh. How was it painted? For most viewers, the answer will simply be “I don’t know.” The painter certainly didn’t want you to know. The object in making such a painting is that the technique should be invisible. You should not be thinking about the painter wielding a brush. You should be thinking about what the painter has depicted. If you enlarge the photograph, you will not see brush strokes at all: you will simply see the blotchy artifacts of a high-ISO picture from a cheap phone camera.

Now let us look at this Renoir, The Vineyards at Cagnes:

The Vineyards at Cagnes

This was the painting used on many of the posters advertising the exhibition. You hardly even need to enlarge the picture to see the brush strokes. If you enlarge it, you will see not only brush strokes but also the texture of the canvas as it caught the brush. Every aspect of the painting reminds you of the brilliant painter standing in front of the canvas daubing it with gorgeous colors. The technique is, as the young people would say, in your face.

This is the great change that came over the art world. From the Imp­res­sion­ists on, the technique of the art was on full display, whereas the art of most eras before put all its effort into making the technique disappear in the finished product.

It is Dr. Boli’s hypothesis that the curators of today have lost the ability to parse art of the pre-modern age. They have very sensitive and well-trained eyes for technique; when the brush strokes are right there in front of them, our art experts can describe them and classify them with minute accuracy. But when the technique is made as invisible as possible, they have nothing to talk about. The thing that attracts their attention is the picture. And it is a picture of something, and therefore it is the something that they judge, and not the art.

Let us look back at the Vibert again. What do we notice if we judge it as a picture? We notice a number of extraordinarily clever things the artist has done. Note, for example, the mirror. It is a small canvas, so to make the obscenely rich cardinal the subject, the painter can afford only a small amount of background. The mirror, however, shows us the distant reflection of the opposite wall, with its rich gilt decorations. It is a way of painting a huge room without painting a huge room. Now look at the floor. Notice how the colors of the urn and the cardinal’s red cardinal suit and the details of the ornaments on the wall are subtly reflected in the expensive parquet, showing that the floor is perfectly polished and has had no more indelicate feet than the gentle pitter-pat of a cardinal’s red slippers on it since the polishing. Notice also the petals that have fallen from the bouquet, emphasizing how rich and huge it is: in spite of the obvious constant attention of the cleaning staff, it is not possible to keep up with so many petal-dropping flowers.

These are observations that might profitably be suggested on a plaque next to the painting, so that the gawking visitors might have some way of beginning to understand what the artist was up to. It is Dr. Boli’s hypothesis that they do not appear because museum curators simply do not know what the artist was up to. They have lost the ability to look at art of the pre-modern age and see it the way either the artists or the artists’ original audience would have seen it. They do not find brush strokes or garbage glued to wood or anything else that would be an obvious indication of the work the artist did, and they have largely lost the ability to judge composition and the various subtleties we just mentioned. Therefore their minds unconsciously fall back to the the subject of the picture or sculpture, and their judgments are about that subject, not about the artist’s technique. Then, of course, the dominant intellectual forces of our time assert themselves, and since the painting shows a scene from the past, our curators must make it clear that they have repudiated the wickedness of the past.

That is Dr. Boli’s hypothesis. It is probably all wrong, as most similar witterings whooshing through the tubes of the Internet are. But this is Dr. Boli’s own Magazine, and as editor he is qualified to decide which of his own witterings will be published. Today he had nothing else prepared, so you get this one.

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ASK DR. BOLI.

Dear Dr. Boli: Every so often I hear people talk about “the mysterious East,” as though everyone knew what that meant. What do they mean when they talk about “the mysterious East”? —Sincerely, A Professional Sinologist.

Dear Sir or Madam: They mean that, in spite of having some of the most delicious cuisines on the face of our planetary conglobation, ordinary people in China and Japan and nearby places have enthusiastically adopted American fast food. This is a mystery no ordinary theory can account for, and experts believe it can only be explained by quantum psychology.

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LETTER TO THE EDITOR.

Sir: When ideas have become outmoded and irrelevant, it is time to discard them honestly. Our progress is retarded by clinging to dated habits of thought that have outlived their usefulness. There was a time, for example, when flint-knapping was a vital survival skill, because it was the only way to come by the tools that everyone needed to survive. But now we live in a civilized society, where anyone with an Internet connection can just order a flint knife on Etsy. I have a drawer full of them, and I have no idea how they were made. In fact, I have no idea how they got in the drawer. I think they may have been left by the previous tenant. The point is that flint-knapping is no longer a skill we need, so we can turn our attention to more interesting and important matters.

This example shows us how to recognize when a pursuit is no longer necessary to the general population, and thus should be abandoned except by specialists. Thus we can see, when we consider the matter from an unbiased point of view, free from the shackles of sentimentalism and tradition, that it is time to abandon education.

There was a time, perhaps not so long ago, when education was a desirable and even necessary tool in a civilized society. But civilization has passed beyond that point. Just as we no longer need to knap our own tools, so the skill of thinking for ourselves is irrelevant and unnecessary. We do not need to know facts and dates in history, because our phones will instantly tell us any fact we need to know. We do not need to be able to add and subtract, because we have calculator apps on our phones. We do not need geographical knowledge, because map apps will use GPS to tell us every turn we need to make. We do not need to understand science, because the President of the United States knows enough science for all of us. We do not need to be able to express ourselves in writing, because AI will write for us. We do not need to be able to read, because our phones will narrate any written material to us, and simple pictographs convey whatever information needs to be ignored quickly on the highway.

Yet we continue to spend countless millions of dollars on educating young people, in spite of the obvious fact that no good comes of it. I assume we spend countless millions, anyway: I asked Gemini how much Americans spend on education every year, and it gave me a number, but I couldn’t even count all the digits in the number, let alone interpret how many millions it represented. So I asked it to explain the number to someone of my intellectual level, and it said, “A whole lot.”

Think of the things we could accomplish with all that money! Surely it would be enough to buy every American a new and better phone, for example. I don’t know how many Americans there are, but it has to be at least a few dozen, and yet I’ll bet the money we spend on education would be enough give them all really nice phones. Then they would have everything they needed, without spending countless hours in school surreptitiously scrolling on their phones when they could be proudly scrolling out in the open.

At present, the only thing that keeps us from abandoning education is the huge entrenched education establishment. It may be difficult to overcome so much inertia, but I have an idea. We can make the education professionals the first people to get the new and better phones. Then, when they are all properly distracted, it will be easy to close down and demolish the various schools all across the country, and ten to one the educators with shiny new phones will never even notice. —Sincerely, Brandon Pinch­mottle, President, Amer­icans Against Intel­lectual Activity.

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WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

Here is a little game for artsy types to play.

It has become the norm in museums to post explanatory plaques beside works of art, the plaques not only explaining who the artist was and where the work fits among the various artistic trends and fads, but also telling us what we are supposed to think of the art.

While wandering through the splendid “French Moderns” show at the Frick Art Museum in Pittsburgh the other day, Dr. Boli noticed a particular tendency among the plaques for the various works. The exhibition gathered a number of the Impressionists, the “Fauves,” and a few later modernists, but it also included half a dozen Academic artists as well to show us what the modernists were rebelling against. How, after all, can you understand Renoir without knowing about Bouguereau?

What Dr. Boli noticed was that the plaques for the Academics were likely to explain why the art was evil, whereas the rest—all the works that are usually lumped as “Moderns,” from the Impressionists on—would just explain who the artist was and what the artist was trying to do. The explanations might not be very good, but they were at least about the art.

Once he noticed this tendency, Dr. Boli realized that he had seen it on every recent trip to an art museum. Art from before the Impressionists is likely to come with an explanation of why it is morally wrong, but an artist with “Modernist” credentials seems to be exempt from moral examination.

Thus we can make a trip to the museum into a sort of guessing game, or perhaps an exercise in creative imagination. For every realistic or pre-modern work of art, we try to imagine what a museum curator would think was morally unacceptable about it.

Here are a few examples to get us started.

The Carpet Merchant of Cairo

The Carpet Merchant of Cairo, by Jean-Léon Gérôme. What’s wrong with this picture?

“Although his detailed rendering of two carpets lends this painting a documentary appearance, Gérôme’s stereotypical portrayal of an Egyptian vendor and brightly costumed passerby reveals his desire to appeal to European fantasies of the Arab-Islamic world. In France, such imagined scenes were interpreted as faithful records of an unchanging ‘Orient,’ helping to justify and obscure the harrowing transformations enacted by European imperialism within North Africa and the Middle East.” Now, it is also possible that Gérôme painted a Cairo street scene this way because Cairo streets looked like this. He had been to Cairo and toured Egypt and loved every minute of it. But we know he was a bad man, because he painted in a pre-modern style, so he must have been conniving with perpetrators of atrocities to hide the evidence of their crimes, which as everyone knows is most effectively done by pictures of men selling carpets.

Lady with Servant and Dog

Lady with Servant and Dog, by Jacob Ochtervelt (c. 1671–1673). Here is a charming little domestic scene showing everyday life in a Dutch household. But we know it must have sinister implications, because it was painted before anyone had even heard of Impressionism. What’s wrong with this picture?

The “boastful world map” in the background reminds us that horrible colonialists were perpetrating colonial horrors. It’s true that the canvas is small, so there are no clear details on the world map, but to possess a world map is crime enough in a seventeenth-century Dutch family.

Crowd marching toward enlightenment

Here is part of the long series of murals in the Grand Staircase of the Carnegie Institute, showing crowds marching toward enlightenment, which they will never reach because John White Alexander, the artist, died before he could paint the symbolic figures of the Noble Quartet (Art, Science, Music, Literature). What’s wrong with this picture?

According to a plaque on the wall, the crowd does not accurately represent the racial or economic makeup of Pittsburgh.

Pourquoi naître esclave ?

Pourquoi naître esclave ? (“Why Born a Slave?”) by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1868–1870).

Here is a bronze bust made as a deliberate rebuke of the enslavement of Africans. Surely, even in our age, when art is judged only by the quality of its political expression, this work must be above reproach. But no: it was sculpted in a pre-Impressionist style, and therefore it is morally compromised. What’s wrong with this picture?

“Created twenty years after the abolition of slavery in the French colonies (1848), the bust was meant to appeal to the antislavery views of a progressive white audience. Despite its seemingly sensitive portrayal of an individual, the bust nonetheless reinforces the objectification of the Black female body as an exoticized other…”

See? You can do it.

Now it’s your turn:

Innocence, showing a girl holding a young lamb

Innocence, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau.

You can answer in the comments: What’s wrong with this picture?

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