Posts by Dr. Boli

BOTSTYLE.

Posted by on . No comments.

It is always good fun to make predictions about our friends who are artificially intelligent and then watch the predictions not come true, and that is all the excuse we need for offering another one.

An email correspondent mentioned that she had been a bit put out when AI invaded her email. She had been ready to write a reply to a message from Dr. Boli when she saw that Google’s pet bot had already drafted a complete reply for her, plausibly human-sounding, and the bot offered to send the message off with one click and zero actual input from the putative author of the response. Is this the future? she asked. Will it soon be impossible to tell whether our correspondents have actually read and replied to our messages, or whether they have just let the bot do all their thinking and pressed the button without even reading their own replies?

Dr. Boli thought for a little while, and then gave opposite answers to the two questions. Yes, he wrote back, this is the future. More and more people will simply push the button and allow the bot to do all their thinking for them, because most people find thinking an unrewarding slog and will be glad to be relieved of that responsibility. But for that very reason it will be easy to tell which messages have been written by bots. They will all sound alike.

Right now, the purveyors of botty services emphasize how well the bots can imitate you. They learn your style, we are told; they write in your voice.

And that is true now to a certain extent. Large language models work by predicting what word is likely to come next. Give one access to all your accumulated emails and other writings, and by simple statistics it will start to sound like you.

But that depends on your having an archive of writings that come out of your own brain. Suppose you are one of the large majority who will be happy to accept whatever the bot writes and declare it good enough. From this point on, almost all your communications will be written by the bot. As time goes on, these botty effusions will form the majority of the communications that have gone out under your name. Older messages will fall victim to the various forces that cause old data to crumble away, and eventually your own unbotted writing will have vanished from the universe. The bot’s only models for “your voice” will be the things the bot itself has written.

This is a feedback loop, and a feedback loop always ends in a high-pitched squeal.

More and more of the world’s writing will consist of bots replying to bots. They will learn from themselves and each other, and they will all sound alike.

In the field of software documentation, this has already happened. Look at the descriptions of new projects on GitHub; look at the changelogs; look at the user manuals. They are all written by bots, with few exceptions, and they all speak in the same voice. And it is a distinctive voice. You quickly learn to recognize it.

That is the future of communication. It will separate the human writers from the bots very neatly, but—as we have already seen in the world of technical writing—the human writers will be hobbyists. Bots will be considered necessary for professional communication.

That is not necessarily a dismal future. Think how much you treasure a handmade sweater or quilt that no machine could ever duplicate. Messages you receive from people who care enough to write their own words will be messages you treasure the same way. Likewise, if you are one of the small number of people who still prefer to communicate in their own words, you will be regarded as a kind of prodigy. It will not increase you chances of remunerative employment any more than the ability to crochet an exquisite shawl will increase them. But it will earn you a kind of social awe, and that is worth more than employment in the long run.

MRS. CHESWICK’S EDUCATIONAL STORIES FOR CHILDREN.

Posted by on . 4 comments.

A long time ago there was a blue jay, but not really that long ago when you think about it, because after all birds didn’t evolve till the Jurassic period, and that’s practically last week compared to the Big Bang, but anyway it was a while ago, but how long isn’t really important unless he owes back taxes. And this blue jay’s name was Jonathan Jamison Jehoshaphat Julian Jambudvipa Jenkins Jay, but everyone just called him Mr. Blue. Now, one day Mr. Blue was out walking his dog, which is hard for a blue jay, but he managed it somehow. And by the way, if you were wondering what the dog’s name was, he was called Red, which was odd because he was a black lab, and personally I think it must have been some kind of joke, naming a black lab Red, don’t you? But anyway, Mr. Blue was out walking Red when they met an orange tabby cat named Blackie. And Blackie was nonplussed, because on the one hand he wanted to chase the bird, but on the other hand the bird had a big dog. So Blackie just walked on by, and that was the last they ever saw of him. So they kept on walking, and they came to their favorite coffeehouse at the corner of Maple and Fitzsimmons, and Red the dog said, “I’ll have a pork latte and a peanut for my bird.” And it turned out that Red was the master and Jonathan Jamison Jehoshaphat Julian Jambudvipa Jay was the pet all the time! And with a name like that! Isn’t that amazing? It just goes to show you.

POPERY UNMASKED.

Posted by on . 4 comments.

Removing the pope’s mask to reveal Satan underneath

There is something very amusing about vicious propaganda when it is so vicious, and so convinced of its own rectitude, that it can produce books with titles like The Romish Horseleech and mean those titles seriously.

The general premise of the Protestant anti-Catholic writers has always been that the falsehood of popery is obvious, and we need only hold it up to the light of day to convince people that it is obvious. That the Catholic Church might have reasons for its beliefs other than greed and outright satanism does not usually enter into our writers’ calculations. “Many are the errors and evils of Popery,” says the author of A Thunderbolt for Rome, “but the cause of them all is one only, namely, the withholding the sacred Scriptures from the people. The evils and sad effects of Popery are many, but the remedy and cure for them all is one only, namely, the free circulation and perusal of the Bible. The people need not to be admonished against the evils and idolatries of Popery; as soon as they read God’s holy Word for themselves, they will abandon it of their own accord.”

It is quite true that, in the past, the Catholic Church has occasionally been parsimonious with the Scriptures, keeping them out of the hands of ordinary people as long as it was possible to do so. The reason for the parsimoniousness was a belief that ordinary people are stupid, and left to read Scripture on their own will come to all sorts of daft conclusions. On the one hand, this belief is insulting and illiberal. On the other hand, it is objectively correct. We may console the Romanists for the current accessibility of the Bible in such a bewildering array of translations by observing that probably as many Catholic converts have gone over to the Popish side because of what they read in the Bible as Protestant converts in the other direction. Once you open the floodgates of Scripture, you must accept the consequences, and it is probably just as likely that a Protestant will become Catholic through excessive exposure to the sacred writers as that a Catholic will become Protestant.

None of our anti-Catholic propagandists would admit that, of course, and we can assume that they were sincere in their beliefs. They do not strike us as a bright lot. But our readers may judge the sincerity of these authors for themselves, because—as the regulars have already deduced—we have added a page of Anti-Catholic Propaganda to the Eclectic Library.

In choosing works for this collection, we were guided by the principle that they must be unintentionally amusing. There are plenty of dull works of theological argument that we could have added, but skipped because they did not amuse us. There are also plenty of works in which the anti-Catholic propaganda consists entirely of long quotations from Catholic liturgy, on the grounds, it seems, that simply exposing the Catholic liturgical books to the light and air would cause them to turn to dust. We have skipped those as well. We preferred to include only works that are breathtaking in their self-confidence, because pride goeth before a fall into a cake, as Mack Sennett could have told us. Thus the author who promises us that “This work contains, it is hoped, a complete refutation of Popery in a short space” is assured of a place in our collection.

At some future time it may amuse us just as much to collect a page of works of Catholic anti-Protestant propaganda. But it will be hard for the Catholics to stand up to the amusement value of the nineteenth-century Protestant writers we list here:

Anti-Catholic Propaganda at the Eclectic Library.

COMING SOON TO A THEATER NEAR YOU.

Posted by on . No comments.

The Phantom of the Operetta. Film version of the Broadway (Dormont) musical. When a production of The Desert Song is horribly mutilated by a tragic casting accident, Sigmund Romberg dons a mask and black cape and vows revenge. Not yet rated.