Ampersand Gazette #29
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A.I.: Actually Insipid Until It’s Actively Insidious
WASHINGTON—The alien invasion has begun. … I read that you could use advanced A.I. to interview historical figures. So I conducted my dream interview with Shakespeare, bantering with the Bard.
“Greetings, fair sir or madam,” ChatGPT said, embodying Shakespeare.
What is your response to those who think “The Merchant of Venice” is antisemitic?
“While it is true that some of the language and imagery used in the play may be considered offensive by modern standards,” he replied, Shylock “is a complex and multifaceted figure who is both villain and victim.”
The Bard of Avon, as he called himself, cautioned that while the Oscar-winning movie “Shakespeare in Love” was “whimsical,” “it should not be taken as a factual representation of my life.”
Can you write me a love sonnet?
He could, even though, as he said, he was “a mere machine.” One stanza read: “With eyes that shine like stars upon the sea, And lips as sweet as summer’s ripest fruit, Thou art the one my heart doth long to see, And in thy beauty, all my dreams take root.”
Shakespeare, it ain’t. Still, I tell him, I would love to be the heroine in a Shakespearean comedy! It took ChatGPT only moments to write “The Clever Maid.”
… [five-act play outline]
Sounds more like a Salma Hayek heist movie. I spent the rest of the afternoon soliciting love poems from John Donne, Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe, who called me a “telltale columnist.” I tried to channel Sylvia Plath, but ChatGPT told me that would be “inappropriate.”
The most entertaining mimicry was when A.I. Kendrick Lamar wrote me a rap: “Listen up, I got a story to tell, ’bout a journalist who’s sharp as a nail. She’s got the pen and the power, To make politicians cower.”
For now, ChatGPT is typing, not writing. The creative spark requires humanity. But soon, A.I. could be sentient. Then we’ll need our dog bowls.
from Maureen Dowd’s Opinion Essay in The New York Times
“A.I.: Actually Insipid Until It’s Actively Insidious”
January 29, 2023
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To the Editor:
Writing is a skill: It takes years to become an effective writer and many more to develop deep thought and personal style. In high school, I took a number of English and history exams, but none taught me more than the traditional essay assignment. With the time to probe deeply into my thinking and carefully unearth evidence, I discovered all sorts of worlds beyond the explicit nature of texts, and I had the opportunity to explain them fully while finding my voice.
Reforming courses by removing writing from the curriculum altogether (or forcing very quick writing), as described in this article, cheats me and so many students of the opportunity to invest in ourselves and our ability to think.
So, as a high school senior who’s staring down the prospect of a college education, I’m desperately hoping we can find a more nuanced solution for avoiding ChatGPT plagiarism.
Elizabeth Gallori
Brookline, Mass.
from a Letter to the Editor “How Will Chatbots Change Education?”
in The New York Times
January 29, 2023
So, there’s a question about A. I. that I have seen no one asking. That is, how is it possible that one of the first collective reactions to the new ChatGPT success is all about how humans could use it for nefarious purposes? Better, why?
Mind you, I’ll give the point to the cybersecurity folks. Their job is to assess cyber-risk, but when did we become so absolutely certain about the badness of human nature that suspicion is the first squawk out of the gate?
This reaction came from mainstream journalists. A lot of them. If we actually were to follow their premise to its logical conclusion, we would have to realize that anything—and I do mean anything—could be used for nefarious purposes.
I just finished reading a book on the history of board games. It’s part of my research for Jasmine Increscent, the second book in my speculative/historical fiction series, The Subversive Lovelies. In it, I learned that during the Second World War, the game of Monopoly was used to hide escape routes from German prisoner of war camps for English military. They carved shallow pockets into the board, inserted a map printed on silk, two rasps, fake i.d., and then reglued the usual Monopoly board image. They included Reichmarks in the Monopoly money, and sent them to P.O.W. camps under the imaginary aegis of Ladies’ Aid the War Effort societies.
Twenty-one thousand (yes, you read that right) Englishmen escaped those camps because of this strategy. Brilliant, I thought. But what did the Germans of the time think? They thought the game had been used for nefarious purposes. Are we then to conclude that one person’s brilliant is another person’s nefarious? Perhaps.
More to the point, Monopoly had no feeling about it one way or another. Neither does A.I. Neither, for that matter do the guns that have been used in the mass shootings that keep on coming with terrifying rapidity in the U.S. No, no feelings at all.
What matters in each of these cases, Beloved, is human. Human feelings and human intention. Human, not inanimate object, intention. I’m with Maureen Dowd: “For now ChatGPT is typing, not writing,” and with the high school senior: removing writing from the curriculum is a terrible idea.
At the same time, we must be clever, and conscious, about not only our own intentions, but those of others. We must take the time to discern our own, and we must invite others to share theirs. Will we be fooled sometimes? Of course, both by ourselves and by others.
I would submit to you that few of us, really, very few of us are deliberately nefarious in our intentions. Instead, I think humanity—because of what we inherently are—have benevolent intentions for everything. Even A.I.
P.S. I totally loved Maureen Dowd’s title, and the full text of her essay is totally worth your reading time and attention.
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“How is it that bookstores do justify themselves in the age of Amazon?” James Daunt, the chief executive of Barnes & Noble, asked during the Book Industry Study Group’s 2020 Keynote. “They do so by being places in which you discover books with an enjoyment, with a pleasure, with a serendipity that is simply impossible to replicate online. And to do that, you have to have a good bookstore.”…
Daunt’s view on e-book readers—of which Barnes & Noble has its own, the Nook—is that they aren’t quite the competition they’re made out to be. He recalls running Waterstones during the rise of the Kindle and agreeing to stock Kindles in-store. This seemed, to his critics, like selling the rope that would be used to hang him. He saw it differently.
“You e-read solely for convenience,” he said. “But the physical book is just a huge repository of pleasure. It’s hugely enjoyable to select a book in a nice bookstore that respects books. That’s just a real rush if it’s done nicely. As far as I was concerned, the e-reader would have people reading more, and the more people read, the more physical books they’d end up buying.”
from an Essay by Ezra Klein in The New York Times
“The Bookstore of My Dreams Is Not What I Would Have Imagined”
January 28, 2023
James Daunt demonstrates one of my all-time favorite metaphysical principles with his attitude toward e-readers. I’ll get to that, but first, let me confess. Whilst I would not characterize myself as an early adopter of anything, e-readers were the exception. I could hardly wait for my first Kindle.
At that point in my life, I was doing a lot of air traveling, and you’ll have to take my word for it, but lugging eight hundred-page books—Diana Gabaldon, anyone?—had gotten very old very fast. Not only that, but I was two kinds of reader.
I read for enjoyment, yes, and that meant I read fast, but I also read for research, which meant I read a little more slowly, highlighted like a fiend, wrote marginalia, and generally woolgathered as part of my fiction-writing research process.
That usually meant I had both pleasure reading and research reading with me at all times. Two eight hundred-page books are heavy! I won’t even begin to tell you what I took on my 23-hour flight to Taiwan.
So, yeah, Kindle. I remember the first time I walked onto the jetway to board a plane with a purse, and nothing else. A purse. Truth? I felt like I was already flying, so lightly was I traveling. Utter magic.
Back to Mr. Daunt, who—you’ll have to forgive me, but I must—was undaunted at the prospect of selling Kindles in his brick-and-mortar bookstores. How did he do it?
He said, Yes, and … instead of No, because …
When I was the head of Spiritual & Energy Medicine at a big medical center in Boston, a woman who I’d worked with was at her wits’ end about her Type-A husband. Trying to decide whether to divorce him, she brought him with her one day to see me.
When I joined them to do the session, his face was glued to his phone, his leg was twitching, he didn’t even look up. After a minute, though, and his wife very loudly cleared her throat, he did look up. He said, “So, yeah. You’re the spiritual lady, huh? Can you tell me what your spiritual practice is in one sentence or less?” Not quite hostile, but getting there. You know the tone.
I said, “Yes.” Then I stopped.
He snapped his fingers at me and said, now quite hostile, “Well, what is it?”
I didn’t say anything. His wife burst into laughter, and said, “She already answered you, darling.”
I said, in my deadliest voice, “Would you like me to explain further?”
“Yes, yes,” Mr. Impatience lobbed at me.
“My spiritual practice is to say Yes. So here’s how it worked in this situation. Yes, I said to myself, there’s a total asshat sitting in my office for a session being irritatingly rude to me. Yes.”
Suspended animation. Mr. Type-A’s jaw dropped. Then he laughed, put away his phone, and got down to the business of saving his marriage.
Now before you think I’m advocating being rude to your clients, I’m not, but what I am absolutely advocating is Mr. Daunt’s bookstore philosophy. In his case, Kindle was coming. Like it or not. Better to bring it close, and include it, rather than resist it. I too didn’t have a choice about the rude CEO; I included the rudeness and the gentleman in what was happening. Yes.
Not only that, Beloved, but that man ended up saving his marriage, and sending me many new clients because of how I’d faced him down. He figured if I had the um, let’s say nerve, to call him on his attitude, I’d be able to help him get his sales teams in line, and sure enough, I did.
A win-win, for us both. Just like Mr. Daunt and Kindle. A win-win for the pleasure of browsing through physical books and for e-readers alike.
Is there something you’re resisting including in your life, Beloved? Take a moment right now to consider how there might be a blessing in including it instead of resisting it. I’m betting you’ll be so glad you did.
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One-on-One Work
I’ve had something of an Aha! Moment about my chakra work and counseling.
As I’m sure you know, I’ve shifted my counseling to a short-term, subject-specific model. What this means is that I am working with people on one subject of their choosing for between six and twelve sessions, not on long-term daily maintenance issues. We connect to make organic, inside-out change, change that is desired by the person. It’s freed me up considerably to do more writing.
In terms of chakra work, it’s become clear to me that the way students most benefit from learning the chakra work I’ve developed is by doing, lack of a better term, a one-on-one hybrid of counseling/learning. The magic of chakra work is never, but never theoretical. It can’t be. It’s always applied. In fact, I’ve found that once the work is applied to oneself, it becomes easy to use it with others.
So if you are called to serve humanity as some kind of counselor, coach, healer, teacher, and are in need of a system to organize that service, my chakra work just might be for you. Find it here, and find me here.
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Teachings
I have two things in the works for chakra teachings. First, I am enchanted with the notion of tiny courses—these are slices of my chakra teaching in no more than 90-minute evergreen courses of video, audio, and worksheets. You might take one tiny course on the chakra colors and their meanings, and another on the chakra numbers and their meanings. These are in development.
I’m also considering giving a monthly Chakra AMA, as they’re known on Reddit: Ask Me Anything … Chakra-related. I’m not yet sure of the platform I’ll use, but I’ll keep you posted.
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Chakra Gift & Workbooks
Please be reminded that the Chakra less/MORES are always available for free here. Download one or the other or both and start your chakra work today.
And, the eight Energy Integrity Workbooks—
one focused on each major chakra—are findable here.
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And in publishing news …
I’m up past my hairline in research for both Jasmine Increscent and Shrew This! And Impending Decision is burbling away on a back burner as well. I have never researched two books, never mind three, at the same time, but there’s a first time for everything. It’s magic, and I’m having a lot of fun.
We’re reading Upending Tradition, Book 4 of The Boots & Boas Romances, aloud right now as part of our standard proofing process, and I’m hoping to publish it by the end of this month.
That will mean all books already written, that were, if you will, in the can, are out in the world, which will mean, of course, that it’s time to get going on the next ones. An author’s series are never done? Well, maybe not never.
In the meantime, Beloved, I urge you to adopt Yes, and … as a new policy in one bit of your life as part of our ongoing, shared task of being Ampersand. See you in two weeks, S.