What We Should (and Will) Be Embarrassed By...

Introduction

Have you ever been sent a link to a New York Times article, and you click it, and it starts to show you the story but then pops up a paywall saying you’ve reached your limit of  free articles? And it’s infuriating because you haven’t seen a free article in like four years? So your limit of free articles is apparently zero? Well, I have a solution but you’re not going to like it: just cough up a bunch of money and subscribe to the Times … which I now do.

Well, at least there’s some good stuff in there. I read a fun column titled “Future Cringe: Things We’ll Regret About the Present,” for which they invited a few dozen guests from academia, media, and business—as well as a guest AI “writer”—to weigh in. With this post, I weigh in as well.

Why bother? Well, some of the responses were spot-on, such as how we’ll one day be embarrassed at having overused the word “journey” metaphorically, and at how we did too much with CGI in movies, and how we were generally reckless with our privacy online. But some of the other notions were off-base, like suggesting we’ll be embarrassed about ever having observed daylight saving time (which is in fact a highly useful convention), or about having worn “beanies and workwear because no one’s working and no one’s that cold” (contributed by a young woman who clearly doesn’t know how cold a balding middle-aged man’s head can get, and is apparently unaware that unemployment is at its lowest rate since 1969). And there’s the poet who wrote “It’s cringe not to have a New York Public Library card in 2023” (i.e., she evidently doesn’t realize most American’s aren’t eligible for this card). So I see room for improvement here. I’ll share my observations, starting, ironically enough, with a few cringe-worthy expressions the Times article’s contributors used.

(Is it okay for me to steal the Times’ concept here? Sure! First of all, they’re not the only ones to have this idea. Second, at least I’m crediting them with the prompt. They may have ripped me off, without crediting me, in their recent article about prepping for a colonoscopy. They suggested mixing the laxative drink mix with a Top Ramen flavor packet … a wacky idea I posted three years ago here. The only difference is I was obviously joking…)

Terms from the column that made me cringe

The phrase “cancel culture” appeared three times in the article. I’m already tired of this phrase, and even the word “cancel” in this context. There’s nothing that new about publicly shaming people; offenders used to be put in stocks. Our generation thinks “cancel culture” sounds clever but it isn’t. We’ll all realize this one day.

Cringe as an adjective: this came up three times too, with the person who said “it’s cringe not to have an NYC library card,” and another saying “professional clothing is … going to be so cringe” and “saying L.G.B.T.Q. is going to become so cringe.” At least the Times, in their introduction, used “cringe” correctly as a verb … why are so many people pretending it’s an adjective?

YOLO: I can’t believe a contributor used this acronym, especially in a column on current cultural trends that won’t stand the test of time. As I described here, the term “YOLO” was embarrassingly passé ten years ago.

My list of what we’ll someday cringe at

For one thing, I’m really tired of the phrase “lean in.” It’s just not that meaningful, and it’s become really trite and arguably patronizing. More than four years ago the Washington Post declared “the end of leaning in” in this article, which challenged Sheryl Sandberg’s overall message to women. The article also noted how, as even the president of LeanIn.org acknowledged, “the phrase ‘lean in’ has been used to mean many things — some of them very far from what Sheryl intended.” And yet I still hear “lean in” all the time. There are muscles in my face that are sore from all the eye-rolling.

Another thing I predict we’ll look back at with embarrassment is the promotion of cannabis like it’s some kind of healthy, holistic, responsible way to self-medicate for anxiety and other ailments. Bay Area freeways are studded with billboards promoting weed like it’s the next big “wellness” thing, like meditation or yoga or “just taking care of yourself.” I sincerely hope future generations return to seeing pot for what it is: a hedonistic drug that dudes like Jeff Spicoli use because they’re young and irresponsible and like to party. Marijuana is not part of a sensible adult lifestyle just because a growing number of states have been foolish enough to legalize it.

Perhaps hand-in-hand with the cannabis lifestyle is all this home food delivery: Uber Eats, Grubhub, DoorDash, etc. Isn’t it bad enough getting takeout because we’re too lazy to cook? Now people are so freaking lazy they can’t even run a 10-minute errand to pick up their food? Is it that their sweatpants are so grubby they’re afraid to be seen in public? Or they can’t find their shoes? Or maybe food delivery is all about catering to people who are too drunk or high to drive? Whatever the case, I find this trend depressing and hope somebody someday asks, “Why did everyone get so lazy back in the ‘20s?”

Moving right along, I really hope we eventually look back and shudder at how we parents have bullied our children into filling up all their time with organized activities designed to look good on college applications. As described here, one silver lining of the COVID pandemic, for my younger daughter, was that with so many formal activities suspended, she finally got to just hang out with her friends, whose schedules had historically been booked solid. Does it need to take a pandemic to free up these poor kids’ afternoons?

In a similar vein, perhaps we’ll one day regret, with a pang, pushing so many kids into STEM. As I’ve explored at length here, much of the hype around tech—and the antipathy toward more traditional fields—is inaccurate. STEM grads don’t earn considerably more money, and a study conducted by the United States Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics found that tech doesn’t actually employ more of the workforce than it did 20 years ago, and its share of the job market isn’t expected to significantly grow.

On a lighter note, perhaps Americans will eventually wince at the silliness of how automakers market their vehicles, with brands nested inside brands, e.g., AMC Jeep Cherokee Renegade Sport Unlimited. Do we humans really respond to that? Like, I’m supposed to feel better about my truck because it’s the Sport edition? Or the Unlimited? What does Unlimited even mean here? If my Jeep Cherokee is also a Renegade, does that make me even cooler?

Vitamin water has got to go. The idea that people are vitamin deficient is arguably bogus, whereas drinking one’s calories is an unequivocally bad idea and a huge part of our obesity crisis. At least if we renamed it “Stupid Water” people might not have to ask later, “What the hell were we thinking?”

Another behavior we’ll probably cringe at in retrospect is this trend of grown men and women zipping around on electric Razor scooters. Come on, people. Have some dignity.

Now, as I’ve argued before in these pages, anyone who uses a Keurig ought to be ashamed of himself. What a joke those things are. I hope everyone grasps that eventually, and the Keurig goes the way of those Space Food Sticks from the ‘70s.

Now, the next cultural circumstance I’ll mention isn’t exactly ubiquitous, but it does crop up from time to time: people who apparently cannot conceive of the reality that not everyone uses an iPhone. Someone will tell me, “Just get it from the App Store,” and I’ll say, “Is there an Android version?” and then I just get this blank stare of disbelief, as though I’d just said, “I don’t actually have any sex organs.” 

Speaking of tech, this brings me to my final prediction/hope: that one day we will be duly embarrassed by our current infatuation with A.I. It’s become impossible to look at a newspaper or magazine, or even have a conversation, without somebody raving about the latest, greatest A.I., particularly (as of this week) CHATGPT. In fact, one of the contributors to the Times article about future cringe was the CHATGPT chatbot, which wrote:

Overreliance on technology: Our overdependence on smartphones, social media and other digital devices will likely look outdated in a few years as new technologies emerge.

Man, this is just classic A.I. bullshit. At first glance, it seems impressive that it’s a fairly legit sentence, grammatically, and is pretty much on topic. But the statement isn’t persuasive in the least. It begins to assert that we are overly dependent on digital technology, but then instead of supporting this idea it wanders off into a pointless generality about new technologies improving on old ones. I mean, what technology doesn’t look outdated when it’s replaced by something newer? Isn’t that exactly what it means to be outdated? The statement is tautological and conveys nothing of value. It doesn’t deserve to be quoted in the Times, and in general I’m still unimpressed by A.I’s writing “ability.” Of course, with A.I. we might get off easy if one day we just look back with embarrassment. A.I. could end up doing a lot more damage than vitamin water, Grubhub, and “lean in.”

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Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? - Part 2

 Introductions

In my last post, I reacted to a 2019 New Yorker article about new machine learning technologies that, some say, will eventually enable A.I. to write magazine articles. Disturbed by this, I spent the next year gathering examples of Google predictive text and Smart Compose errors. My last post analyzed a few common failings. Below I continue the discussion, considering possible causes of stranger errors and delving into particularly problematic pitfalls.

Could A.I. be led astray by … humans?

Do you ever wonder if A.I. errs by replicating mistakes it learned from the content it trained on? Maybe that would explain this gaff:

I’m absolutely sure I’ve never typed “Logan” on my phone. So where did it come from? Well, the obvious next word you’d expect after “sawing,” which is “logs,” starts out pretty similarly to “Logan,” and the “a” key is right next to the “s.” So this could be a repeated typo, unless “sawing Logan” is actually a thing. (Except I just googled it … and it’s not.)

This is where the content produced by A.I. is on shaky ground. Vladimir Nabokov described pornography as “the copulation of clichés,” but he could have just as easily been talking about news, or what passes for it, with complete nonsense being repeated often enough to eventually be taken as truth. So it is, perhaps, with machine learning based on what humans are writing—or attempting to write. Perhaps if enough people mistype “sawing logs” as “sawing loga,” with predictive text suggesting “Logan” because that’s at least a character string the A.I. is familiar with, and enough people accidentally accept this suggestion, it could reinforce the “learning” to the point that the A.I. thinks “sawing Logan” means something. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, almost like “put the pussy on the chainwax,” except it’s not funny. A.I. text can’t be (deliberately) funny because there’s no creative human behind it to make it funny.

Apparently random gaffs

It’s not always possible to even hazard a guess at where A.I. came up with a suggestion. Consider the art of baking. There are a finite number of things you can bake: a cake, a pie, cookies. I don’t care what the context is … if you use the verb “bake,” these (or very similar nouns) should be the suggestions. But look at this:

Look, maybe there’s some psycho grandma out there who might bake, say, her grandson David. But bake another David? Okay, maybe she’s a serial killer out to get anybody named David. But “bake Livestorm”? How do you bake a webinar platform, especially if you’re a grandma who is presumably is not that tech-savvy? WTF!?

New check out this little zinger:

I’m not expecting A.I. to be well versed in Devo lore, but it could have reasoned this one out. Given the construction, “What, like you’ve never seen [whatever] …” most humans would correctly guess that the next word should be “before.” I don’t think any human would suggest “of diaphragm” in any situation. It is a decidedly useless phrase. Yes, we use our diaphragms whenever we breathe, but we never think about it. Nor, I expect, do the members of Devo.

My next exhibit is particularly damning when you consider what a terrible year 2020 has been, and how many times I’ve told somebody, via text message, “I just threw up in my mouth.” I guess my phone had been digging deep into widespread cardiopulmonary lore because it again went weird on me:

There are so many better candidates here. Threw up in my hands. Threw up in my hat. Threw up in my guest bathroom. And it’s trying to be helpful with “threw up in my respiratory?”

Failures of grasping context

This is where context becomes important. It could be that the A.I. was fixated on some Internet-wide phenomenon—say, articles involving COVID-related breathing issues—such that it ignored whatever I was writing about. This actually makes sense, because A.I. likely can’t consider all my sentences in the context of one another.

Here’s another suggestion that this Gboard predictive text application was preoccupied with respiration.

Look, Android, I’m talking about Amtrak! It’s a train! Clearly I was asking about the upper berth.

Now, I think we can all agree that really good A.I. should ideally look not only at who is composing the message, but whom he or she is sending it to. Why would the suggestion “me” ever make sense in the context below?

Android is driving the entire phone … couldn’t it easily rule out the possibility that my text recipient was also on the line with me? And isn’t that just common sense anyway?

In the case of my own texting, Android has an easy job because the majority of my text exchanges are with my daughter. With that in mind, the predictive text utility should be able to rule out any word that would take the conversation into an uncomfortable realm (i.e., that no father and daughter would ever pursue). Look at this:   

OMG. What kind of sick dad would pen something like that? “Congratulations honey … your birth control is working!” And here’s another doozy:

Look, Android … you should be able to figure out the gender of your phone’s owner. Well over half the population would never have cause to write “I guess I’m pregnant.” It’s not a very useful word most of the time, particularly not when a teenager is shooting the breeze with her dad. I’ve heard of people breaking up with a boyfriend/girlfriend via text, but who announces something as huge as a pregnancy via text?

Speaking of racy words that cannot apply to half the population, where was Android going with this?

It just makes no sense. Even if the pronoun in the sentence were “he,” at what hospital anywhere should the staff routinely wear a condom? And how did A.I. even think to suggest this word to me, when I haven’t had cause to think about, talk about , or use a condom in over thirty years? (Granted, as a father I do have a duty to mention birth control to my kids, but a) I’d never do it in writing, much less in a text message, and b) all males resort to euphemism in these cases, e.g., “No glove, no love” and “Remember the rule, protect your tool.”)

Now, let’s back up from an A.I. that considers both composer and recipient; can’t know the mindset of the people involved; doesn’t have the backstory; etc. The strange thing is, these epic fails even pop up when we’re only asking A.I. to go back to earlier in the sentence—that is, to not just consider the most recent word typed, but the one before that. It cannot always manage this. Look:

If you played a word association game with a human and started with the word “breast,” asking what word might logically come next, I can imagine that some would say “cancer” and some would say “milk.” But if you started with the phrase “chicken breast,” no human would think of cancer or milk. A human would say “sandwich” or something. Nobody in the history of the world has typed “chicken breast cancer.” (Okay, I just fact-checked this and it turns out there was a barbecue chicken breast cancer fundraiser once, in Nassau, Delaware … but this has got to be an edge case.) Ditto “chicken breast milk.”

When A.I. looks clueless and out of touch

As I stated before, A.I. couldn’t possibly replace real writers, who have insight and passion and actual intelligence, but perhaps it could do a journeyman journalist’s work someday. But for that to work, the A.I. must never seem clueless or out of touch. But look at these bonehead suggestions:

The A.I. didn’t parse the (non-) question beyond the word “what.” Thus, it completely missed the point—this was an observation, so appropriate responses would have been things like, “I agree,” “Word,” “I know, right?” and “Amen.”

Look, I get it that statements like “What grace and elegance” are easier in Latin, which has a whole construction (the vocative case) around such utterances (e.g., “O tempora! O mores!”), but any human could have grasped that my daughter wasn’t asking a question. There wasn’t even a question mark! I mean, duh!

But wait, it gets worse. My #1 predictive text pet peeve? I have a daughter named Lindsay, and look what the A.I. suggests every single time I type her name:

This is so maddening. I have typed “Lindsay” dozens of times in the past year and I have never accepted the suggestion “Lohan.” On that basis alone the A.I. should stop suggesting it. But there’s a much bigger reason to nix “Lohan”: Nobody is talking, emailing, or texting about Lindsay Lohan anymore. She is no longer a household name. This is not just my opinion. She hasn’t made a Hollywood movie since The Canyons all the way back in 2013. Was The Canyons the kind of critical and box office success that people are still talking about seven years later? Uh, no. It has an IMDB rating of 3.8 out of 10, and a Metascore of 36 out of 100; at the box office, The Canyons took in a domestic gross of just $56,825. The average movie theater ticket in 2013 went for about $8. That means this movie was seen by a mere 7,000 people. It almost couldn’t be a worse failure. Is this the kind of train-wreck movie offered to those who were once stars but have fallen too far to get a decent role and have to grovel in the gutter for anything on offer? Well, I haven’t seen the movie, but I have my guess, and it’s hell yes. The hapless Lohan’s personal and professional nosedive is just too sad for anybody to want to even talk about, so most of us are merciful enough to brush her under the carpet. But not Android! It’s all like, “Oh, did you just type ‘Lindsay’? You must mean Lindsay Lohan!” Puh-lease.

Is there an even worse way to show how out of touch you are? Actually, yes. Consider this final exhibit in the case of albertnet vs. predictive text:

What do you mean, “they say YOLO”?! Come on, nobody says YOLO! It’s like the poster child for being tone deaf culturally. Check out the urbandictionary.com definition of YOLO: it’s a feeding frenzy of abuse. One popular definition is “Carpe diem for stupid people.” Another is “the douchebag mating call.” A third definition simply states, “A term people should have stopped using last year.” The date-stamp of this third definition? 2014. The musician M.I.A. wrote a song called YOLO but by the time she was ready to record it, the term was already toxic so she rewrote the song as “Y.A.L.A.” (that is, “you always live again”). And that was in 2013.

First Lindsay Lohan and now YOLO? Is Android’s predictive text stuck in 2013? Machine learning, my ass!

To be continued…

Obviously, Google’s predictive text and Smart Compose aren’t the only A.I. text creation technologies out there, so this essay wouldn’t be complete without an exploration of other nascent platforms. Alas, I see I’m out of room here, so tune in next week when I’ll delve into my own experiments with these, including GPT-2, the technology that’s supposedly the closest to replacing writers.

Other albertnet posts on A.I.

• I, Chatbot
• Almost Intelligent – Part I
• Almost Intelligent – Part II
• Smartphones & Artificial Stupidity
• A.I. Smackdown – Moto vs. Cortana vs. Siri
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 1
• Could Artificial Intelligence Replace Writers? – Part 3
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 1
• A.I. Smackdown – English Major vs. ChatGPT – Part 2
• Schooling ChatGPT
• Will A.I. Steal Our Jobs?
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part I
• Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part II
• What is ChatGPT Great At (and Not)?
• Tech Reflection – Two Sides of AI
• AI Smackdown – ChatGPT vs. Copilot vs. Gemini
• More AI Smackdown - ChatGPT, Copilot, & Gemini Write Poetry

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