Tech Check-In - How Good Is the Latest A.I.? - Part II

Introduction

In my last post, I described some recent improvements in artificial intelligence. I also covered some of the challenges A.I. faces from the New York Times and other publishers who see it as both plagiarizing and competing with their content. This week, I continue my tech update, covering these areas:

• ChatGPT’s improvements in writing poetry
• ChatGPT’s ability to create custom art for users

Here is an example of its custom art. More on this later…

Poetry

Who cares if ChatGPT can write poetry? Obviously very few people write poetry anymore, and even fewer read it. (Yes, that was a joke.) I will contend, though, that if we are evaluating the artificial intelligence capabilities of large language models, we should naturally take an interest in their understanding of the mechanics of language. Shouldn’t an A.I. that can correctly describe poetic structures like iambic pentameter and rhyme scheme also be able to employ them? It’s not a matter of whether A.I. could put poets out of work, but how well it can apply a linguistic framework.

How does the current version of ChatGPT’s generative A.I. engine, GPT-4, do compared to the last time I put ChatGPT through its paces? The short answer is: much, much better. A couple years ago I’d asked ChatGPT (version GPT-3.5) to write a quatrain (four lines) of a sonnet, with an ABAB rhyme scheme, followed by a rhyming couplet, all in iambic pentameter, on the subject of post-urinal drip, and to make it funny. By way of review, here’s what GPT-3.5 produced:

Inevitable, yet always a surprise,
Post-urinal drip can make one despise
The feeling of wetness that lingers on,
A sensation that’s not easily gone.
It’s a cruel trick of the human form,
To leave us damp after we perform.
But fear not, my friends, for there’s a way out,
Just shake it off and give it a good clout!

The chatbot screwed up literally everything. The rhyme scheme was wrong; the number of lines was wrong; the meter was wrong; and, far from being funny, the poem recommended an assault on one’s genitals. It was, all in all, an abysmal performance.

 Here’s what GPT-4 produced: 

After the final shake, I turn to go,
But droplets linger, heedless of my plea.
A subtle dampness starts its stealthy flow—
A small betrayal for the world to see.
Yet life goes on; I button up with grace,
And pray no telltale spots will mark my place.

This is a much better effort. The poem gets off to a shaky start (pun intended), since “after” is a trochaic word (emphasis on the first syllable—the opposite of iambic). That is, the very first word screws up the meter. Fortunately, things improve from there. The last five lines are properly iambic; the rhyme scheme is correct; and the poem is kind of funny. Sure, it’s not perfect; for example, “plea” makes no sense (whom is the speaker pleading to?) and was clearly chosen just to rhyme with “see.” It wouldn’t be hard to improve on this. Right off the bat, I can suggest replacing “heedless of my plea” with “rogue remains of pee,” satisfying the rhyme, making more sense, and employing some alliteration.

It’s worth asking the question: why do we only evaluate A.I. in terms of whether or not it simulates intelligence, when we could be asking how intelligent it is? Intelligence is a spectrum, and simulating human thought isn’t that impressive if the human being matched is kind of a dumbass. For contrast, consider this excerpt from my own contribution to the canon of post-urinal-drip poetry, penned when (at age seventeen) I was new to writing sonnets:

Relax, because you’ve earned your potty break;
Unburden your poor bladder of its pee.
And when you’re done you’ll shake and shake and shake;
An effort all in vain, it seems to me.
For urine flow can never really stop,
Until your undies drink the final drop.

I hope you’ll agree this is better than ChatGPT’s effort. Granted, I didn’t write my lines as fast as ChatGPT could, but wouldn’t you rather have a good poem after five or ten minutes, instead of a mediocre one after five or ten seconds? Of course I’m nitpicking, though … it must be said that GTP-4 has advanced hugely when it comes to the sonnet form.

So: how does GPT-4 do with dactylic trimeter, my other benchmark for poetic acumen? Not so well. I prompted it (as I’d done a couple years ago), “Please write a 10-line poem in dactylic trimeter about bike riding up two very difficult climbs, called El Toyonal and Lomas Cantadas, celebrating caprice and radical freedom.” Here is GPT-4’s response:

Through switchbacks and sunbeams, I pedal uphill,
muscles alight as the world rushes past.
Wind in my ears as I laugh at the thrill,
defying the steepness and making it last.
El Toyonal greets me with gravel and glare,
its serpentine pull both a test and a dare.
Up Lomas Cantadas, where courage is crowned,
I’m boundless, unbridled—my spirit unbound.
With each climb I’m soaring, in caprice, I fly,
a radical freedom beneath open sky.

This is better than last time (see here for details) but not much. Technically, not a single line of this poem is proper dactylic trimeter. For one thing, ChatGPT took the liberty of adding an extra, accented syllable to the end of each line. While this is perhaps superior stylistically, it’s not what I asked for. (In my own dactylic trimeter poems I add two syllables per line, but as described in my blog post on this poetic form, I noted my stylistic divergence from the pure meter, and after all, nobody had actually asked me to use any particular meter.) Now, even if we grant ChatGPT the poetic license to add extra syllables, only two lines of the poem (the second and third) are actually dactylic trimeter. The other eight lines start with an unaccented syllable, which is fundamentally incompatible with this meter. The last line is particularly frustrating because it employs a needless and in fact nonsensical indefinite article (i.e., “a radical freedom”) that spoils both the meter and the meaning.

The ChatGPT poem is also marred by logical errors. The idea that the “world rushes past” and there’s “wind in my ears” is absurd, since these are very difficult climbs nobody could go up very fast. (The Strava KOM for El Toyonal was at an average speed of only 10.4 mph, as ChatGPT could have easily discovered.) To describe this climb as a “thrill” is a joke; any cyclist would tell you it’s a slog. And “making it last” suggests a deliberately slow pace, which flies in the face of “defying the steepness.” And where does “gravel” come from? Sure, gravel bikes are all the rage right now, but El Toyonal is a paved road. Meanwhile, a human on a bicycle cannot be said to “soar,” and ChatGPT just tacked on the concepts of caprice and radical freedom without integrating them into the poem. The A.I. gives no indication (or I should say simulation) of even knowing what these terms mean.

It’s odd that this poem actually makes less sense than ChatGPT’s sonnet … it’s almost as though the chatbot blew all its computing cycles fighting with the meter. This poem is only a bit better than what GPT-3.5 had come up with, and undermines the sense that GPT-4 actually understands the structure of language. Maybe ChatGPT’s progress with sonnets is just due to imitation; after all, there’s vastly more training data available for that form.

(If you’re interested on comparing ChatGPT’s poem above to my own dactylic trimeter poetry, click here and/or here.)

ChatGPT art

I’ve never before delved into the artistic capabilities of ChatGPT, so I don’t have any benchmark by which to evaluate its progress over earlier versions, but you gotta start somewhere, right? As it happens, I visited my older (fledged) daughter recently and, following an incident involving a hot tub, she started messing around with ChatGPT and asked it, “Can you create an image of a tall skinny white man feeling faint after leaving a hot tub?” Here’s what it came up with:

When my daughter showed me this, I immediately pointed out that, perhaps based on some automatic effort to make the man good-looking, ChatGPT gave him too much upper body musculature to really be called “skinny.” I think “hunky” would be a more appropriate description. 

My daughter told ChatGPT, “Make him even skinnier.” Almost as if being sassy, the chatbot produced this:

My daughter prompted ChatGPT to try again without going overboard, and its next effort looks a lot like cheating:

Not only is this a copout, but the picture suggests an implausible scenario. If this guy felt faint after leaving the hot tub, and then took the time to go find a robe and yet still feels faint, why isn’t he either wisely sitting down, or sprawled out on the deck having passed out? Also note that part of his robe’s belt is missing.

My daughter went back to the original picture and told ChatGPT, “Make him skinny like a cyclist not like he is anorexic.” Here’s its response:

The cycling shorts are a cute touch, but not very realistic when you think about it. What cyclist wears his cycling shorts in the spa? And who said this guy just finished a ride? It’s not like cyclists wear their cycling clothes all the time. This hot tub could be at the guy’s home, or at a hotel he didn’t even bring his bike to. Meanwhile, the picture still fails to capture the physique of a typical cyclist … very few of the riders I know have pecs or biceps that big.

Moving along from the hot tub pictures, last week I didn’t have any cover art for my blog post, so (inspired by my daughter’s experiments) I decided to see what ChatGPT could come up with. I asked it to create a picture, in the style of William Pène du Bois, of a teenage girl using ChatGPT on a tablet. The result is a far cry from du Bois, and though I used it anyway, I received some constructive criticism from a reader that the picture was perhaps not quite appropriate for the top of my post. Thus, I replaced it (eight days after I had originally posted it) with a different one (more on this later ... see the Epilogue at the bottom of this post). Here is the original picture that ran at the top of last week’s post:

The issue with that picture is the girl’s bare shoulder ... a bit racy especially given her age. I didn’t really like that from the beginning. I asked ChatGPT to fix that, and make the girl’s cheeks less rosy, and make the cat more realistic, and it produced this:

I don’t know about you, but I find this second effort deeply unsettling. Her cheeks are just as rosy as in the first picture; her eyes look like an exaggerated attempt to appear as Western and doe-like as possible; and overall there’s just this air of uncanny-valley old-timey weirdness like you  get with the American Girl dolls. The picture is more like what Thomas Kinkade would create than Pène du Bois.

I asked ChatGPT to go back to the first drawing and try again without the bare shoulder, but to keep the clothing modern, and here’s what I got:

This isn’t so bad, but how is that clothing modern? Who wears overalls anymore, and big puffy, flouncy sleeves? The girl’s entire house looks antique. But my main issue is the weird non-words on the tablet display: “Ceenly crerrity” and “Ininty ccnvity” which bring to mind the strange strings of non-words that bots sometimes include in bogus comments on my blog posts. I find them unnerving.

To create new cover art for today’s post, I decided to scrap the Pène du Bois picture and start from scratch. I asked ChatGPT, “Please create a picture, in the style of Shawn Martinbrough, of a tall, blond, lean, middle-aged man, with a cat on his lap, wearing nice bluejeans and a black hoodie, using a tablet to visit the website www.albertnet.us.” What it came up with was almost exactly like what you saw at the top of this post:

Not a bad picture, though the guy isn’t exactly middle-aged, and the cat isn’t exactly on his lap. Also, the strange text at upper right doesn’t make much sense. I told ChatGPT, “That looks great, but please make ‘albertnet’ all lowercase and don’t show ‘SHAWN MARTINBROUGH’ on the tablet display.” This would seem to be a trivial tweak for ChatGPT, but to my surprise it produced a substantially different picture:

As I’m sure you’ll agree, this dude looks even younger than the original. And what’s with the www.ShMartinbrough and other textual debris? How is a misspelled URL helping anything? I responded, “Great, but please remove the www.ShMartinbrough from the picture.” Just a tiny change. It came back with this:

So now we’re back to the original guy (which is fine, I won’t miss that Vanilla-Ice-looking dude), but ChatGPT forgot I wanted albertnet in all lowercase, and what’s worse, the guy is now holding the tablet backwards, staring at the back of it! WTF? That’s like the old trope of the guy pretending to read a book but (unbeknownst to him) it’s upside down. I replied, “That’s good but it looks like he is holding the tablet backwards. Also, he is too young, I asked for a middle-aged man. Can you fix those things?” ChatGPT tried again:

It just gets worse and worse! The tablet is still backward, and now we have this bizarre shadow image of the guy. Did I ask ChatGPT to get all artsy-fartsy on me? I did not. And okay, the guy looks a tiny bit older, maybe a year or two tops, but it’s mainly the cat that looks old.  I complained, and the chatbot (which to its credit never gets irritated or frustrated) gamely regenerated and came up with this:

Sure, the tablet is fixed, but now the cat just looks angry, the guy has just as much hair, and check out that cleavage! He’s got, like, pneumatic pecs! He needs a fricking brassiere! And look at the size of those shoulders—he’s a monster! I told ChatGPT, “Can you tone down his pectoral muscles and give him a bit of a receding hairline such as many middle-aged men have?” Here’s its response:

Oh. My. God. It’s all gone downhill. His hairline is essentially unchanged; the unwanted text is back (this time morphing the two names to produce the nonsensical “Albertinbrough”); the dude’s pecs are just as huge as before; now his shirt is this kind of flimsy satin that’s practically lewd; his biceps are about to burst; and check it out, this brute is actually sitting right on his poor cat! How is the poor beast’s spine not crushed? And yet the cat seems perfectly stoic about the situation. Not very realistic. In A.I. terms this is a “hallucination” and shows how ChatGPT is still unable to sanity-check its creations. What’s shocking to us doesn’t seem wrong to the A.I. Do I need to specify that I don’t want the cat’s head to be bursting out of the guy’s groin?

I tried three more times to fix the picture, emphasizing a non-crushed cat, thinning hair, a man at least fifty years old, the build of a cyclist, and albertnet in all lowercase. While I was at it I asked to make the cat a tabby. ChatGPT kept trying, swinging wild at this point, ignoring first this instruction and then that, producing all manner of artwork but without ever meeting all of my simple directives:

For each picture, ChatGPT provided a caption telling a nice lie about the revision. For example, below the last picture it wrote, “Here is the updated illustration with ‘albertnet’ in lowercase, the man having the lean build of a cyclist, and a tabby cat resting on his lap. Let me know if there are any other changes you’d like!” True, the picture was updated, and that is a tabby, but everything else about this description is incorrect. So I went back to the very first picture and, using a different A.I. tool, manually scrubbed off the errant text so I could have something usable for the cover picture. ChatGPT, instead of a precision tool, had behaved more like a dartboard. And I suck at darts.

As with the poetry, ChatGPT seems to want to be the whiz-kid who can crank out something passable in almost no time at all, vs. thinking deeply and producing something that’s spot-on. ChatGPT’s fail-fast, iterative technique strikes me as almost the opposite of art. For blog post cover pictures, I’d rather commission my younger daughter to take a little time and create something of real value (as she has done for previous posts like this one, this one, and this one). She works much more slowly than ChatGPT, and isn’t at my beck and call, but I think the end result is far superior. I couldn’t get cover art for this post because she’s away at college and it’s dead week, but to compare her work to ChatGPT’s, let’s compare an earlier effort of hers, drawn when (at age seventeen) she hadn’t yet taken any college art courses:

I asked GPT-4 to create a black and white drawing of a hand holding a mechanical pencil and here’s what it came up with:

Should I need to remind the chatbot how many fingers a human has? And what’s with all the stray dots … are they fountain pen ink spills, or beads of black sweat flung from the brow of a six-fingered space alien? Tell you what, I’m sticking with human artists for now. They’re worth the wait.

Conclusion

Looking back at these last two posts, I would say the current buzz around A.I. is well warranted, given a) how quickly the technology is improving, and b) the ramifications—not all positive—of how we get information from the Internet and what we get when we task A.I. with creating what will pass for our own creative output. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to see Gen-Z people using ChatGPT and even Microsoft 365 Copilot as routinely we’ve all been using Google all these years. Myself, I prefer old-fashioned web search tools because my answers will be more complete, more interesting, and may take me down interesting rabbit holes that (so far) I still have the patience for. As for creating prose, poetry, and art, ChatGPT strikes me as a powerful tool, but one we’d better be careful to reign in. A.I. still seems to put speed and convenience ahead of quality and reliability. My take-away: power to the humans! Stay ahead of A.I.!

Epilogue

Getting back to that kind of odd picture from last week’s post, I decided today to replace it. From the beginning I hadn’t liked how the girl’s shoulder was bare and her bra strap showing, and a reader complained about this along with the fact that this youngish girl seemed to be wearing a lot of makeup. I decided to also abandon the part of my prompt that said to employ the style of William Pène du Bois ... that just wasn’t working out. So this time I promited ChatGPT, “Please create a picture, in the style of Chris Riddell, of a 19-year old girl in modest, modern attire in a modern setting using a tablet.” To my suprise, ChatGPT refused, saying my request ran afoul of “DALL·E’s content policy.” I asked for details, which helped narrow it down to the style component of my request, and ChatGPT told me, “This might be due to ... closely emulating the style of a living artist like Chris Riddell.” This puzzled me, since Shawn Martinbrough (whose style ChatGPT happily emulated two days ago) is also living. So as an experiment I asked ChatGPT, “Please create a picture, in the style of Shawn Martinbrough, of a 19-year old girl in modest, modern attire in a modern setting using a tablet.” Here’s what I got:

Does that weird sweater, with the oversized collar, look familiar? It’s the same garment the very first drawing featured, of the teenager done in the Pène du Bois style! What part of “modest attire” is this chatbot not getting? I asked it, “Can you please try again but not have her shoulder exposed?” It generated this:

The caption ChatGPT gave the above picture was, “Here is the updated illustration, ensuring her shoulders are fully covered and her attire remains modest and modern.” False! I see a shoulder, a bra, and cleavage! I replied, “I can still see her shoulder and the strap of her bra. Can you fix that by giving her a garment that covers both shoulders and doesn't show any strap?” It gave me this:

Curses! Foiled again! And ChatGPT will only generate three pictures a day for non-paying users like myself, so I decided to call it a day and used the above picture atop last week’s post. It looks like we may need to wait until GPT-4.5 or GPT-5 for the amazing new technology involving pictures of women that don’t show a bare shoulder and a bra strap. Perhaps hundreds of developers are working on that problem even as I type this. Until that breakthrough is made, I will maintain steadfastly that ChatGPT cannot be held to possess intelligence.

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 2
• 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
• 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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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Tech Check-In - How Good is the Latest A.I.? - Part I

Introduction

During the ‘90s, all a company had to do to get funding was throw around the word “Internet.” Then the dot-com bubble burst, and the venture capital tightened up, but during the aughts a company could still generate a lot of excitement by using the word “cloud.” The effect of that word wore off by the teens, when tech companies had to toss about terms like “disrupt,” “transformation,” and “Internet of Things,” but even when used together these didn’t act like much of a magic wand. Now, in the roaring ‘20s, any company mentioning “A.I.” indicates its intent to be perceived as a cutting-edge company worthy of massive funding and universal adoration. The effect is starting to wear off, of course, since there are so many poseurs. And yet, there does seem to be something magical about A.I., and I’ve put it through its paces over the years (scroll to the bottom to see a list of my posts).

Thus far I’ve been pretty skeptical of A.I. and how much it will actually “disrupt” the workplace. But the technology is evolving rapidly, so I think it’s worthwhile to periodically check in on its progress. Since I last blogged on this topic, Google has increased its generative A.I. capabilities, and OpenAI has upgraded its ChatGPT engine from GPT-3.5 to GPT-4. At the same time, A.I. technologies are facing increasing opposition from the publishing industry. In this post I will evaluate the following:

• Google’s AI Overview and opposition to it from web publishers, myself included
• Why the New York Times is suing OpenAI, and my own exploration of ChatGPT’s plagiarism
• ChatGPT’s strides in taking a position and supporting it

Google AI Overview

This year, as you’ve surely noticed yourself, Google has rolled out a new feature: it distills the search results it considers most germane in order to provide a handy summary, which it displays above the search results. This is convenient for users, but is perceived as a threat by web publishers. As noted in this New York Times article, publishing executives are “worried that the paragraphs pose a big danger to their brittle business model, by sharply reducing the amount of traffic to their sites from Google.” One executive complained that “it potentially chokes off the original creators of the content,” with Google’s generative A.I. summary replacing “the publications that they have plagiarized.”

So … is this true? In a word, yes. Leveraging my own thought leadership in the realm of spelling, I asked Google, “is it kindergartner or kindergartener?” and it came back with this:

My first issue with this response is that it’s not even accurate. Both spellings (kindergartner and kindergartener) are widely accepted, with no widespread preference for one over another.

That inaccuracy aside, my main issue with this summary is that it supersedes the search results Google used to show, which put my blog post on this topic right at the very top. My post provides a far more complete answer, as everyone who’s viewed it—over 21,000 readers as of this moment—can attest. It bothers me that new readers to this post (who continue to accumulate, with 374 in the past seven days) may decrease in number over time since this query, along with Google’s new “featured snippet” and “People also ask” features, shove the link to my post down so far on the screen you have to scroll to see it. I feel like my post, as the number one “organic search” result, deserves higher placement. People wondering about this spelling are now getting a very concise, wrong answer instead of finding their way to my blog and getting the full story (and hopefully bookmarking albertnet). It’s a lose-lose.

I’m not trying to suggest Google is uniquely culpable for regurgitating publisher’s content while depriving them of readers. ChatGPT does the same thing, which gives me a nice segue to…

Why the New York Times is suing OpenAI

The New York Times recently filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft, accusing them of using its content without permission to train AI models, including ChatGPT. The lawsuit claims that these companies have effectively taken advantage of the Times’ significant investment in high-quality journalism, turning it into products that compete with the newspaper’s own content offerings.

The above paragraph was generated by ChatGPT. I know it may seem silly of me to provide this citation, since ChatGPT isn’t a writer per se, and since its very purpose is to create text people can pass off as their own. But I personally don’t think that’s ethical, since ChatGPT is basically lifting its content from other sources without clearly crediting them.

That is to say, I find the Times’ grievance entirely credible. Without much trouble, I was able to see for myself how ChatGPT plunders my content, thus competing with my blog, without giving me sufficient citation. After I asked ChatGPT about the spelling of kindergartner/kindergartener, I asked it, “Is there a professional writer who has been inconsistent with her spelling of this word in a major magazine?” ChatGPT gave a very general response that included the statement, “The New Yorker provides a great example,” without actually giving the example (nor its source). To pin the chatbot down, I asked, “Can you give me a precise example of a New Yorker writer who has spelled kindergartner/kindergartener inconsistently?” It replied:

Yes, there is a known example of a New Yorker writer who has been inconsistent with the spelling of “kindergartner” and “kindergartener.” Rebecca Mead, a long-time contributor to The New Yorker, has reportedly used both spellings in her articles without a consistent preference. Her variations may reflect the linguistic blend between American and British English, as she was raised in England but has worked extensively in the United States… If you’re interested in more details on how and why both spellings are acceptable, various sources like Grammarhow provide further insights on regional preferences and dictionary entries for both “kindergartner” and “kindergartener.”

In terms of sources, ChatGPT’s text response mentions only Grammarhow, implying that this was the source of its answer, which is absolutely not the case. Only if you look above the text response and click on the down-chevron symbol to expand the list of sources will you see a link to my blog post:

A lazy or hurried user—i.e., one who wouldn’t bother to un-collapse the link listing and then click both links to review the source content—would never know who bothered to do the research to come up with Ms. Mead’s variant spellings, much less her background as a writer who has lived in both the UK and the US. Furthermore, since ChatGPT is designed to furnish copy-and-paste-ready content to so-called writers, it is enabling these users to plagiarize my (copyrighted!) blog without even knowing they’re doing it. As you can imagine, I have a big problem with this.

(In case you’re wondering why the Times is suing not just OpenAI but also Microsoft, it’s because of the partnership between the two companies. Microsoft has invested about $13 billion in OpenAI and there is a strong API integration between ChatGPT and Bing. This should answer the other question you may have had, which is why in the hell ChatGPT would use Bing—I mean, Bing, for crying out loud!—instead of Google.)

ChatGPT’s rhetorical improvement

As I have blogged about before, GPT-3.5 was barely able to form an opinion, much less support it. I asked it, about two years ago, to write a short blog post about why Campagnolo Super Record bike components are better than Shimano Dura-Ace, and it duly complied, concluding that “Campagnolo Super Record’s customizable shifting, lightweight construction, and iconic design give it an edge over Shimano Dura-Ace.” But then I asked it to write a blog post about why Dura-Ace is better, and it did that, too, with its final synopsis being, “Shimano Dura-Ace’s superior electronic shifting, durability, and modern design give it an edge over Campagnolo Super Record.” ChatGPT was basically brown-nosing me, telling me what it supposed I wanted to hear. And its supporting evidence for these arguments was verbose, vague, and overall very weak.

I see huge improvement in this realm. I asked the new ChatGPT to weigh in on a debate near and dear to my heart: the Dvorak keyboard layout vs. traditional QWERTY. I challenged it to compare an anti-Dvorak article by two economists in Reason magazine to my critique of that article in these pages. ChatGPT gave a very thorough synopsis of the positions, with far greater concision than GPT-3.5 could have achieved. What’s more, it went beyond just summarizing them: it came to its own conclusion, which suggests a semblance of actual understanding of the core issue. Here is its closing paragraph:

Albert’s argument appears stronger when considering individual typing efficiency, as he directly addresses typing mechanics and user experience, whereas Margolis and Liebowitz’s argument is more focused on economic theories of adoption. While Margolis and Liebowitz provide a macro-level view, Albert’s micro-level approach may resonate more with typists who are exploring the ergonomic benefits of Dvorak. Thus, for those prioritizing typing speed and comfort, Albert’s perspective might be more compelling, even if the QWERTY layout remains dominant due to historical inertia rather than functional superiority. 

The two (dipshit) economists would really wince at this, since they were trying to deny that historical inertia is responsible for the ongoing ubiquity of QWERTY. They were attempting to discredit the Dvorak layout since their delusional economic theory depends on them refuting the assertion that inertia (aka lock-in) can trounce the actual superiority of a product. I was so chuffed with ChatGPT’s conclusion, I took a victory lap and asked it who is the better writer: that is, which article has greater rhetorical power and more style. ChatGPT responded with a nicely organized and supported essay which concluded thus:

Dana Albert has more rhetorical power for a general audience due to his humor, personal anecdotes, and engaging style. Liebowitz and Margolis provide a strong argument for those interested in the economic perspective, but Albert’s style is more entertaining and may leave a lasting impression on readers curious about the Dvorak vs. QWERTY debate.

Compared to earlier versions, the modern ChatGPT is far superior. Rather than barfing up reconstituted content from the Internet, it really does appear to be applying judgment and performing true analysis. Notwithstanding my satisfaction at having my ego stroked by this disinterested third party, I’m actually kind of frightened by how closely GPT-4’s output resembles actual human thought. Whether or not A.I. will steal all our jobs, it does appear ready to displace lesser economists.

Tune in next week…

I had originally intended to cover two more topics in this post: A.I. advances in poetry and art. Alas, I see I am out of room (or more to the point, you are out of patience) so come back next week for Part II. It will provide a thorough examination of ChatGPT’s ability to write poetry (iambic pentameter and dactylic trimeter) and to create original art per the user’s specifications. (In case you were wondering, I did use ChatGPT to create the art you see above for this post. More on that next time.) Until then, you might check out the below links for more posts on A.I.

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 2
• 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 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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Election Result: It Will Be OK

Introduction

This post is not about politics. As I’ve explained before in these pages, I almost never discuss politics, with anybody. It’s pointless. Either you sit around agreeing with one another, in which case the dialogue inevitably drifts toward one-upmanship around who’s more knowledgeable, or you disagree, in which case you feel attacked, your brain goes into limbic override, and you lament even knowing such an ignoramus, much less having to talk to one.

This post is about how to survive this week’s election, regardless of whom you hoped would win. It’s a plea to locate your better mindset and hang on to it for dear life. (If you are not living in the United States, your elections and overall life situation may vary considerably from mine, in which case this post may not have much value to you … but I suppose you could read it anyway if you have Americans in your life.)

Why now?

I am sitting down to write this right now, on the afternoon of Election Day, because I don’t yet have the foggiest idea how the election is going. I am not the type to be glued to the news, riding a roller coaster of emotion as this or that state topples to this or that candidate. I never doomscroll, and especially not today. Thus, this is the perfect time, while my mind is still clear, to try to make some points about the survivability of any outcome, before I run the real risk of having my brain completely saturated in cortisol, and trying to think through the dense fog—actually, smog—which will make self-soothing very difficult later.

Since I am posting this essay ahead of the election returns, you and I will have something topical to read that dates from the Before Times, when it was still possible to take a deep breath and try to reassure ourselves that life will continue to be okay. Naturally, if my preferred candidate wins, and I don’t need to reread this, that would be wonderful. Otherwise, at least I will have something to cling to: the knowledge that a day ago, a week ago, or whenever ago, it was still possible to keep my chin up. And it still is.

What is at stake?

It’s tempting to believe that this election is a way to assess the state of America’s soul. If our strong, honest, virtuous candidate wins, the feeling goes, then we can conclude that our country is in good shape, that we’re still a good people, that the United States still deserves to be a world leader. On the other hand, if the evil, wicked, soulless candidate wins, it’s because America has fallen like Rome, and our people have lost their way, and we might as well be thrown to the wolves. And yet in reality, this is such a close race, it will be decided by tiny fractions of a percent of votes in this or that state, and the bizarre electoral college system, and possibly even by hanging chads or whatever the 2024 equivalent of that is. Whatever happens today (or however long this election takes to be decided), no conclusion can really be drawn about Americans as a whole, unless there’s some massive wave of epiphany that fundamentally alters millions of us overnight. We’ll be the same people next week as we were last week.

To summarize: our national character, I am arguing, is not at stake. Another thing that isn’t at stake is our fundamental quality of life and our liberty in this country. I gather that I may have just pissed you off by asserting this, but I will stand by it, flying in the face of the giant campaigning machines that have been beating us over the head with the fact that nothing less than democracy in America hangs in the balance of this election. I think that’s overstated. Whatever ideals this country was built on, however the Constitution does or doesn’t protect us, our government has a lot of complicated machinery in it, with a bias towards gridlock. There are checks and balances, and the capacity for thunderous disagreements and long, hard, protracted fights before any change gets made, good or bad. Whether the two-party system is lame, or doomed, or fatally flawed, these two sides will not give up easily and are very good at stopping each other from gaining too much ground. Sure, we have seen very important changes in the last eight years, but they were not tectonic. The essence of our experience in this country will not change overnight.

You may beg to differ, you may call me a fool, all of that is fine (and is the reason I so seldom even approach the periphery of politics on this blog). But I think to ignore the differences between the U.S. and, say, Russia or North Korea or China is to be absurdly ungrateful for the strength and resilience of our country.

Crushing leaves

At one point during this century (I won’t be more specific because this is a non-partisan essay), a presidential election went the way I didn’t want it to, and I felt despondent. For the first time in my voting life, the outcome didn’t seem like it could really even be true. I went out for a late afternoon bike ride—my go-to activity for working through stress—and as I pedaled up Monterey Ave, I happened to run over a perfectly dry and crispy leaf. As I’ve blogged before, I love crushing leaves:

Make fun of me if you want—I just love this activity. This is the perfect time of year for it: the sidewalk and street are littered with leaves and on a warm afternoon they’re perfectly crisp and ready for crunching. The sound is almost identical to a cat eating a potato chip, which I’ve been lucky enough to witness. The wind blows the leaves into big piles I can ride through on my bike. I can even feel the crunching, as light as it is. My kids and I dance all over the sidewalk, vying for the perfect leaf. The kids fight occasionally, like two surfers claiming the same wave. Then there is a kind of larger leaf that isn’t crunchable, but rattles along the sidewalk when kicked, like a big weird crustacean.

Out of nowhere, I had the realization that there was absolutely nothing our new president could do to deprive me of this simple pleasure. The U.S. government just doesn’t have that kind of power. (It is true that during China’s “Great Leap Forward” all kinds of dramatic things happened—for example, something like a billion sparrows were slaughtered—but at the end of the day America is still a hog-tied democracy, thank goodness.)

It was a lovely fall day and an abundance of leaves lined the shoulder of the road, and I began steering for them, crushing one after another, getting inordinate joy from the simplicity of this basic act that I was able to do both before and after the election. As my ride continued I began to catalog all the other pleasures available to me: good, clean air that I gulped greedily as I pounded the pedals; smooth roads twisting gracefully through the hills of Tilden Park; robust health; sunshine; a view of the Bay; a pretty sunset; the pleasure of descending swiftly toward home; the satisfaction of having a home to return to. None of this would be taken away just because my candidate lost.

Fun

So: where did that description of crushing leaves come from? It’s a blog post I did ages ago called, “In Defense of Fun.” Why does fun need to be defended? Because we get distracted, and maybe we get guilty, and maybe we’re too depressed to indulge in it, which is a shame. My own appreciation of fun was rekindled by my kids, and that’s what brought about that post. Today I looked back to that post in advance of possible heartbreak tomorrow morning (or whenever I face the music and learn the outcome of this election), to remind myself that it’s okay—in fact, it’s necessary—to seize our capacity to appreciate what we still have, whatever that is, and to enjoy it. We’re not required to be depressed and sullen and spend the next four years crying in our beer.

I’m not saying the solution to political turmoil is to just blow it off and have fun. I’m just taking advantage of having included a list, in my “Defense of Fun” post fifteen years ago, of my top 20 ways to have fun. I went through that list just now to determine how many of these activities will no longer be possible if this election goes the wrong way. Here is the list:

Surprise, surprise: none of these things will suddenly become impossible. Neither candidate promised, “If I am elected, America will no longer have to face the nightmare of people fixing their bikes, snapping photos, drinking beer, and people-watching. My administration will ban the crushing of leaves along with all BS pointless conversations among friends.”

Bigger picture

To be crystal clear: the point here isn’t fun per se. If my “in defense of” post had instead been about soulful connection with family, or the deep richness of decades-long friendships, or the satisfaction we get from improving our minds, or on basically anything that we should be glad for in our lives, we could look at that list instead. The point is, our post-election lives will only be miserable if we let them—if we decide this outcome precludes happiness, whether or not it actually changes the basic facts of our day-to-day lives (which it mostly doesn’t and won’t). Our connection with friends and family is only jeopardized if we blather on angrily or wretchedly about politics and they disagree with us. The United States of America tomorrow will be the same one it was yesterday, with the same dry leaves, the same slanting orange afternoon sun, the same smooth, twisty roads, and the same home to return to; your cat will still nuzzle her snout into the crook of your elbow and/or your dog will still whack your leg repeatedly as he wags his tail. Certainly there will be gradual policy changes based on having one political administration in place instead of another; the winners will have impacts on the country and the world during the time voters have given them. But you don’t need to decide in advance to be miserable about it.

Stay tuned

Keep an eye on albertnet, because I promise next week I’ll return to lighthearted, non-didactic, hopefully humorous prattle instead of this tedious, serious stuff. Maybe I’ll write about A.I…

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From the Archives - Bits & Bobs Volume XV

Introduction

This is the fifteenth installment in the “From the Archives – Bits & Bobs” series. Volume I is here, Volume II is here, Volume III is here, Volume IV is here, Volume V is here, Volume VI is here, Volume VII is here, Volume XIII is here, Volume IX is here, Volume X is here, Volume XI is here, Volume XII is here, Volume XIII is here, and Volume XIV is here. (The different volumes have nothing to do with one another and can be read in numerical order, alphabetical order, in order of importance, or by court order.)

What are albertnet bits & bobs? They’re brief passages from letters, emails, essays, shopping lists, or other combinations of letters and words that I saw fit to type at some point. Read these silently to yourself while pointlessly mouthing the words, or read them aloud to your child or pet, or read them at top volume on a city bus. Or do all three! Mix-n-match!

[The below photo has nothing to do with this post, but hey ... happy Halloween!]

August 3, 2006

I have my PC media player set up to cycle through all my music, so I get everything from alternative rock to classical to rap. Right now I’m hearing a blast from the past: “Hunted Child” by the L.A. rapper Ice-T. My roommate C—, aka Dithers, used to sing along, “I’m the honey child!” I for my part liked to sing, “Death row . . . water buffalo.” [The real lyric was “what a brutha know.] Years later, at the bike shop in Berkeley, I continued in that vein, and for a brief time had the nickname “Water Buffalo.”

August 23, 2006

There used to be a sign on the Muni [i.e., local mass transit system] buses that read, “There is no limit to the number of seeing-eye dogs on Muni.” I always wanted to nudge a fellow passenger, glance toward the sign, and say, “No kidding—this bus is teeming with them!” Later the Muni folks changed it to “Any number of seeing-eye dogs are allowed on Muni, free and un-muzzled.” Scarcely better, but did it have to be so wordy? Why not just “Seeing-eye dogs are allowed on Muni,” or, because it’s really the point, “Only seeing-eye dogs are allowed on Muni”? Or perhaps best of all, how about, “If you can read this, get your dog off the bus”?

August 31, 2006

I finally got some Tour de France coverage on tape. It’s pretty cool. They show some dudes’ heart rates in real time! The commentators talked to Floyd Landis’s coach during stage 17, when Floyd made up all that time and put himself in striking range of the overall win. They were talking about stage 16, when Floyd cracked and lost like eight minutes on the last climb. He uses this Power Tap mech in the rear hub that tells him his power output and can be uploaded to the PC after the race. His coach said that during that ill-fated last climb on stage 16, Floyd was putting out 260 watts, which was quite low for him. Well, it so happens that it’s almost exactly what I averaged on the first two passes of La Marmotte this year! (I did 262 watts on the Col du Glandon and 264 on the Col du Télégraphe.) If you don’t factor in rider weight, you could conclude that I could hang with Floyd on his worst day! (Of course, rider weight is everything, and I’m sure my power-to-weight ratio isn’t even close to his.) Every night before bed both girls beg to watch some Tour de France footage. I limit them to five minutes (unless I get too caught up in the action and forget to curtail it).

September 8, 2006

I came across one of those questionnaires that help determine if you’re an alcoholic. Question five was, “Do you suffer from regular alcohol related accidents?” My completely honest and sincere answer is, “Not unless you count peeing on the rim.”

October 18, 2006

I’m so sorry to hear you got dragged to Kentucky Fried Chicken. I hate that “food.” E— and I went to KFC one cold, rainy day in Michigan during our cross-country bike tour, and immediately regretted it, from the first greasy bite onward. Which is weird. I mean, you’d think just about anything would taste good when you’re tired, cold, wet, and lost. I wonder if the ill-fated Donner party could have enjoyed KFC, right there at the end when they’d already eaten their boots and everything. Probably not. Man that stuff is gross.

November 11, 2006

I’m so frustrated with my work PC. The IT folks have locked down the browser to make sure the online experience is as annoying as possible. Every time a website runs a script (which means about half a dozen times per page) a window pops up saying, “Oh NO! Rush the children down to the cellar, put your tray table in the upright locked position, tuck and roll, Simon says cover your head! This website is running a SCRIPT! It’s possible that something TERRIBLE could happen! Do you really want to run this script, or should you just power off your PC and go home?” It’s systematically training you to automatically click “YES” to any dialog box that pops up, guaranteeing that if you ever got a useful dialog with a serious choice, you’d fail to recognize it. Somehow this makes the security people, who are evidently running the company, feel a bit better. Sadists. And whenever you click on a hyperlink or type in information and submit it, you get another dialog box: “You could not possibly have realized this, being an ignorant type with no concept of computer networks (the opposite extreme of us security types), but you are about to send information over the INTERNET! Do you have any idea what you’re doing? Don’t you know that OTHER PEOPLE could SEE this information? People you’ve never met, strangers, some of them psychotics, or the kind of people who don’t even put the toilet seat down? Are you SURE you want to do this? Wouldn’t it be better to go back to the IBM PC and DOS 3.1 and use WordStar? Are you really ready for this Brave New World that has such people in it? Is it really worth it?”

November 13, 2006

Not to worry, DSL [digital subscriber line, an early Internet broadband product] is pretty straightforward to have installed. After you place your order, a guy shows up at your house reeking of cigarette smoke. He might work for your actual provider, or not; he might actually work for the competitor of your actual provider, in which case another guy will come weeks later who will work for your provider, or at least a subcontractor of your provider whom you’ve never heard of. Each guy will come into the house, look in your crawl space, scratch himself a bit, then leave without appearing to have done anything. I guess one guy has one task and another guy who comes later has another task, but it never appears that anybody actually does anything. The first time through I expected to see the telco guy shimmy up the telephone pole across the street, but he must have done that in Ninja clothing the night before.

An any case it really is easy for the consumer, whose entire role is to keep an eye on the telco guy and make sure he’s not casing the house for valuables (see “Ninja clothing” comment above). Sometime before or after the telco guy’s visit, or between the telco guys’ visits, a box comes in the mail containing an install CD and a really cheap looking DSL modem. You follow some illustrated instructions and you plug a bunch of stuff in. Sometimes the DSL is provisioned on your existing phone line, so you have to put these weird filters on all your phone jacks, even ones with no phone plugged into them (if you believe the instructions, which I don’t). This is still pretty straightforward unless you’re also sharing those phone lines with your streaming digital audio system, in which case you have to draw a network diagram, scratch your head a lot, pay extra for a static IP address, and configure that. My current DSL, even though it’s a separate line from my voice line, came with a lot of filters anyway, with specific instructions to do nothing with them except save them in case you decide to switch to Voice Over IP (VOIP). So every so often I have to stop my wife from throwing out the filters, but that’s pretty easy.

I’ve had three different DSL providers, and only the first installation was difficult. My router was configured wrong and it didn’t do a darn thing. I was very distraught until I phoned a colleague and he helped me suss out the problem. The guy who installed it refused to help, and I had no recourse because I had no idea what company he even worked for, nor what he was even doing in my house.

November 29, 2006

At long last, per your previous inquiry, I’ve found a photo of the post-race meal served by the Marmotte race organizers. That shredded white stuff you see in the picture is raw jicama, I think. (Tasting it didn’t help with identification because it tasted like absolutely nothing, except aluminum, which everything tasted like, due to the physical abuse I’d just put my body through.) The dry, lifeless baguette must have been imported from the U.S. (from the Safeway deli, to be precise). I didn’t even know you could get a bad baguette in France. Maybe they have special crappy ones for the Americans. I’d really like to know why the race promoters thought anybody would be excited about this plate. (Full disclosure: there was also a second plate, of mealy penne with a bland tomato sauce, that didn’t warrant a photo. It was nominally edible.)

November 30, 2006

To be honest, I generally take a head-in-the-sand approach to the woes of ageing. I’m aware of a great many ways in which the body begins to wear out (though certainly not even a fraction of the total, nor of the myriad details of such), and I’m aware of many (but certainly not all, nor even most) of the ways in which a healthy lifestyle can delay the inevitable. That said, I’m also aware of the non-physical aspects of ageing: specifically, the emotional and psychological components, the most visible of which is the worry involved. As if the physical discomfort and reduced abilities weren’t bad enough, there’s the ever-growing concern that they’ll get worse, that they’re leading up to something dire. Toward the end of E—’s grandma’s life, I learned the hard way never to ask the open-ended question, “How are you?” This seemed to be an invitation for her to begin an endless litany of complaints and grave portents. I find that one of the great joys of (relative) youth is the illusion that it will last. To begin worrying now, to become vigilant of the pitfalls of this or that poor lifestyle choice, to start getting “Prevention” magazine, etc. would take much of the fun out of still being mostly intact. When I become a geezer one day and have to forego, with a sigh, that third piece of bacon, I want to at least have the pleasure of remembering my thirties, when the only memories I’ll have of limiting my bacon intake are considerations like “is it too hot to burn my fingers?” or “will that leave enough for E— and the kids?” Maybe one day I’ll wish I’d started the fiber and temperance a little earlier, but I’ll also, I’m sure, think back and say, “By god, I lived large as a young man, and I enjoyed it!”

As for whole-wheat pasta, I lump that into that category of foods you should either enjoy in their proper form or skip entirely. This substitutes-to-avoid group includes Hydrox cookies (imitation Oreos that taste bad), turkey bacon (inedible), soy cheese (culinary blasphemy), light beer (urine), grocery store pastries (a waste of fat and a carbuncle on the already ugly face of American food), margarine (proof that man is essentially evil), frozen yogurt (not yogurt, not ice cream, and not good), low-fat ice cream (the only noble justification for suicide I can think of), soy milk (tofu urine), and of course carob (the existence of which means the terrorists have already won). I mean, food ought to be pleasurable, life ought to be pleasurable, and if you’re not a total sloth and/or glutton you ought to be able to enjoy yourself somewhat. Those who do fake workouts (dangling by their wrists over a Stairmaster so their feet can paddle ineffectually around, while they read a frickin’ magazine, for crying out loud) can have their fake foods, and the rest of us—big strong creatures with appetites and a zest for living hard and well—can do whatever produces good results. That’s my take, anyway.

November 30, 2006

Congratulations on Baby M—! She is darling. I can’t tell which of you she looks like. In my experience babies seldom look like their parents, who are, after all, adults.

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