Status-Q

My friend Michael is a jolly good photographer, and I remember him telling me long ago, when he first started posting them online, that he'd had a comment from someone saying, "Your camera takes really nice photos!"

To which Michael had replied, "Thanks! Your keyboard writes really nice comments!"

Little did we know, back then, what was in store...

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I have a sneaking suspicion that one of my clients is using a GPT to write some of his emails. I've had two or three in recent months that are just too carefully formatted: with nicely boldfaced section headings, too many bullet points, no typos, and they're just a bit too verbose: they read more like a legal document, a press release or a bad Powerpoint presentation than like a message to someone you've known for years.

My immediate reaction was that wonderful phrase I heard recently in an AI-related discussion: "Why would I want to read what somebody couldn't be bothered to write?" And if I knew that it was an LLM, and not a human, that had written it, that might have been my response. But I wasn't quite sure.

And this makes me think that accusing someone of using an AI, if in fact they haven't, could become a dreadful insult - I'd certainly take it that way. "You write like a machine." And, actually, one of the reasons I'm fairly confident that this particular chap is using it for some of his messages is that he also sends me missives which are much more human, and sound like him, and the difference is noticeable.

Unfortunately, kids aren't always smart enough to detect this distinction, and schools and colleges are finding they must now emphasise, to a much greater degree than in the past, that the essay a student produces for their assignment -- the end result -- has no value in itself. Your teacher isn't looking forward to receiving it because he really wants to have your great work of literature to keep on his bookshelf. No, it's the process of writing that essay that is the valuable thing, and doing so is the only thing that will help you when you're in the exam room at the end of the year without the help of ChatGPT (or 'CheatGPT' as I've recently heard it called). The recent idea that continuous assessment is a fairer way to assess students than the rather artificial world of exams is therefore being turned on its head.

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In the early 18th century, Alexander Pope published his poem 'An Essay on Criticism', which introduced us to such phrases as 'A little learning is a dangerous thing', and 'Fools rush in where angels fear to tread'.

Think about that second one, for a moment . Can you imagine ChatGPT and its ilk ever coming up with that beautiful and succinct phrasing which incorporates so much human tradition and experience in just eight words? No, of course not. It might repeat it, if it had found it elsewhere, but it would never originate it.

AI systems are trained on the bulk of the data to be found on the internet, and they statistically predict what words and phrases might come next based on what they've seen most frequently. An AI's output will always be average, and never excellent. If you're lucky, then your AI will have been trained more on quality content than on the random output of the hoi polloi, and it might produce output which is in some senses slightly above average, but it is nevertheless always just plagiarising large numbers of humans.

Another famous line from An Essay on Criticism is the wonderful

To err is human; to forgive, divine.

And it was in the late 1960s -- yes, as early as that! -- that the newspaper columnist Bill Vaughan came up with a pleasing and much-quoted variation:

To err is human, to really foul things up requires a computer.

But I would suggest that we now need to revise that for our current age.

"To err is human, to excel is human, but to be truly average requires a computer."

I mentioned to my wife recently that I was having another go at reading James Joyce's Ulysses. Rose, who is extremely well-read and knows it because her rather large collection of degrees includes an English Literature one, gave a monosyllabic response.

"Why?"

"That", I replied, "is a question I ask myself with each page I turn."

I need to tread carefully here, because I have some very good friends who love Joyce, and Ulysses in particular, but the book is most famous for dividing opinions, so I hope we can remain friends! Many of us are grateful, though, that Virginia Woolf was so dismissive of it, because it shows we are in good company:

"Never did I read such tosh. As for the first 2 chapters we will let them pass, but the 3rd 4th 5th 6th–merely the scratching of pimples on the body of the bootboy at Claridges. Of course genius may blaze out on page 652 but I have my doubts. And this is what Eliot worships..."

Now, I admit to not having got very far with it yet (though I have also read and heard recitals of various extracts over the years). But while there are some books where I will occasionally jump to the end of the page to skip a dull section, Ulysses is, I think, the first where I can get bored in the middle of a paragraph and decide that it isn't worth finishing.

It's not that I dislike a challenge in my reading. I adore Shakespeare and, I suspect, read more poetry than the average bear. I even like cryptic crosswords. But all of those give you some reward for your persistence, in a way that this, so far, has not.

I suspect that Joyce, like many influencers after him, had just realised, after some fairly lacklustre books like A Portrait of the Artist, that shock and divisiveness are the best ways to go viral. It's just too bad he didn't decide to make it enjoyable as well.

Many years ago, I saw a review of the 700-plus-page tome: "Man walks around Dublin. Nothing much happens." You could make similar claims about, say, Under Milk Wood, but that is, in my opinion, greatly superior. And much shorter. I think I might have enjoyed and appreciated Ulysses as poetry if Joyce had kept it to, say, about a dozen pages.

D. H. Lawrence was marginally more forgiving than Woolf:

"Ulysses wearied me: so like a schoolmaster with dirt and stuff in his head: sometimes good, though: but too mental"

I would agree: it is very clever in places, and Joyce certainly gets top marks for originality, but that can be an overrated characteristic, I think, in literature as in music or art; sometimes there are good reasons why nobody did it this way before now!

So I'm going to make a comparison which probably isn't often made amongst the literati: Ulysses reminds me of Austin Powers. I saw that movie soon after it came out -- on a plane, I think -- and it annoyed me because every fifteen minutes or so I would decide it was too stupid to waste my time on, and be about to turn it off, and then something very funny would happen. I would laugh out loud, and keep watching for another 15 minutes. In that way, I may even have made it to the end; I forget.

Ulysses, after pages of boredom, brings up something to make the corners of my mouth curl slightly upwards... and then goes back to obscure tedium again. I fear that ratio won't be enough to keep me going as far as Virgina Woolf, who famously gave up on it at page 200. Most of us only have about 4000 weeks on this earth, and there are so many enjoyable ways to spend them that I doubt I will squander many more on Joyce. But we will see.

I'm reading an electronic version (partly because neither of us has yet deemed it worthy of the bookshelf-space a paper copy would consume), and e-books have the interesting characteristic of making it harder to tell how far through them you have progressed. But I'm going to suggest that most paper books fall into one of two categories. There are those where at some point you think, "Oh, that's sad, I'm getting near the end!" and there are those where you think, "Good God, how much more of this is there?"

'Nuff said.

Looking out of the window at present, I am reminded of a verse I learned in my childhood:

The rain, it raineth on the just
And also on the unjust fella.
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust's pinched the just's umbrella.

It's rather pleasing to discover, investigating it now, that the verse comes from Lord Bowen, a notable lawyer of the mid-19th century. (There are a few variations on the precise wording of the last line, but I still like my mother's version above.)

Bowen had many achievements in his life, both professional and literary, and I hope he won't mind that I remember him for this rather than his translations of Virgil.

It occurs to me that if I were to suffer a minor injury today, perhaps through careless use of a carrot-peeler or (more likely) a soldering iron, it would have the compensation that thereafter I could strip my sleeve and show my scars and say, "These wounds I had on Crispin's day!"

Almost seems worth it. Especially if some of my friends would agree to hold their manhoods cheap in consequence...

After a hundred years in a vault, Mark Twain's autobiography is soon to be published. Memo to self: remember to achieve something significant enough in your life that anyone will be interested in reading about you a century later...

It sounds, though, as if the renewed interest in him may be a mixed blessing, which reminds me of a little poem I learned as a child:

Lives of Great Men all remind us As we o'er their pages turn That we too may leave behind us Letters that we ought to burn.