Nibbling on an Apricot While Wearing Beige Trousers

This morning I got sucked into reading still another editorial cautioning against the pernicious effects of large-language models, this one focusing on the development of young minds. The New York Times identified the author, Debbie Millman, as a “brand strategist” and chair of the master’s program in branding at The School of Visual Arts. Viewing the world from her Manhattan office, she defended her vocation (and indeed existence and that of her generation and social class) as follows:

“Language is not merely how we express ourselves; it is one of the ways we become ourselves. We write in order to find out what we think, we revise in order to discover whether or not we believe it, and we speak, stumble, clarify, retract and try again and again in order to understand the space between ideas and truth.”

She then went on to catastrophize AI’s affront to teaching and learning, warning against the “profound risk … that young people will use artificial intelligence to bypass the development of their own interior lives and fail to hone their actual intelligence.”

Yes, an expert on distinguishing oneself as a creative so as to flourish in our post-modern predatory capitalist environment, to fulfil one’s inner aspirations by making lots of money, is who the NYT Editorial Board chose to bemoan AI’s existential threat to our unique personhood?

Does anybody else appreciate the irony?

Forgive me if I found her “Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—”

The Greek chorus screams that employing an em-dash engenders suspicion of AI use.

So, “Do I dare disturb the universe?”

The answer was C: the author of this blog post was quoting T.S. Eliot. Congratulate yourself if you would still be able to pass the standardized test granting college credit for your high school literature course. Like me, you are a dinosaur.

Did you also write sonnets (or perhaps, lyrics that fit to songs filled with G, C, and D major chords) for your teenage romantic interests? Did it work?

The last person I wrote verse for married me, even insisting the poem appear on our wedding invitations. We’re still married thirty-three years, two kids, and two mortgages later.

As such, I guess I can measure out my life with more than just coffee spoons.

(Answer is B—he’s still referring to that poem he first encountered in AP English, and the literary device employed in the line excerpted for the question is synecdoche.)

Mea culpa: I can’t imagine life without reading, inquiring, synthesizing, expatiating, revising, and throwing mind-stuff out into the world. It’s my brand. (Please use the tab on my website titled “New Books” to find links to my two recent trade paperbacks available from Amazon and other businesses supported by Amazon Web Service’s greenhouse-gas-spewing data centers.)

But why should I expect others to feel the same? Isn’t it enough to be trained for jobs that serve the plutocrats but can’t yet be replaced by AI and robotics? Why should I care if you are…

Paid good money not to think

Of ecosystems at the brink

Or tortured kids in far-off jails

Or freedom and what it entails

Until you are recession-remade to a cell-phone-scrolling,

Homeless hungry, oft extolling

Borrowed thoughts—curse-word-laced

With righteous anger—defanged and displaced

Toward the victim of the day.

Hell, some sites will even pay

For venom spewed from simple minds

Sent via fiber optic lines.

You object: Don’t you have a right to a life comprised of Dominos take-out and gas-station IPAs; putting likes on the feed of today’s goofiest influencer (six-seven, six-seven); and voting, if you feel like bothering, for whomever seems most likely to make gas cheaper (without dwelling on the geopolitics you were trained not to understand or care about, branding being superior to logic)?

I inhale; contemplate ignoring all “American Idiots” (as I eagerly anticipate the new Green Day movie); and instead, scream into the void.

Without ever running anything through ChatGPT. This is my voice.

I grow old ... I grow old ...

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

That’s T.S. Eliot’s.