Artificial Education

As a boomer, I am glad most of my life was spent before smartphones (the iPhone was introduced in 2007) or even the Internet. I learned how to write, solve problems without looking up the answer, and focus on tasks for hours without being distracted. Speaking of writing, here's another reason to be grateful that I received my education when I did, and yes, I would have been tempted to use artificial intelligence (AI) had it existed. [bold added]

(Illustration from Kent State U.)

There’s a Good Chance Your Kid Uses AI to Cheat

A high-school senior from New Jersey doesn’t want the world to know that she cheated her way through English, math and history classes last year.

Yet her experience, which the 17-year-old told The Wall Street Journal with her parent’s permission, shows how generative AI has rooted in America’s education system, allowing a generation of students to outsource their schoolwork to software with access to the world’s knowledge.

Educators see benefits to using artificial intelligence in the classroom. Yet teachers and parents are left on their own to figure out how to stop students from using the technology to short-circuit learning. Companies providing AI tools offer little help.

The New Jersey student told the Journal why she used AI for dozens of assignments last year: Work was boring or difficult. She wanted a better grade. A few times, she procrastinated and ran out of time to complete assignments.

The student turned to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini, to help spawn ideas and review concepts, which many teachers allow. More often, though, AI completed her work. Gemini solved math homework problems, she said, and aced a take-home test. ChatGPT did calculations for a science lab. It produced a tricky section of a history term paper, which she rewrote to avoid detection.

The student was caught only once.

We are now in the second stage of the AI arms race in education. Teachers are using software to detect the use of AI, and students are using AI to "humanize" their writing.

Students don’t want to be accused of cheating, so they’re using artificial intelligence to make sure their school essays sound human.

Teachers use AI-detection software to identify AI-generated work. Students, in turn, are pre-emptively running their original writing through the same tools, to see if anything might be flagged for sounding too robotic.

In the workplace of the near future, using artificial intelligence will be a necessary skill. It will also be important to have human workers who can think for themselves. I am very happy to be retired and will be neither a worker or supervisor in that environment.

The Cards Are Mailed

We finished signing and addressing the Christmas cards and will drop them off at the Post Office this afternoon. Most of the addressees will receive them after Christmas, but at least the postmark will verify that we got them out before Wednesday.

I still have some business forms to be filed with California before year end and some donations to be reviewed (we're itemizing in 2024), but the holiday to-do list is nearly checked off and, at the risk of jinxing it, the signs point to a Happy Holiday week.

Notes: the Modern Private Diary

2008: view from office with first iPhone

I began using the Notes app when I got my first iPhone 16 years ago. It was the repositor of random musings, then shopping and to-do lists, passwords, progress on YMCA exercise machines, drafts of emails not sent (but too good to trash), and sundry items. There are now 53 Notes in total; one could almost say Notes has become an extension of my brain.

For lots of people, the Notes app has become an extension of their brains. Its popularity has spurred Apple to introduce richer features like document scanning and checklists with check boxes. But users and tech-industry analysts alike say its simplicity is what has made Notes a cultural touchstone since its 2007 debut. Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande and other celebrities use it to express their feelings in a relatable way—so do the keepers of world-famous pygmy hippos.

Apple doesn’t say how many people use Notes, though it’s preinstalled on most of the 2.2 billion Apple devices active globally. Goodnotes, Notion and other similar services with more features—and broader compatibility with Android and Windows—have each been downloaded around 50 million times from 2021 to October 2024, according to market-intelligence firm Sensor Tower.

...TikTok has become a repository where people share what they deem their most “unhinged” Notes app entries.

The hashtag #notesapp has more than 90,000 posts, with users sharing revenge speeches, breakup rationales, love-song lyrics and cry logs. (Yes, people use Notes to record the days when they cry.) One popular trend, which even singer Chappell Roan jumped on, was “never go through a girl’s notes app.”

Apple's iPhone data is encrypted and therefore gives users a (false?) sense of privacy. It's a place to vent, save inappropriate jokes, and store our true impressions of people. Just be careful which icon you tap: Notes are very easy to send to or share with other people.

Stanford's Creative Writing Contretemps

Part of the School of Humanities and Sciences (CEO World)

IMHO, it didn't look like "-isms" (for once) had anything to do with this decision, but after award-winning writer Joyce Carol Oates hinted that sexism was a factor, a "national backlash" resulted.

Stanford creative writing layoff ‘scandal’ ignites backlash among authors and students

Stanford University’s announcement that 23 creative writing instructors will be pushed out of their jobs and replaced has set off a national backlash in the literary community and among students in the program.

“Why would senior faculty vote to fire their colleagues who are doing so much of the work of teaching?” celebrated author Joyce Carol Oates posted on social media, raising questions about whether Stanford’s decision was meant to save money or was inspired by rank sexism.

“I am puzzled most by the lack of simple collegiality & generosity at one of the most wealthy universities in the world,” Oates wrote. “Stanford’s endowment could support an entire nation. Yet, much-admired (writing instructors) were fired after having requested modest raises which would have brought their salaries to levels far below senior faculty.”

Also, she noted, “only male senior professors voted to fire.”

Background from the Chronicle article: Pulitzer-prize winning author Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) founded Stanford's creative writing program in 1946. At the same time Texas oilman E.H. Jones, brother of Stanford English professor Richard Foster Jones, established both the Stegner Fellowships and Jones Lectureships.

The Fellowships were monetary grants for the students and the Lectureships funded short-term teaching appointments that the Stegner fellows could apply for. Over time the short-term appointments morphed into long-term positions.

A Stanford working group

decided to restore the intent of the Jones lectureship and give new Stegner Fellows “the opportunity to apply to be Jones Lecturers once they have completed their fellowships,” [Dean of School of Humanities and Sciences Debra] Satz said in her letter...

The new appointments will be one year “with the possibility of renewal for up to four more years.”

Undoubtedly there are some excellent instructors who have been let go, but I applaud Stanford for forcing new blood into the lectureships, but more importantly "restor[ing] the intent of the Jones lectureship." Too often we have seen donors' wishes being disregarded, and it's a sign to future donors that Stanford will abide by their instructions as best it can.

New Year's Resolutions: Limited Accountability

These resolutions, reproduced from four years ago, are more like good habits to be developed than concrete goals (it's the contrast between "lose weight" and "lose 10 pounds"):

More	Less
Reading books	Web-surfing
Water	Sugar
Getting rid of stuff	Buying stuff
Taking courses	Electronic games
Writing letters	Saying "yes"
Sleep	Texting, esp. thank-you's
Fruits and vegetables	Fried foods
Exercise	TV
Organization	Procrastination

I'm going to apply numerical criteria; the first, "reading books," will become "read one book each month." As for the rest, I'm going to keep them to myself. Public accountability is over-rated.

No, Thank You (Notes)

Christmas is the season of shopping, gift-wrapping, mailing, and spending, not to mention traditional activities like church-going, caroling, tree-trimming, and card-writing. The "chore" that is among the last on the list is composing thank-you notes, which are going "the way of the horse and buggy":

Writing a thank-you note requires keeping track of who needs thanking, crafting a message that strikes the right tone, thoughtful but succinct, neither florid nor terse. To say nothing of hunting down a mailing address, buying the cards and getting the stamps.

The obligations stack up particularly high at certain life stages: 20 notes to all the kiddies who attended Ethan’s fourth birthday, holiday gifts, newborn presents.

Even Lizzie Post, etiquette maven and great-great-granddaughter of manners arbiter Emily Post, thinks that while a handwritten note can convey special effort, a texted thank you is OK in most situations. Especially within groups of friends or peers, the thank-you text has become standard and accepted, she says.

A texted thank-you? Say it ain't so, Lizzie Post. What would your great-great-grandmother say?

To be perfectly honest, there are members of our extended family that don't bother with any kind of acknowledgment--text message, phone call, voicemail, email, or otherwise.

After a couple of years of no response, we have stopped sending gifts to them. It may be a win-win: less holiday shopping for us and not receiving a present that is desired by them.

Meanwhile, I'll continue to write thank-you notes for people that send me stuff because I wouldn't feel right if I didn't do it. Yes, I'm a prisoner of my upbringing.

Act and Write Your Age

To baby boomers who want to avoid offending Gen Z (born 1997-2012), the advice is: don't use the thumbs-up 👍 emoji.

Sending a thumbs-up can be seen as passive aggressive and even confrontational, according to Gen Z who claim they feel attacked whenever it is used.

Whether the chat is informal, between friends or at work the icon appears to have a very different, 'rude' meaning for the younger generation.

A 24-year-old on Reddit summed up the Gen Z argument, saying it is best 'never used in any situation' as it is 'hurtful'.

The wisdom is age-old: don't try to speak, or text, or employ emojis to make the kids think you're au courant. Leave the pictograms to others, and communicate the way you were taught. The kids will respect you more.

Catching Up With Kerouac

Despite my ambition of only a year ago, Jack Kerouac's compact prose wasn't enough of a motivator to make it over the finish line; I'm only halfway done with the relatively short 305-page Penguin paperback of his most famous work, On the Road (1957).

In my defense there's no burning mystery to be solved, and little desire to see how the main characters turn out. I do enjoy the colorful, free-flowing prose as the first person narrator, Sal Paradise, parties with his friend Dean Moriarty through the towns of postwar America.

However, I've come across a new reason to finish the book. I want to read his next novel, The Dharma Bums, that arguably has more relevance to the world of today.

But when “On the Road” was published in 1957, the road trips it chronicled were already 10 years in the past. By then Kerouac had already emerged as a different kind of writer, one who found rapture off the road, prowling in thick forests “to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstasy of the stars.” As we celebrate his centenary on March 12, it’s Kerouac the nature writer who glows most brightly...

Gary Snyder (1930- ) in 1975
(Frank Beacham's Journal)

Kerouac’s feeling for nature took a religious turn after he met the poet Gary Snyder in 1955. A first-rate mountaineer, Snyder was a practicing Buddhist who wrote haiku-inspired verse about the Pacific Northwest’s flora and fauna. Influenced by Native American cultures, Snyder envisioned preserving the entire Pacific Coast as a zone where people could live in harmony with nature. As “Japhy Ryder,” he became a main character in Kerouac’s ecstatic 1958 novel “The Dharma Bums,” whose early pages detail their meeting in San Francisco...

The novel helped launch the “rucksack revolution” predicted in its pages, inspiring legions of young Americans to abandon materialism and seek revelation in nature...These day hikers dressed in North Face and Patagonia gear climb Desolation Peak to stand where Kerouac once dreamed of satori while scoping for wildfires.

The latter sentence refers to Jack Kerouac's experience in the mountains of Washington state. [bold added]

The next summer, he headed to Washington’s ethereal North Cascades to begin a two-month stint as a U.S. Forest Service firewatcher, a job that Snyder had once held. At Marblemount on the fast-flowing Skagit River he received a week of fire training before beginning the three-day trek to his station atop 6,102-foot Desolation Peak. While Kerouac’s job was to scan the horizon for wildfires, his goal was to write and meditate, take botanical hikes, gaze at the Northern Lights and cleanse himself of anxiety and alcohol.

"the twin-peaked Hozomeen was his mystical muse," and the result was The Dharma Bums.

Note: firewatching is a lonely job, but its enforced isolation is a boon to writers and other introspectives.

The Last Mile is the Hardest

Alan Turing (biography.com)

Alan Turing, one of the founders of computer science, proposed in 1950 a way of distinguishing human from artificial intelligence in what has become known as the Turing Test. Though the Test is highly structured (typewritten communication in a laboratory with a human being and a computer), it has been popularly simplified to the question of whether one can tell if one is talking to a computer or a live person.

Alan Turing predicted that by the year 2000 a computer would have a 30% chance of fooling its interlocutor. We're a few years behind schedule, but his prediction has been fulfilled:

GPT-3 can work out analogy questions from the old SAT with better results than the average college applicant. It can generate news articles that readers may have trouble distinguishing from human-written ones.

And it can do tasks its creators never thought about. Beta testers in recent weeks have found that it can complete a half-written investment memo, produce stories and letters written in the style of famous people, generate business ideas and even write certain kinds of software code based on a plain-English description of the desired software. OpenAI has announced that after the test period, GPT-3 will be released as a commercial product.

GPT-3 (Generative Pre-trained Transformer, third generation) seems to "understand" fairly complex texts. Example:

(WSJ image)

I copied and pasted the first paragraph of George Washington’s 1796 Farewell Address: “The period for a new election of a citizen to administer the executive government of the United States being not far distant, and the time actually arrived when your thoughts must be employed in designating the person who is to be clothed with that important trust, it appears to me proper, especially as it may conduce to a more distinct expression of the public voice, that I should now apprise you of the resolution I have formed, to decline being considered among the number of those out of whom a choice is to be made.”

GPT-3 gave me its translation: “I am not going to run for president.” Take a bow, HAL 9000.

Nowhere in the Washington quote does the word "president" appear. Scary.

But the GPT-3 isn't perfect.

Yet when I gave it the famous first line of Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice”—“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife”—the AI was puzzling to watch. In the course of my first four tries, a few of its answers were sort of in the ballpark without being quite right. (For instance, “A man with a lot of money must be looking for a wife.”) Then on my fifth try, it seemed to crack up: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man with a good fortune must be in want of a wife, because men are very vain and they want to be seen as wealthy, and women are very greedy and they want to be seen as beautiful.”

I took satisfaction from knowing that the artificial super-intelligence had as much trouble with Jane Austen as I did. It is a truth universally acknowledged that female communications are still too complicated for the presumptively male programmers to figure out. Eventually, the AI suffered the fate of male brains: "it seemed to crack up."

2020 Resolutions: More and Less

More	Less
Reading books	Web-surfing
Water	Sugar
Getting rid of stuff	Buying stuff
Taking courses	Electronic games
Writing letters	Saying "yes"
Sleep	Texting, esp. thank-you's
Fruits and vegetables	Fried foods
Exercise	TV
Organization	Procrastination

Held Up Very Well

(Image from Smithsonian Magazine)

The first Christmas card was created by Sir Henry Cole in 1843. The Londoner was facing the daunting task of answering "stacks" of holiday correspondence.

He approached an artist friend, J.C. Horsley, and asked him to design an idea that Cole had sketched out in his mind. Cole then took Horsley’s illustration—a triptych showing a family at table celebrating the holiday flanked by images of people helping the poor—and had a thousand copies made by a London printer. The image was printed on a piece of stiff cardboard 5 1/8 x 3 1/4 inches in size. At the top of each was the salutation, “TO:_____” allowing Cole to personalize his responses, which included the generic greeting “A Merry Christmas and A Happy New Year To You.”

The themes have proved to be durable: family, charity, conviviality, and a simple "Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year", with no religious or commercial messaging. After 176 years and many variations, the original design seems humdrum, but when you think about it, it's held up very well.

Note: the local angle is that John Crichton of San Francisco owns one of the few surviving copies of the card and is lending it to the Charles Dickens Museum in London.

NaNoWriMo

In case you missed it November was National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). The organizers of NaNoWriMo encourage aspiring writers to produce a 50,000-word novel by the end of the month by committing to a daily word count "without worrying about quality". Author Mur Lafferty:

"Even if you write complete garbage that you don't keep, you are still learning what doesn't work."

As readers of this humble journal can attest, the "complete garbage" part is covered. How long does it take to find out what works? It's been sixteen years....

How Not to Market Books to Guys

This blurb was supposed to make me buy this book:

A New York Times bestselling author recounts growing up in 1950s Pittsburgh in this “luminous” memoir (Publishers Weekly) with nearly 2,700 five-star Goodreads ratings. “Loving and lyrical… This is a book about the capacity for joy” (Los Angeles Times).

"Luminous", "loving", "lyrical"? I feel the gorge rising.

Note: for the record I did like The Writing Life and found Annie Dillard's introspective reveries to be honest and thought-provoking.

Evelyn Waugh Was Born 100 Years Too Soon

Evelyn Waugh (1903-1966) (Biography.com)
I long thought "he" was a woman because
dust jackets never had photos.

The majority of book-readers are women, and they want to read woman writers:

A 2014 Goodreads survey of 20,000 male and 20,000 female participants on the site found that of the 50 books published that year that were most read by women, 46 were written by women.

One growing genre is the psychological suspense novel with a female protagonist. Because of a common belief that only a woman can truly get into such a character's mind, female readers favor woman authors.

Male writers are adapting ambiguous pseudonyms (e.g., Jordan, Stacy) or just abbreviations (e.g., J.K. Rowling, who is, of course, a real woman) so as not to be rejected out of hand.

These days men aren't reading a lot of books, especially fiction. It's a woman-readers' world, and male suspense writers must adapt accordingly.

Life: No One Gets Out Alive

(Image from Daily Beast)

Game of Thrones author George R. Martin, on why he kills off so many main characters:

"the truth is, as we say in Game of Thrones, all men must die,” he said. “You can’t write about war and violence without having death. If you want to be honest it should affect your main characters.

We’ve all read this story a million times when a bunch of heroes set out on adventure and it’s the hero and his best friend and his girlfriend and they go through amazing hair-raising adventures and none of them die. The only ones who die are extras. That’s such a cheat. It doesn’t happen that way."

"you should be honest about death and indicate it can strike down anybody at any time,” Martin said. “You don’t get to live forever just because you are a cute kid or the hero’s best friend or the hero. Sometimes the hero dies, at least in my books."

It's okay for a fictional world to be utterly fantastical, yet it must be "realistic" in that it remain true to its own rules. If this dichotomy were easy to navigate, there would be many more bestselling authors.

A New Form of Language

The first set of emoji---there are hundreds to choose from---on the iPhone keyboard

Sure, emoji 😀 are cute when used sparingly, but when I see them all the time in a correspondent's text messages, I begin to wonder about her writing skills. ("Use your words," we remind children whose emotions leave them tongue-tied).

But not so fast, old guy. You may be too quick to dismiss a birth of a new form of language, suited to online communicating:

Emoji assist in a peculiarly modern task: conveying emotional nuance in short, online utterances. “They’re trying to solve one of the big problems of writing online, which is that you have the words but you don’t have the tone of voice,”....Gretchen McCulloch, a linguist and author, says....In an age of rapid chatter, emoji prevent miscommunication by adding an emotional tenor to cold copy.

As with any language, there are rules:

when we use face emoji, we tend to put them before other objects. If you text about a late flight, you’ll put an unhappy face followed by a plane, not the reverse. In linguistic terms, this is called conveying “stance.” Just as with in-person talk, the expression illustrates our stance before we’ve spoken a word.

People of a certain age are finding it difficult to keep up with these changes in language and communication, and we feel so, so....😢.

English Digs

Emma Thompson won the Best Actress Oscar
in 1992 for Howards End.

Actress Emma Thompson, on reading for the audiobook of Henry James' The Turn of the Screw: [bold added]

I consider Henry James the most extraordinary writer (well, I almost prefer Edith Wharton, but don’t tell anyone I said that). I know his work very well, and I love it. The Turn of the Screw is extraordinary—the idea of these children knowing, in a ghastly way, stuff they shouldn’t know is so terribly good...

Interviewer: How do you use your voice to evoke a book’s atmosphere?

I think the writing does that for you. It gives you so many clues as to how it should be read.

Interviewer: Well, it does when you’re talking about a brilliant author.

Absolutely. I don’t know what you do if you’re reading Dan Brown aloud. I really don’t.

Bazinga! The Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown must have felt that one across the Atlantic.

Cast Out the Convolution

As a young graduate student, I liked to use big words to impress the teachers with my vocabulary (that strategy did work in college). A business-school professor quickly disabused me of that notion when he tore apart a five-page essay; he deleted whole paragraphs, crossed out footnotes, and replaced multi-syllabic words with the one- or two-syllable variety. Lesson learned: unless your name is William F. Buckley, simplify, simplify, simplify.

Pointing to some great writers, the Economist's writing columnist "Johnson" agrees with this precept:

Hemingway was a master of knowing how to make the fewest and simplest words tell. Churchill, who knew how to balance and measure out a sentence, said “short words are best, and old words, when short, are best of all.” (The Economist’s style-book editor once took this so close to his heart that he wrote a leader with only one-syllable words.) Orwell said “never use a long word where a short one will do.” Elmore Leonard, a novelist famous for his gritty and realistic style, made one of his ten rules of writing “Never use a verb other than ‘said’ to carry dialogue.” (His summary of the ten rules: “If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.”)

One can go overboard, however. If a big word is the best word, use it. Don't give in to hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia!

Grab and Hold, But Not Too Long

Twitter's effect on writing has often been deplored because of its 140-character upper limit on "tweets", but this bug could well be a feature.

Getting things into 140 characters might be teaching young writers one of the most cherished virtues among those who deal professionally with writing: brevity.

Excessive wordiness is learned [italics added]:

Why do people write more than they should, when most people find writing difficult? This may be because during their education, young writers are...told to write papers to minimum lengths.

Say your piece. Use no more words than are necessary. Then get off the stage.

And so I shall.

Paroxysms......of Laughter

An award that no writer wants to win: the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. An example from the 2010 titlist:

"Like a lepidopterist mounting a tough-skinned insect with a too blunt pin he screwed himself into her."

Or how about last year's winner?

“Surely supernovas explode that instant, somewhere, in some galaxy. The hut vanishes, and with it the sea and the sands—only Karun’s body, locked with mine, remains. We streak like superheroes past suns and solar systems, we dive through shoals of quarks and atomic nuclei. In celebration of our breakthrough fourth star, statisticians the world over rejoice.”

Literary Review editor Jonathan Beckman has some suggestions, such as "just make sense" and "don’t get carried away by metaphor."

Your humble correspondent has more prosaic advice: if you can't do it well, best not to do it at all, or as my old English teacher used to say about the comma, when in doubt, leave it out.