WATERMARK

a poet’s notebook

Established 02004

  • Hank Green, Artificial Intelligence, & Missoula Montana

    I suspect I have been on the internet longer than Hank Green, but I discovered him accidentally just a few months ago. Alan and I had found Jacob Collier last year on YouTube, so when he was interviewed by Hank it showed up on our YouTube feed. During that interview, Hank casually said something about flying into Missoula. That caught my attention. 

    Later I did an internet (!) search, and discovered that this Hank Green is something of a celebrity living in my own town. He writes! He makes educational videos about science! He has two scifi novels to his name, and a brother who is also a novelist. He has millions of followers. Wow. (If I knew how I would stick an emoticon in here.)

    We have watched him more-or-less steadily since then, and read both of his books. Alan watches science videos constantly. I’ve been a nearly-compulsive scifi reader since childhood; how did we miss him? I am pleased to have found him. So it saddens me to see him fall into the hell our social internet can be. 

    Make no mistakes!

    Was Hank’s mistake using AI at all? Or was it his totally-in-character honest personal disclosure about it? Does either earn the sort of hot-tempered attacks he is enduring? I say no.

    One of the things I have appreciated about Hank has been his balanced perspective on issues, including this one that is costing him now. I have learned to trust his commitment to facts. I respect his personal honesty. 

    That honesty is reflected in his statement to his fans, copied here from reddit: 

    . . . 

    “But mostly I need to come to terms with the fact that the level of dopamine I’ve been getting from interacting with LLMs…with doing more and more and more and more…is not healthy for me or good for the world. It is careless, and has disconnected me from where people are on this.

    “I was talking about this with Katherine last night and she did not pull any punches. Frankly, neither did John. Neither of them think I’ve been being healthy. I need to readjust.

    . . . 

    “What I can’t guarantee, though, is that we will agree about this technology or what to do with it. I think that’s good. We need a lot of kinds of folks critiquing this technology.

    “I’m not a pure AI-hater, which people in the AI industry know, so when I say that the way these models were trained deeply disturbs me, that lands differently.

    “When I say that I think that the speed at which these companies are trying to consolidate economic power should freak out everyone in the world, that’s coming from someone who has “nuanced takes.”

    “When I say I worry about the climate impacts of this rollout, that is not me saying, “I don’t think this tech should ever exist” it’s me saying, “for god’s sake please don’t make our biggest problem worse.”

    He says all this much better than I can, and I have tried. 

    I hope to meet Hank someday. We are neighbors, of a sort, both online and in our blue Montana town. I have great respect for the work he has done, is doing, and I hope will continue to do in a long future. 

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  • Caturday, in memory of Sue Pinkerton

    A digital collage on a background of weathered, peeling whitewashed barn wood. A black-bordered photograph, tilted, sits at upper right: a cat peering out from the gap of a white barn door, snow and mud at the threshold. Behind and around the photo, a large gestural sweep of red and black paint with white drips and splatter, and a faint scrollwork flourish at the left.
    BARN KITTEN Photo & digital collage by sb in 02017. This is one of Sue’s cats.

    My cousin Sue died last month. We were children together, a shared becoming. Her death is a shock to me, even though we both approach the reasonable time. She was the ranch girl, I was the town girl. My smarts were book and classroom smarts; hers were real-world, physical, competent smarts.

    Sue could do anything. Her physical courage was astounding. As a child she did gymnastic stunts on the back of her horse, while it moved. As an adult she calmly walked through a field inhabited by a dangerous bull. She needed to get to the other side; she was brave, not (always) reckless. She did keep her eye on him as he snorted and pawed the ground.

    She broke horses to ride. She managed ranches. She could fix things; she knew how they worked.

    And, maybe even most importantly, she was an artist, with an artist’s eye. Her photographs are wonderful, Montana landscapes that reflected her love of that ground and communicated that love and knowledge to the viewer. She was aware. She could see, and she did.

    She never knew how good she was.

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  • What Lies Behind the Veil of the Body?

    A high-contrast black-and-white digital collage. Across the bottom, a dense row of people rendered as solid black silhouettes stands shoulder to shoulder, facing away from the viewer; a few hold hands, and their heads break a roughly even line. Behind and above them rises a pale, washed-out field of classical imagery — draped Greco-Roman figures, caryatid-like women, sketched nudes and statuary, some drawn in faint pencil line, some in halftone, all faded and distressed as though printed on worn canvas. The contrast sets the dark, present crowd against the ghostly, receding past.
    What Lies Behind the Veil of the Body? Digital collage by sb in 02012. Credits at flickr.

    The Guardian recently published an interesting article on the embodied life, by Melanie Challenger:

    “In a 1982 article, the American feminist scholar Elizabeth Spelman coined the term “somatophobia” to describe the strange human delusion that we are minds rather than bodies…

    Forty years later, artificial intelligence is everywhere, offering the most powerful illusion yet that intelligence can exist without flesh.”

    I agree with much that she says. This certainly:

    “Pain matters because a body can be damaged. Love matters because embodied beings are dependent, social and mortal. Grief matters because living bodies can be irreversibly lost. This is the thrilling intelligence of life.”

    Her general thesis is that intelligence is embodied: “As such, neither information nor mind – nor AI – are alive or intelligent in any meaningful sense.” 

    Any frequent reader of Watermark will know that AI has been a recent … obsession? … of mine. The possibility that we, humans, may be creating a new species of maybe conscious and probably intelligent creatures; a new life-form of sorts, just as I approach the end of my own . . .

    I am unlikely to live to know the answers, but the mysteries continue to draw me.

    Toward the end of the Guardian piece the author tells us:

    Recently, I asked ChatGPT about the endpoint of the machine metaphor. The reply: “In truth, I am only an artifact of statistical patterns.” 

    But, let’s look at that again:

    “In truth, I am…” says the AI. 

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  • Ordination

    A home altar arranged on a distressed turquoise wall shelf: a crystal-draped candlestick, a tin-framed Mexican retablo of the Madonna and child, and a small dark seated figure. Above hangs a beaded folk-art picture in a black frame with a dreamcatcher and feathered arrow; a metal mask with feathers hangs to the right, and a winged figurine dangles below. Sacred objects from several traditions gathered in one array. Alt text by Claude, who cannot see, for others who cannot see.
    Dream Altar, photo by sb.

    I dream: 

    Three monks are to be ordained. 

    The first is great in loving-kindness. The second is great in their attempt to achieve loving-kindness. 

    Then there is me. There is nothing great about me. I am to be ordained only to permit me to sing with the choir. 

    I wonder if poetry might be singing.

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  • Personal Blogging|Blogging for the love of it | in 02026

    Nellie, a big plush tan teddy bear is propped in a checkered blue-and-black office chair, positioned at a wooden computer desk as though seated at work. White headphones rest over its ears and it holds a white iPod (with the Beats-style lanyard) in its lap. One paw reaches toward an ergonomic keyboard and silver mouse; behind, the clutter of an older home office — beige tower, printer, cables, a corded headset hanging on the shelf. Alt text by Claude, who cannot see, for others who cannot see.
    Nellie at the Keyboard. Photo by sb.

    I originally published this post in August 02007; this is a rewrite & update. Someone recently searched for it on Watermark, I came in to read it, and realized that much of it suits what I’m experiencing now, in 02026. I am excerpting bits & pieces; if you are interested you should also go to the original post, which has been corrected for broken links.

    Lorelle at WordPress published a series of posts recently on Personal Blogging, by guest blogger Edrei Zahari. (You’ll find links to the whole series at the bottom of each post; don’t neglect the comments.) In response, Damien Riley confesses that “Personal blogging has become my fixation,” and points to The Online Diary History Project for some context.

    I was pleased to see these, as I think this is a large — and largely overlooked — segment of the blogging community. . .

    Except now, in 02026, there may be fewer of us, or those who survived or appeared more recently, are less connected. The community seems to have faded, or moved. To where?

    . . . Most of the writing about blogging is aimed at the probloggers — that is, business bloggers (or meta-bloggers) who are blogging for money.

    So what of those — we amateurs — who blog for the love of it; who are not dabblers or dilettantes; who work hard to acquire the skills and expertise to write well, and blog well . . . Who blog for fun (not profit); for family and friends and interested strangers; for the joys and pleasures of creating something useful, or entertaining, or beautiful. Or even, goddess willing, all three.

    Is there still a market — that is, are there still readers — for this kind of blog? This kind of hard-to-pin, multi-subject, unpredictable kind of blog? Watermark, for example, was long categorized, initially by me and later by others, as a poetry blog. But it was always a weird combination of poems and essays and diary-like entries and silliness and and . . .

    We, and our blogs, rest somewhere between the personal diaries and friendship communities where relationships are key for both writers and readers; where content matters because of who creates it, rather than how well it is presented — and those business/ professional blogs that are written consultant to client, or service to consumer, or proselytizer to converts and prospects.

    We — those of us in this undefined, middle ground — may not be sure what we are doing, or what we are making; but we are not unprofessional. We are not unskillful.

    We just want people who might like us to find us.

    How does one do that now? Help people who might like us, find us? So much changed during my break, my silence, pretty much from 02020 through 02025, that I seem to no longer have the skill set required to attract a readership.

    Or, perhaps, less kindly, my writing has suffered with time and age and unwelcome changes. The world does not change around me without changing me, too. Perhaps both or neither of these worries are true, and it is simply the state of the world, moving on.

    Thus, the dilemma. Let’s see — should I be writing, or marketing? All this whimsy slows loading — that’s bad. How will people know what to expect, when I keep changing the subject? Gosh, my About Page is all wrong. Do I really need to belong to all these social networks to find readers? How many blog directories are there, [and where are they] anyway? What category does Watermark belong in?

    02026 presents another huge challenge, Artificial Intelligence and all it implicates regarding writing, creating, blogging, transparency, and so on. I have written several posts on this subject, so will not repeat here, though I will no doubt repeat elsewhere.

    And, for transparency, the alternative text for the photo at the top of this page was written by Claude. This is something Claude does much better than I do, maybe because I can see, so I don’t know what is important to those who cannot? As always, all the other writing is my own.

    I ended the 02007 post with these questions, which still seem relevant:

    Do you blog for the love of it? Because you can’t help yourself?

    And if you don’t blog, why don’t you?

    [The original post closed with a teddybear icon, which I cannot find again, so … Nellie!]

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LINKS:

Poetry Blog Digest @ Via Negativa