Artificial Intelligencce – Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

The Promise No Tech CEO or Politician Will Ever Make

A promise not made is easier to avoid than a promise made

There’s an issue out there that could change the way people think about a nuisance we all increasingly live with. That issue is spam. Emails, texts, phone calls, you name it. We’re swarmed with it like with mosquitos at dusk. And every effort you hear a tech company make to try and make unwanted calls and messages less of a problem is essentially a sop, soon to be defeated. The bad guys are better at this game, and quite frankly, the good guys don’t really care.

Cans of Spam displayed in a grid by Hannes johnson mRgffV3Hc6c unsplash.

I’ve often said that any politician running for national office promising to end spam in all forms as we know it would instantly find a constituency. I still believe that.

Politicians won’t do it, because, hey, they are part of the spamming problem. Note that they’ve exempted themselves from any soft shelled regulations they’ve legislated in the past.

These days, Tech CEOs also have an opening they’ll never take advantage of it. Not that they don’t care the way politicians don’t, but spam is good for their business. Take the AI push and the reactions to it. The folks pushing Artificial Intelligence are worried about a backlash spoiling their game from consumers, corporations, and maybe a government or two. And that backlash appears to be growing.

Who knew that if the sales pitch was AI would take your job, some would be unhappy?

Who knew that if your CEO discovered that they weren’t wracking up bottom line savings by dismissing the workforce that they’d be a bit peeved?

Who knew in what AI-induced downsizing law firms that feeding legal advice or sensitive information into an AI chatbot removed attorney client privilege?

Who knew that folks watching in plain sight as local politicians took cash to push through new data center construction that would increase their utility bills that folks would shockingly rise up in anger?

Who knew that employees of AI companies would be so concerned about how governments might use AI for surveillance and war fighting that they would petition their CEOs to stop government contracts?

Who knew that governments, that at one point were fat and happy to let AI run its race given all the cash lobbyists were stuffing in their pockets, would discover that perhaps these robots could possibly indeed bring chaos to things like financial systems and just about anything else?

Who knew that in order to keep AI chatbots from hallucinating, the user has to tell the AI chatbot not to hallucinate? It’s like telling your kid or a politician not to lie and expecting that to happen.

Here’s a small hint. Everybody knew. Everybody knows. It sounds like for the most part the chumps are catching on.

While there are spheres where AI might actually be of benefit to society AI might not get that chance unencumbered. So far on a consumer level its time saving and life altering benefits seem to have boiled down to sorting through emails and calendars, creating nonconsensual porn, making music and podcasts that nobody wants, dishing out bad therapy advice, and creating conversational partners for those who can’t converse with others in real life.

Essentially the same promises that computer technology has always promised. Only this time around the wheel it’s becoming exponentially easier to collect data from anyone using the computers. And that’s the end game.

Even with this growing backlash, tech CEOs aren’t going to make a promise to use this new super intelligence that can schedule a flower delivery, or spit out your calendar, to derail the possibility of them controlling that game. It is funny though that no one seems to have created a chatbot or LLM that can solve PR problems.

I don’t pretend to understand all of the technological ins and outs of chatbots, LLMs, MCPs, and other terms that seem to change each time a new version comes out or something goes wrong. I do suspect that the technology they are promising could fix the spam problem if that was the desire. In the same way, politicians could do so with regulation.

There’s a part of me that thinks these are actually political promises with technological problems that could actually be solved, or at least ameliorated. But promises not made are easier to deal with than keeping promises made.

There’s money to be made, and plenty of suckers willing to pony up. So why upset the game by pandering to sentiment?

(Image from Hannes Johnson on Unsplash)

You can also find more of my writings on a variety of topics on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. I can also be found on social media under my name as above. This site does not use affilate links.

Sunday Morning Reading

Sometimes a pear is just a pear.

Another Sunday dawns, so it must be time for Sunday Morning Reading. An interesting collection of pieces to share this week. On one hand it seems like any other week. On the other, this week’s edition offers a few nuggets worth chewing on. Don’t over think it. Enjoy.

Leading off, I’m highlighting an excellent series from The Baffler called The Profession That Does Not Exist. The Baffler bills itself as “America’s leading voice of incisive and unconventional left-wing criticism”, for what that’s worth. I find it an excellent source of good writing. Each of the pieces in the series that has the subhead “writing won’t make you a living”, is worth your time, but I’ll highlight two.

A Pear Is Just A Pear by Timmy Straw. Making your way in a crazy world you can find that sometimes a pear is just that. A pear.

Bertrand Cooper’s ISpyForGood recounts his experience as a social media investigator, a job that allowed the possibility of stepping out of poverty that entailed examining how others often scammed their ways to do the same.

Apparently the ruling class in Silicon Valley are worried that folks don’t take too kindly to their products or their ruling. David Wallace-Wells takes a look in A.I. Populism Is Here. And No One Is Ready. I guess when you threaten to turn the world upside down folks do get a bit antsy.

Open your arms and wave at just about anything happening around and to us and you can’t miss the obvious. Tom Wellborn takes it all on in The Frequency At Which Accountability Cannot Reach. Sometimes a pear is just a pear.

JA Westenberg says Outrage Is Letting Someone Else Set The Frame. Westenberg also offers up The War Between Fast And Legitimate Is Here. I suggest getting out of these messes we’re in calls for new frames or new acceptance of coloring outside the lines. Oh, wait. All the lines have been blurred.

James O’Sullivan thinks We’ll Soon Find Out What Is Truly Special About Human Writing. I suggest we’ll “rediscover” rather than finding out, but his point is spot on.

Meanwhile, Will Gottsegen says Sam Altman Wants To Know Whether You’re Human. It appears Altman and his ilk are looking at the problem through the wrong end of a telescope at a tiny mirror reflecting back.

On another front, Marianne Dhenin takes a look at The Small Wisconsin City That Defeated A Giant Data Center. I don’t think the robots will ever be able to muster this kind of civil action.

You, like I, may be overly tired of hearing anything having to do with the Epstein Files. Even so, I encourage you to take a look at this excellent piece from Gabrielle Glancy. I Grew Up With Epstein In Brooklyn. Our Neighborhood Held Dark Secrets not only tells a tale that should frighten, but one that I guess more might share than most ever want to acknowledge.

Happy Mother’s Day to all our mothers out there and all to come. Sometimes a pear is just a pear.

(Image from Tijana Drndarski on Unsplash)

If you’re interested in just what the heck Sunday Morning Reading is all about you can read more about the origins of Sunday Morning Reading here. If you’d like more click on the Sunday Morning Reading link in the category column to check out what’s been shared on Sunday’s past. You can also find more of my writings on Medium at this link, including in the publications Ellemeno and Rome. This site does not use affilate links.

MacBook Neo and iPad: Here We Go Again

Tired arguments get a new leash on life

When Apple released the MacBook Neo it was obvious to most that Apple had introduced a product that would shake up the larger laptop market. Lurking just underneath that obviousness was how it might or might not affect the iPad market. It was only a matter of time and timing, before those who, both rightly in some cases and wrongly in others, criticized Apple for not delivering the iPad of their dreams that could do anything and everything seized on the Neo’s success as a pivot point in the discussion.

An iPad Pro with a scribbled message that says iPads and Neos. There is an Apple Pencil laying on the iPad

The quest for the perfect device for everyone is and will always be an imperfect one. Much like the arguments. In addition to its impact on the laptop manufacturing markets, the MacBook Neo proves just how imperfect those arguments are. Yet, there’s already a large dollop of discourse saying that the Neo proves Apple’s iPad strategy needs adjusting. Add to that the rumors of a touchscreen Mac that continue to recirculate the same way the iPad discussion does just prior to WWDC each year.

On Michael Tsai’s Blog there’s an excellent collection of links and comments that’s worth a look if you’re at all interested in this ultimately meaningless debate. The links feed off a post from Craig Mod, titled MacBook Neo and How The iPad Could Be, that argues “iPads should be radically touch only and MacBooks should be keyboard-first.” I can’t say I disagree. But I think the discussion should go further than either/or.

There’s got to be several data centers worth of AI-scraped web articles on the ups and downs of the iPad floating around and how Apple’s strategy held it back. And yes, the iPad has had its ups and downs. But I would argue that’s mostly, not completely, a question of preference rather than any “the iPad should be this or that” win or lose proposition.

Being an iPad user since the first edition, I’ll say this. Most of the dissatisfaction I’ve seen over the years comes from those who wanted the iPad to be more like a Mac than those who used it primarily as a tablet. Without trying to be derisive, I’d venture to say that most who complained were keyboard jockeys by trade. I don’t begrudge them their complaints. From that perspective the complaints did and still do make sense. In many ways they were following Apple’s lead from the “What’s a computer?” days, before Apple abandoned that tack and sailed into broader and more lucrative waters with Apple Silicon.

Admittedly I’m showing my own preference here. I use an iPad as a tool in my work as a theatre practitioner. I’m on my feet with a script on my iPad, using an Apple Pencil to take notes. If I need to do keyboard work in the rehearsal room, I plop the iPad on a Magic Keyboard, do the keyboard related task, then pop the iPad off again and get back on my feet. When I’m back in my digs, I mostly work on a Mac. Apple’s ecosystem makes this all possible. When it works well.

Personally, I hope Apple keeps developing and delivering all of its current line of products. Stretch capabilities in some to the limit, and limit others with less.

The current lineup serves me well. Frankly, I can’t imagine any changes Apple could make that would alter how I work. I’d be content with that future, even though I know the tools I’m going to use are going to change regardless of my current comfort zone. If that future is all about creating hardware to run AI, as it appears to be, the decision points are going to shift away from most of the spec and capability differences we’ve been accustomed to in the past anyway.

Craig Mod argues that “the specificity of our tools should be radically clear.” I buy the argument, but extending the discussion I’ll say it’s better to have more capability than less. Most users don’t touch anywhere near what even the most limited devices can offer. In my experience they find their way to whatever level they need, which is a much lower one than most realize. Those of us who may made need more, don’t understand that most users couldn’t care less.

Moving on, and with the “What’s a Computer?” miscues behind us, Apple’s current challenge and our headaches stem more from Apple trying to meld its operating systems into some sort of grand cohesive vision that feels the same across all of its devices. Admirable. But ultimately flawed in the same way that each different computing device Apple sells is as different as any two users who use that same device. Vive la différence.

I’m sure Apple gets that, but until the MacBook Neo that wasn’t quite as smack the Apple press in the face apparent, even though there have been lesser featured iPads at lower price points prior to the Neo. You could argue the same about the iPhone Air, but the higher price obscures the point.

With talk of higher priced “ultra” iPhones and who knows what else supposedly on the horizon, who knows where all of this really leads. I’m guessing Apple will be more than content to have a multi-layered series of price points attracting customers from both the low end and the high end. That all leads to more users spending money on Apple services and that’s the key to Apple’s continued growth. More hardware entry points (price) bring in more users than new features most won’t ever use. It’s simple math.

As long as Apple’s hardware profit margins can be maintained across its lineup, even with lower priced and perhaps less capable hardware, it’s pretty much a slam dunk. The success of the Neo not only points to this strategy, it should also point ahead to a diversified hardware lineup that fills many needs, as long as there is a clear and distinct choice for the toolsets that suits them best.

(image from the author)

Streaming Services and Sports

Streaming fantasies

I have a fantasy. It’s a sports fantasy. Actually it’s a sports viewing fantasy. Perhaps it’s an entertainment streaming fantasy. Regardless, it’ll never be fulfilled.

Just about every streaming service has jumped onto the live sports streaming bandwagon. That’s understandable. Sports attracts eyeballs. Eyeballs equal money. Money makes the balls bounce.

Streaming services that I turn to insist on pushing their sports investments on to the top of their poorly designed homepages, forcing the user to scroll if they aren’t interested. Of course streaming services homepages are notoriously poor user experiences to begin with.

Like I said, I get all the reasons behind this. I get that the streaming executives have overpaid for the right to stream whatever they’re streaming and are trying to capitalize on the investment, on the way to raising prices to cover that cost, and perhaps find a few new viewers who might not already be fans. It feels very much like my grandkids screaming “watch this, watch this!”

To be fair, things have gotten better. Streaming services that feature live sports have at least reduced some top line over exposure along the way, or provided tabs for different categories that segment sports and other viewing genres. But they could go further.

So, here’s my fantasy.

Give users an option to not see sports programming so prominently displayed on the already atrociously and algorithmically designed homepages. A simple switch that says “give me more of this” or “give me less.” Trust me, as someone who likes to view sports, I’ll find a game or a match that I’m interested in if I want it. And I’m sure there are plenty of users who will want to see sports programming prominently featured. So let viewers choose. Those who run these networks should be interested in that choice.

Streaming services could also extend a give me more or less feature to other programming. How many times do you need to see the same title displayed in different categories, or after you’ve watched it, or have to scroll past a genre you have no interest in?

Whether it’s sports or any other entertainment genre it seems to me it would be better to gauge interest ahead of time, instead of waiting for viewership numbers after the fact. Who knows, it might be a good way to provide metrics that might actually be meaningful when it comes to thinking about where these services are going to spend money in the future.

Like I said, it’s a fantasy.

Sunday Morning Reading

It’s all a loop

Back from spending time with the grandkids and back for some Sunday Morning Reading. There’s an interesting context to the many issues we face that evolves while watching the little ones grow and learn. Things are happening that will affect their lives in the years ahead. Yet there’s a blissful innocence cocooning them from it all. At the moment.

In my reading, and in my sharing of that reading, I find I’m doing so mostly for the thousands of tomorrows they have in their future, much more so than for anything that will happen in this week’s tomorrows that might affect me in the moment. Read on.

Neil Steinberg’s Meet My Metaphors #5: ConAgra is about so much more than the agricultural giant moving to Chicago years ago. If you like metaphors, it’s a must read. If you’re approaching the last leg of the journey, it’s a must read. If you’re concerned about what you may leave behind, well, it’s a must read.

JA Westenberg posits that it’s all a loop. Joke’s on us, I guess. Check out The Loop: Everything Has Happened Before, And Everything Will Happen Again.

Ky Decker wonders, Do I Belong In Tech Anymore? I find if you’re asking that question about anything, you already know the answer.

Wesley Hilliard thinks we should Stop With The Tech Celebrity Worship. I concur. AND I’m for knocking down all the pedestals we erect for celebrities to ascend in any and all fields of human endeavor.

Timothy Noah takes a look at How The Tech World Turned Evil. Pop the bubbles. Tear down the pedestals. Endless loops.

Meanwhile, Makena Kelly examines how Palantir Employees Are Talking About The Company’s Descent Into Fascism.

Follow that up with Jasmine Sun’s piece, Silicon Valley Is Bracing For A Permanent Underclass.

The previous four links speak to a much darker future in one way or the other. Read them. Then go back and re-read the first two links by Steinberg and Westenberg. Looping context.

Closing out this week, here’s a couple of links that feel a bit more uplifting. First up, check out Mat Duggan’s Boy Was I Wrong About the Fediverse.

Then follow that up with David Todd McCarty’s Becoming A Local. Sometimes the horizon is much closer than you think.

Nilay Patel on Software Brain

“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

Every now and then someone crystalizes a lot of the thoughts that spin around discussions, debates, and dialogues about a topic. When those topics are of great import, when the crystallization shows up, it is not only wise, but essential to pay attention. Call it a benchmark. Call it a new starting point for the conversation going forward. Nilay Patel has delivered just a benchmark to pay attention to with his monologue of sorts on his Decoder podcast. If you’re not up for a listen, you can give it a read on The Verge.

For the clear thinking presented there is a confusing array of headlines to choose from depending where you look, Including The People Do Not Yearn For Automation, and Why People Hate AI, but the one I think should stick shows up in my browser tab: Beware Software Brain.

Patel takes a well considered tour through the arguments and discussion that are scattered about and pulls them together nicely. If you ask for a core theme, I’d say that he argues that there are two schools of thought. One rushing to turn AI into what controls our lives. The other isn’t buying the sales pitch.

To me it’s always been a tough sell to foist this innovation on people if one of your selling points is that it will make their jobs unnecessary, let alone create environmentally hazardous data centers to run the machines that are going to eventually unemploy them. I know a few folks who, after training themselves up on AI to do what they do, only to be dismissed in favor of the AI once that training is complete. I don’t think it’s going to be much longer before that predicament touches someone everyone knows.

Getting inside what makes the folks pushing AI’s thinking, Patel defines “Software Brain” as follows:

So what is software brain? The simplest definition I’ve come up with is that it’s when you see the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language of software code. Like I said, this is a powerful way of seeing things. So much of our lives run through databases, and a bunch of important companies have been built around maintaining those databases and providing access to them.

He later goes on:

Anyone who’s actually ever run a database knows this. At some point, the database stops matching reality. At that point, we usually end up tweaking the database, not the world. But the AI industry has fully lost sight of this, because AI thrives on data. It’s just software, after all. And so the ask is for more and more of us to conform our lives to the database, not the other way around.

You need to read or listen to the whole piece.

While I think “Software Brain” well defines the mindset of those celebrating and working towards an AI future. The crux of the matter for me, on perhaps a larger scale, is that for some reason, as ambiguous and arbitrary as we humans can be, we seem to shy away from our own ambiguity in favor of looking for a binary solution. On or off. Right or wrong. Correct or incorrect. We get angry with the shades and shadows of grey that muddy our yearning for black and white.

Perhaps a binary approach to everything seems like it would make life easier. It certainly helps avoid the danger zones of responsibility.

These are certainly early days of whatever Artificial Intelligence may or may not become. Even so, it appears to me it’s just going to be yet another way humans develop, market, and use to avoid facing the tough choices life tosses at us, or we toss at each other. I’m glad to see there is increasing skepticism.

I don’t build or code things with AI, so I can’t speak to that degree of what seems so exciting to so many. That said, the one thing I keep coming back to in my own, very rudimentary experiments with AI is this. At the moment it’s as error prone, and often as ambiguous and obsequious as any human in correcting itself. It seems to be a very human response etched into the code by its creators, knowing things don’t add up. Much like apparently, our DNA. The machines and the math behind them just don’t care.

I don’t think the humans running this race do either.

More Thoughts On The Cook/Ternus Changeover

Honeymoon timing

Yesterday’s news of Tim Cook handing over the CEO mantle to John Ternus was news only in the sense of the timing. As I said then, it’s been expected for a while. It reminds me of any Apple rumor. It’s not true until it’s announced, even though most of the announcements turn into mostly confirmation these days. Note that Wall Street barely moved a tick on that news today. That tells you how well the ground was laid.

Apple ceo jpg.

Of course yesterday’s announcement has prompted exactly what you would expect, yielding tons of coverage on websites and podcasts. For Cook there have been accolades and brickbats, both deserved. For Ternus there has been excitement and a little caution.

Before I get to some thoughts of my own, here are a few links I found worthy of sharing because they stepped outside of the expected.

M.G. Siegler takes us on A Cook’s Tour.

Daryl Baxter saw more shock in the Apple community than I did. He reminds us that Tim Cook introduced the first Siri as part of his first iPhone event in 2011. He points ahead to this year’s announcement by John Ternus possibly poised to announce a promised better Siri. What goes around, might come around again. Let’s hope it doesn’t take another 15 years to get it right this time.

And Horace Dediu looks way ahead to 2040, when Ternus himself steps down to begin the transition to the next CEO. John Ternus Has Left Big Shoes To Fill is quite a trip into the future. You’ll get a chuckle or two.

The first of my thoughts has to do with timing. Not specifically the timing of the announcement, but the timing that any new leader gets when stepping into that role. There’s a window of time in which new leaders get a bit of grace. Most call it a honeymoon. While enjoying that honeymoon it’s perfectly acceptable to foist off blame for anything that goes wrong on the last guy.

That will obviously be difficult with Tim Cook stepping into the role of Executive Chairman of the Board. Sort of like going on your honeymoon with your significant other’s father tagging along. But it will be even more challenging given the apparently well deserved narrative being hyped about Ternus’ hardware smarts and his responsibilities in recent years. He’s had his hands on much of the Apple Silicon generation of products, almost presaging the announcement of his ascension to CEO with his role in the recent release of the MacBook Neo.

Adding to the challenge is the well known and well worn narrative about Apple’s long view roadmap of rolling out new products. The story is that Apple is always working ahead on the next generation of a product as it is preparing to release the newest version. What products will we see over the next period of time were green lighted by Cook?

Ternus’s prior role in overseeing hardware also means all of the products rumored to be in Apple’s pipeline for later this year and into next year will certainly feature his fingerprints. But they will also have Tim Cook’s. The question will one day be which product can the world accept as the first Ternus only product. Does it matter? Not really. But it will be treated as if it does. Ask Tim Cook about how that went once he assumed the CEO mantle.

We also all know that there are apparently hardware products (HomePods, Apple TV, other home products) waiting to be shipped once Apple gets its act together with whatever the new Siri is, and how well that works with whatever they will call what heretofore has been labeled Apple Intelligence.

In my way of scoring, the success or failure of those products will fall into the Tim Cook column, regardless of any contributions by Ternus. Again, does it matter? And again, not really. But there is much riding on that this year. One way or the other it will be an imprint on Ternus’ first efforts, whether that’s fair or not.

As to that last thought on Siri and Apple Intelligence, that’s software. That’s software holding back the release of hardware products for Apple, which is first and foremost a hardware company that relies on its own software.

As I’ve said many times, the hardware I’ve seen the since the dawn of the Apple Silicon era is very good, if not exceptional. The software needs lots of attention and work. It’s not just the design choices, it’s the chinks here and there in the armor that sour.

Ternus may be the hardware product guy, but he’s now going to be the guy responsible for the famous and coveted “whole widget.” Obviously that includes the software. And also, the marketing of that whole widget. Software design and implementation has been a bitter bite of the Apple lately, as has some of the marketing. As Ternus expands his view, I will be watching how Apple’s software develops under his leadership with a keen eye.

That expanded view also includes services. New CEOs always like to make a bold statement when they first sit in the chair. While there’s a lot being made of the semiotics trying to show continuity between Cook and Ternus, I can think of one thing Ternus could do on September 1, that would immediately set him apart an Apple on a new course.

Announce an increase in the base amount of iCloud storage users get for free. 5GB hasn’t cut it for awhile. Cut and run from that legacy and begin making a bold new path.

Sunday Morning Reading

“Scars speak more loudly than the sword that caused them.” – Paulo Coelho

It figures. You plan a weekend of yard work and Mother Nature reminds you she controls more than you do. In these parts that makes this a perfect chilly Sunday for a little Sunday Morning Reading. I’m not sure how, but a theme emerges in the collection of links I’m sharing this weekend, somehow suggesting that regardless of our feelings, the forces that seem to be conspiring against us just keep rolling. At some point, just like with the shifts in the weather, you just want some unshifting force to make it all stop.

Here in Chicago we’re seeing a number of theatre spaces closing. (We’re also seeing a few open.) On the national stage, we’re watching with dismay, anger, and sadness as The Kennedy Center is being shut down by cultural barbarians. Josef Palermo had an inside seat to that dismantling and tells the story in My Front-Row Seat To The Kennedy Center Implosion.

And while Madison Square Garden is more a venue for pure entertainment than the arts, the story about how its owner is using surveillance on its patrons and employees that upset the powers that be is a harbinger of things to come in all arenas of our lives. Check out The Shocking Secrets of Madison Square Garden’s Surveillance Machine by Noah Shachtman and Robert Silverman.

Having experimented a bit with Artificial Intelligence in seeking information about a statue this weekend, my ongoing suspicions that this “way of the future” isn’t ready for today, much less tomorrow. The technology might be not ready for prime time, but the hype has never been. Kyle Chayka says A.I. Has A Message Problem Of It’s Own Making. I like this quote in the subhead, “If you tell people that your product will upend their way of life, take their jobs, and possibly threaten humanity, they might believe you.” True enough. And if those things are as incompetent as humans, what’s the damn point?

It’s all math. That’s one way to sum up any computing activity. Unless it comes to emotion. And yet, some think feelings are somewhere in the numbers. Mike Elgan writes, No, Math Doesn’t Have Feelings in response to those who must not have any feelings of their own, but are trying to add that into the AI equation.

Gaby Del Valle, says The Only Way To Fight Deepfakes Is By Making Deepfakes. Sounds like an arms race to me. We should be up in arms about it.

Speaking of arms races, Gideon Lewis-Kraus looks at AI in the war that isn’t a war, that’s over every week, but begins again every weekend once the markets close in How Project Maven Put AI Into The Kill Chain.

Apologies for so much AI linkage this week, but it’s been on my mind lately, especially since the news of Mythos broke. It’s the latest demon to fly out of Pandora’s box, and I’m afraid it’s not the last. Margie Murphy, Jake Bleiberg, and Patrick Howell O’Neill examine How Anthropic Learned Mythos Was Too Dangerous For The Wild.

CNN has a report by Saskya Vandoorne, Kara Fox, Niamh Kennedy, Eleanor Stubbs, and Marco Chacon called Exposing A Global Rape Academy. It’s a hard, but I think necessary read considering the topic is just how horrible humans can be to one another. Maybe we should hope the robots develop feelings. Too many humans seem to have stopped developing theirs.

Gail Beckerman says If You Want A Better World, Act Like You Live In It. I concur.

And to close out this week, Scars is a short story by Sigrid Nunez. Some scars can’t be seen. The ones we’re watching form daily, can be.

(Photo by the author.)

They Mystery of Magdalene, My Skepticism, and AI

A journey with with public art and AI

I love a good mystery. Especially when it is in public view, like the statue pictured below. (Click to enlarge.)

While in downtown Chicago yesterday I had some time on my hands and took a stroll along Michigan Avenue south of the Chicago River. As I said here, I felt like a tourist in my own town. I stumbled across a statue that seemed new to me.

I was so taken by the statue and its placement between, and prominently in front of, two iconic statues from the 1920’s called The Bowman and The Spearman, that I wanted to know more about what I thought was newer artwork. Given that there was no identification plaque anywhere near the statue, I decided to do what most of us do these days and look up information on the Internet.

I plopped a copy of the photo I took into a Google search box and the result yielded the name of the statue as Magdalene by Dessa Kirk. That’s a link to a Facebook profile. Intriguingly Kirk doesn’t seem to have a website I can find, and examining her photos, I saw only one reference to the statue in question. As a spoiler, it appears Dessa Kirk is indeed the sculptor of this statue called Magdalene. But it took me a while to confirm that.

Magdalene can be found at the intersection of the Congress Parkway and Michigan Avenue in Chicago, and was installed in 2005. Sculpted with a combination of woven wood, branches, and found materials (recycled hoods and fenders of old cars,) combined with weathered metal. The “skirt” of the statue is filled with live flowers and climbing vines, which change the statue’s appearance with the seasons. On my visit I could see a few green sprouts starting to spring up.

Here is a link about the statue on the Chicago Park’s District website that lists her as the artist with a brief bio. I did not find that until after I had gone down the few rabbit holes I mention below.

In this age of dis- and mis- information, AI hallucinations, and AI everywhere — including Google’s search results — I’ve grown increasingly skeptical of just about everything.

Given my age, I’ve also grown increasingly less trusting of my own memory and powers of observation. Something rattling around in my brain didn’t quite sit right about the 2005 installation date. I’ve driven by and through that intersection many times since my return to Chicago in 2013 and I don’t recall seeing the statue.

Before turning into bed for the night, I decided to do another search, this time instead of using Google’s regular old search box, I used Google’s Gemini. It turned up a completely different result, saying the statue was named Terra Nuestra by Hector Gomez and was a part of the Chicago Park District and Chicago Department of Cultural Arts Monument Response Project which just recently launched April 8th of this year.

CleanShot 2026-04-18 at 12.17. Checking out the link to the Monument Response Project I found no mention of this particular statue at this particular site, although there was information about Gonzalez and Tierra Nuestra at another site.

So, at this moment I had two conflicting pieces of information from Google using different access to seek more information. Though Google’s search results presented the Dessa Kirk info in its AI summary at the top of the search results, I was still skeptical.

My initial thought was that if this was a part of an art installation project that had just begun 10 days ago, perhaps local news media, which yielded no results, and Google’s crawlers were just behind the curve. As was the Park District’s website.

The AI generated description along with the project’s narrative that these pieces of artwork were meant to counter existing narratives made perfect sense. Descriptions of this statue, very feminine, nurturing, and a rising from the earth’s posture made, in my mind, a perfect contrast to the often criticized go west young man mythology of the two behind it.

I queried Google’s Gemini further, saying that I didn’t think Gomez’s sculpture was correct and it yielded this correction.

CleanShot 2026-04-18 at 12.30.

Another artist, another statue, correct location, same city-wide initiative. I queried Gemini further and got another correction.

CleanShot 2026-04-18 at 12.32.

Different results. Then, another attempt.

CleanShot 2026-04-18 at 12.34.

And again with different results.

CleanShot 2026-04-18 at 12.35.

And then again.

CleanShot 2026-04-18 at 12.36.

I then preceded to query ChatGPT and Claude. Here’s the first Claude response. Another artist enters the picture.

CleanShot 2026-04-18 at 12.38.

And again later.

CleanShot 2026-04-18 at 12.38.

ChatGPT did no better, no worse, and like the others proved of no use.

The bottom line is that my skepticism and distrust are more than well founded. What triggered me to go down these AI rabbit holes was that there was something logical about a statue I thought was new, that I kept getting conflicting results about, that pointed to a brand new city-wide art project. It made some sense in my growing skepticism. I wasn’t the only one going down rabbit holes.

What disappoints me, and I think should disappoint and be a warning to us all, is that a photo of something — in this case a public artwork that has existed since 2005 — should come up in any of these AI searches with relevant information. There’s an entire industry being built with smartphones, smart glasses and pins, on a feature that tells us to point at anything and the robots will tell you what it is.

I should have trusted the first plain old Google search box even with the AI generated search summary at the top of the page. But long before this little search mystery I’d given up on that, given many of the previous errors that have yielded in the past. Tech companies relying on AI can throw up all the caveats about possible inaccuracies they want to. I’d venture that it’s almost too late, because their initial promises, having been so broken that they now require those caveats, have already sculpted such a deeper narrative of mistrust in most minds, that they’ll live on as long as stone statues.

As to Magdalene and Dessa Kirk, I’m still very taken with the artwork. Another thing this episode tells me is that artists are going to need to be extremely diligent in crafting websites and publicity about their efforts going forward. They only have themselves to trust.

Apple and Google Still Generating Profits from Grok’s Sexualized Image Generation

It’s my rule. I’ll break it if I want.

Rules are made to be broken is the cliché. That’s a theme that’s running louder and wilder through much of life these days. Build complicated and successful things. Create rules to protect what you’ve built. Mass enough power and then bend or ignore the rules when they become inconvenient.

That theme surfaces frequently enough that it’s almost a meme. In politics it happens every day, enough to make a mocking myth of things like the rule of law and the constitution. We see it in religion. We see it in business, too frequently in the business of tech. When you’re big enough that you have to, and can create rules to protect what you’ve built against others, and yourself, you substitute the convenience of adhering to the rules for the inconvenience of principle.

Back in January, (damn that seems so long ago), Elon Musk’s Grok released an AI image editing feature that allowed users to create nonconsensual sexualized deepfakes. It was ugly and disgusting.

As with all new things tech, it caught on like wildfire, and then X took fire from many quarters including some governments. (Not ours — caterwauling congress critters no longer count.) Apple and Google also took hits for continuing to allow the app on their respective App stores in violation of existing rules. There were calls for both Apple and Google to follow those rules and take the app down. Something both companies have done for other rule violating apps with and without public punity.

That didn’t happen.

Yesterday, a report from NBC revealed that Apple, in a letter to U.S. Senators, claimed that it worked behind the scenes of the public uproar to demand that the developers “create a plan to improve content moderation.” According to The Verge,

Throughout this covert back-and-forth, Grok and X appear to have remained live on the App Store, a drawn-out process that may help explain the confusing, haphazard rollout of moderation changes announced in real time. This included limiting Grok on X to paying subscribers and attempting to stop Grok from undressing women. Our investigations revealed that neither were particularly effective beyond making the tool a bit harder to access. Later interventions, like X letting users block Grok from editing their photos, are also easily circumvented.

Despite Apple’s approval and xAI’s claims it has tightened safeguards, Grok still appears to be able to generate sexualized deepfakes with relative ease.

So, essentially nothing of any real effect happened. Scratch that. Something did. X and Grok put the feature behind a paying subscription. One that Apple also reaped profits from and still does. As does Google.

The one rule this era has taught us is that if you’re big and rich enough, and can weather the storm of public scorn, you can essentially ignore the rules. Even those you’ve written yourself. With impunity.