Writing – Page 2 – Life on the Wicked Stage: Act 3

What Goes Around Is Always Coming Back Around

Life can be painful. Live theatre can be as well.

Now that we’re into rehearsals for the stage reading of Puta Wijaya’s play OH, it’s both gratifying and terrifying to discover that my initial thoughts about the piece being timely and universal are correct.

That of course what’s makes a good play, a good story. It also makes for a constant reminder of how little attention we pay to the stories we tell and repeat.

Wijaya’s work began as a short story that was originally published in 2003, and was then adapted by him in 2018 into what he calls a monodrama, meaning a one character monologue. It’s set in Indonesia. But the words spilling out his thoughts could easily have been written about the U.S lately.

Here’s an example:

I’m stepping into the struggle for justice in this impotent toothless tiger of a country which, instead of using what’s left of its strength to fight, lazes around enjoying itself. Oh! This is insanely embarrassing. It just doesn’t make sense. But this is reality. Our reality! The older generation slacks off, the younger generation jacks off. People are racing to dig their own graves.

And another:

Not like those other lawyers these days who are mostly about making deals, or those elites and intellectuals who shine when they are powerless, but who, from their new seats of power, become more…(Louder) violent, greedy, materialistic, merciless, and despicable once they get the opportunity to trample on justice and truth they once idolized.

Working with IVP is one of the gigs I return to eagerly. Working with plays from far away places and different cultures, always, in the end, proves over and over again that at the core, we’re all the same. Though our life experiences may differ, they really aren’t.

I used the word terrifying in the opening of this post because you’d never know that this play wasn’t written about what we in the U.S. are living through currently. I also say that because regardless of where we’re from, or the horrors we endure, we never seem to learn how the wheel always turns and comes round again.

Life can be painful. Live theatre can be as well.

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.

Indigo: A Well Designed Social Media App For Those Who Need It

Good design and execution matter.

Here’s something I’ve been recently thinking about software. There’s really nothing new under the sun. And the skies have been cloudy for a good while. It feels like we’ve reached a point where the only difference between apps within a category boil down to execution and design. Often not even then.

Perhaps we’ve exhausted all of the ideas for what software can do and we’re just looking for a better iteration of what we already have at hand.

I’m talking on a consumer level. Beyond whatever AI supposedly offers, and the explosion of social media apps that happened when Twitter x-ed itself out, I can’t name an app or piece of software in the last few years that wasn’t a different version of something that already existed. Even AI software feels like it’s more of the same, just at a quicker pace.

Certainly there are nuances. But over time they tend to blur. As an example, take weather apps. They’ve all recently followed the leader (I don’t know which app that was) to display variable forecasts from different weather sources. It’s a good feature given that weather services can offer different forecasts. But as most weather apps have quickly adopted similar features, once again there isn’t much of a differentiator between them. Unless Carrot Weather’s bell weather use of insults is your cup of tea.

Don’t get me wrong. Execution and design can (and should) go a long way. Even more so when all things seem much the same or serve the same purpose. Beyond price, that’s really the only big differentiator.

It’s why I’ll try out an app that looks like it doesn’t offer anything beyond what I already have. Within that personal scope, let me say that the new social media browsing and crossposting app Indigo is worth your attention if its functionality fits how you use social media.

Indigo is the creation of Soapbox, the developers who created crossposting app Croissant. (I wrote about it when it released.) While Croissant allows you to cross post to Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads, (functionality I find useful), Indigo is meant primarily to merge and scroll through a single timeline of your Mastodon and Bluesky feeds. You can also crosspost to both if that’s your desire. Threads isn’t included, as it doesn’t allow for viewing its timelines in the same way, which is curious as it is supposedly federated with Activity Pub.

If scrolling social media feeds is your thing, Indigo is certainly worth a look. It’s very well designed, and easy to discover its functionality.

It’s a first version of the app, and as one of the developers, Aaron Vegh says on his blog, “The Indigo we’re shipping today is going to be the worst version.” For the worst and first version, I believe Aaron and Ben McCarthy have done an excellent job. (You should read both Aaron’s and Ben’s blog posts. Ben’s describes the functionality quite well.) Having followed the development of Croissant since its release, I’ll say that the care they’ve used in the past with that app points to the same for the future of Indigo.

If you use both Mastodon and Bluesky, once you sign in to both through Indigo, you see your feeds merged together. You don’t need to use both social networks. The functionality is the same if you prefer only one of the two social networks. So, if you’re user of only one, it could replace whatever app you might currently be using.

One of the nicest design touches, and obviously an essential one, is that it’s easy to distinguish where things are coming from if you merge your timelines. Mastodon links are purple and those from Bluesky are, well they’re blue.

You can tell if a post is crossposted between the two networks, and another nice feature is that Indigo will merge the two in some cases (timing plays a part) so you don’t see them twice. You can switch between each version and take actions like quoting or replying to both at the same time.

If you’ve used Croissant to crosspost, doing so on Indigo will feel very familiar. Notifications, should you choose to receive them on your device, work as you would expect. The Notification tab in the app is quite well done and easy to understand.

The app is available for the iPhone, iPad, and Mac, and a single subscription covers you across devices. There is a free tier that’s read-only. If you’re interested in Indigo, the free tier is read only. That’s good way to determine if the excellent design of the app appeals to you.

If you use both social networks and would like to combine your feeds into one timeline I think Indigo is worth a look. Let me say this about Indigo and my social media usage. The single merged timeline feature has its attraction, but it’s not something that’s a high priority for me and that brings me back to the beginning of this post.

I like to keep my eye out for developers who focus on good design and good functionality. That’s the case with Indigo. As in this case, an app may not fit my needs, but I’ll remember the developers or company behind it. It’s much the same way I follow good theatre or film directors, and good writers.

I don’t see many new ideas or new needs to fill coming down the software or app pike in the near future. That may say more about me than it does the software market these days. Even so, that view of mine has me paying even closer attention to those who care about the look and feel of what they produce.

(image from the author)

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.

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.

Bumper Cars and Grocery Carts

We’re an angry lot these days

We’ve been away for a week, so we had a number of errands to run in order to restock the home larder, pick up the dry cleaning, etc.. It’s a Saturday and a sunny one at that. Cooler than I’d like, but reasonably pleasant. Unfortunately, the cooler temperatures and bright sunshine aren’t leading to cooler heads.

An high angle, wide shot of an old black and white photograph captures the interior of a grocery store where shoppers wait in line at checkout stands.

The nice weather means everyone and their extended families in Chicago has decided to get in their cars and drive today. Add to that, the outbreak of road construction sites that have popped up like spring flowers and you’ve got your typical tangled traffic mess.

One of the things that always gets me is how considerate drivers never focus their consideration beyond what’s in front of them. A considerate driver will pause to let another motorist entering from a side street, or trying to change lanes, not recognizing the line of cars behind them that they are holding up by doing so. It can be aggravating.

It’s different in the grocery store. It’s usually considerate to let someone who might have one item jump in front of you if you’ve got a reasonably full cart. But in my experience, that doesn’t happen if there’s a long line of folks behind them. Spatial and situational awareness is a little more acute when you’re not behind the wheel of a car, instead surrounded by other humans.

Today I witnessed that break down. One customer with a line behind him, decided to let another customer with only a gallon of milk, cut in front of him. It lead to quite a loud chorus of complaints from other customers standing behind the gentleman. The considerate customer fired back with a retort and, well, let’s just say verbal chaos ensued. The cashier and eventually the manager got involved.

Obviously the difference between grocery carts and cars is that you’re not protected by metal and other materials that entomb us in cars. You might hear car horns blaring, but you don’t hear the shouts of other angry customers, separated only by the length of a grocery cart or two or three.

When I came out of the grocery store, the argument had continued in the parking lot. Fortunately, the offending gentleman and the most vociferous objector to his consideration were parked in separate parking lot lanes meaning they were headed in different directions once they got in their cars, doors slamming, to depart.

I’ll leave it this way. We’re an angry lot these days. With all of what we’re dealing with as a society, rising prices certainly being one of them, everybody more than willing to express their anger, regardless of whatever armor they may be incased in.

(Image from the Boston Public Library on Unsplash)

May 1st General Strike Planned. Hope It Matters

I’d like to see more urgency

There is a General Strike planned for this Friday, May 1. Quite frankly, I think it’s just going to be another in a series that have featured No Kings themed protests in the past year.

I don’t mean to demean the effort. Glad to see it happening. That said, given how each day brings something new that’s quickly absorbed into the swelling sponge of sewage that is the zeitgeist these days, I just don’t see any potential for real impact.

One of the problems with this protest is they missed the marketing boat. I get and appreciate the approach and historical tie in of calling a general strike on May 1. But those historical resonances are there for some, unfortunately not for all. Old rules don’t apply.

Also, given what I believe is still an urgent moment, that urgency seems to be fading a bit. I think the promotional pitches should have called the event MAY DAY and played that for all of the contextual danger it implies. Even the “Hold The Line” slug feels like stasis compared to movement.

I can understand the lack of urgency. There’s a growing sense that the next big moment isn’t going to happen until the midterm elections. Perhaps that’s justified in the wake of no real movement so far. But that actually makes the struggle more challenging, at the same time ground continues to be lost on so many fronts that won’t be easy to change.

But even though these efforts feel like they have weakening impacts, they do keep up some pressure. So, in the end I guess that matters.

Here’s hoping it does.

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.)

Sunday Morning Reading

Optimism comes every Spring, but Winter always nips at the edges

Temperatures are warming. Every day brings more daylight, more blooms in the gardens and trees Yet on the edges of two of my interests, politics and tech, things continue to darken a bit. The common denominator between the two? Humans. But then again, humans are the ones who read this Sunday Morning Reading column. As well as the bots that scrape it of course.

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Some of the big news in tech this week was about a new AI product from Anthropic called Mythos. So fraught with potential peril that Anthropic gathered together the major tech heads to form a consortium to keep lid on it. Monica Verma has a good run down with her piece Did Claude Mythos Break The Cybersecurity Industry.

M.G. Siegler’s The Causal Catastrophe of AI takes a look at maneuvering around Mythos as well. Call me crazy, but I don’t think there’s anything casual about this development.

The reason I’m a pessimist on this is that I agree with a comment from JA Westenberg, “Being wrong about doom costs you nothing.” Check out Optimism Is Not A Personality Flaw. The piece walks a line. You should read it and walk it too.

Mike Elgan takes a look at Black Traffic: The Corporate Sabotage Technique You’ve Never Heard Of. Now you have.

Ng Chong examines The Echo Chamber In Your Pocket. Follow that up with this from Julie Jargon: Over 4,732 Messages, He Fell In Love With An AI Chatbot. Now He’s Dead.(That’s an Apple News lnk. This is an archived link.)

David Todd McCarty thinks one path to reclaiming power over information might be in The Return Of The Local Newspaper.You don’t know what you had until it’s gone.

This Is What Will Ruin Public Opinion Polling For Good. The “this,” according to Lief Weatherby, is something called silicon sampling. Yes, you guessed it. AI.

Coming back around to my comment at the top about not having faith in humans, OpenAI’s Sam Altman got his turn in the barrel (again) this week. Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz spent quite a bit of time putting this piece together. Check out Sam Altman May Control Our Future — Can He Be Trusted? FWIW, I don’t need much more time than it takes to put this column together every week to answer their question in the negative. And not just about Altman.

Mean while Altman responded on his blog, after someone tossed a Molotov cocktail at his house. He says “I have underestimated the power of words and narratives.” For someone who has scraped all the words he can off of the Internet and tried to turn them into something smarter than humans, you’d think his machines could have at least figured out that words have power.

Natasha MH sums up a lot of my lack of faith in humans in her piece, Stop Blaming The Chatbot. As she puts it, “AI didn’t make you stupid. You were already getting there.”

Sorry to be so negative this week, but that’s where I’m living., But to change the tone, Neil Steinberg turns around the Latin term, memto mori, (remember to die) around to memento vivere, or remember to live. A nice little bit of humanity to close out this week with Little LIfe.

(Photo from the author)

Pinning Tails On AI Donkeys

Does authenticity matter?

Shortly after OpenAI fired the starting pistol for the AI race by releasing ChatGPT, I started saying that at some point the real money was going to be made by whatever company wins the horserace for identifying work created, regurgitated, or recycled by AI. Turns out I may have been wrong. In the face of what can be called abject surrender to an AI filled future, the sprint is now on to determine who has the best tool to identify what was created by humans. My money says everyone involved is running the Mongol Derby.

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Two very interesting recent articles caught my eye. The first is by Jess Weatherbed on The Verge. Riffing off a quote from Instagram’s Adam Mosseri that it will be “more practical to fingerprint real media than fake media,” the article delves into some of the companies working to authenticate human-made work and the challenges they are facing.

The second article is by JA Westenberg, called The AI Writing Witchhunt Is Pointless. Westenberg examines the unreliability of current AI detection tools, and the very reliable human instinct to jump on Internet band wagons loaded with pitchforks and torches at the ready, if they get any sniff of AI in any content.

Both pieces are worth your time.

As someone who has adapted Alexandre Dumas’ The Three Musketeers for the stage in both a musical and a dramatic version, in English and for Russian audiences, I really appreciate Westenberg using Dumas and his almost factory-like ways of cranking out his content and how that would most likely be received in today’s Internet world.

I also very much appreciate Westenberg’s conclusion, essentially saying that there’s no way we to tell how this all turns out. It’s too early in the race. I’m a bit more hard-nosed about accepting Weatherbed’s optimism that “maybe we can return to the days of trusting what we see with our eyes.” We’ve never been all that good at doing that.

At this moment, among admittedly many more moments to come in this saga, all of the major AI services come with the same kind of PAY ATTENTION warnings on some of their features, yet not so much when it comes to content. There’s really no incentive to do so. Mosseri’s Instagram makes money regardless of who or what creates whatever Reel you scroll by.

Outside of consumable and ad serving content, AI purveyors urge users to check sources because the output before them may be inaccurate in a search result, a math problem, or a medical diagnosis. Notice that the CEO of America’s largest public hospital system is ready to start replacing radiologists with AI. Every time I hear that AI will remove us from donkey-like drudge work, I hear AI will remove salaries, yet I somehow doubt the billing will change much.

We’ve never been good at heeding these types of warnings whether they come from Surgeon Generals, Terms of Service, or from our parents. We’re certainly not that adept at being able to separate fact from fiction, regardless of how it’s created.

It strikes me as a deeply ironic, and somewhat nihilistic question, that if Artificial Intelligence was as good as promised or continues as problematic as it is in its current form in any of its facets, would we even care? Yet, if it is good enough to plant seeds of doubt as to how a piece of content comes to be, does it even matter? Reminds me of the discussion between Oppenheimer and Einstein, teased early and then revealed at the end of the Oppenheimer.

I understand why human creators are concerned, but I’m afraid those concerns are being handicapped away from the pole position. We’ve allowed our economies, both large and small, to be staked on the outcome of the race. On the other hand, if AI is so great, why the hell are AI advocates, running such a breathless and competitive race, so afraid of having anything it produces labeled as created by AI?

(Image from Erwan Hesry on Unsplash.