I know that many of you, like me, are devoted readers of the excellent emails sent every day by historian and Boston College Professor, Heather Cox Richardson. I also imagine, since so much is coming in over our virtual transoms, as it were, that many of us might skip a day, here and there, or lightly skim the contents. I hope it’s OK to draw a recent Richardson post to your attention. It was a definite “can’t miss”, as it was just so hilariously sad.
And, unbelievably, it actually made me feel a little better about just how “I” AI might be.
Prof. Cox Richardson reported that Elliott Morris, the data journalist and author of Strength in Numbers, asked ChatGPT to fact-check an article for him related to several appointees of the current white house invader. The article included a number of facts about the appointees, including that the Secretary of Defense is a former talk show host for Fox News, the Deputy Director of the FBI used to guest-host Sean Hannity’s show, and Jeanine Pirro is the US District Attorney for DC.
The response surprised Mr. Morris. The AI opined that, “These statements are factual impossibilities” and, since none of these statements were possibly true, “they undermine credibility unless signposted as hyperbole, fiction, or satire”.
I sat back and thought about this for a moment. A string of high-performance computers that, together, hold most of the knowledge and wisdom gathered throughout the history of the world, recognized that describing appointments such as these as though they were fact simply had to have been invented. This must have been done, our faceless virtual servants conclude, in order, not only to entertain us, but to tickle our highest sense of humor, setting out a satiric, ironic view, similar to those of Jonathon Swift or Oscar Wilde, to pointedly mock the errors of our ways and days.
Well, yeah, as they say, you can’t make this stuff up. Unfortunately, as we know, these descriptions of the resumes of the most hapless, unqualified presidential appointments in history were actually correct.
Even though our faceless AI friends think the Cabinet is a joke, you won’t hear any of us laughing, given the scope of destruction they are leaving as their legacy, in healthcare, in children’s lives, in impoverished fishermen just trying to make a living, in families destroyed and separated, in revenge-suits in the courts, in the cheapening and coarsening of civic discourse, in a vast trail of bodies. It’s a nightmare created out of ignorance and hubris. A nightmare that, I believe, is now visiting itself on the perpetrators, causing the worm to turn on the worms.
“The worm is turning,” we say, not always fully grasping the meaning and origin of the phrase. The full adage goes, “Even a worm will turn when trodden on.” In our modern case, I interpret it to capture the awakening of the vast majority of the American people to the cruel, incompetent, mendacious gang of current federal leaders and that majority’s growing demands to rise and Throw The Bums Out.
This is not satire, or fiction, but a growing movement which, I truly believe, will succeed, and sooner than we think.
What Did You Do Today, Daddy?
If you found yourself, on Thanksgiving Day, or the day before, in Charlotte, NC or Palm Beach, FL, or Chicago, and you were watching TV, you might have been surprised to see a new kind of ad, produced and aired by The Women’s March.
The ads open on a young girl working on a coloring book on the floor, and rushing to the door, as her Dad comes home from work. He’s wearing an ICE uniform. Hugging him around the waist, she asks, “What did you do today daddy?” A montage of photos then flash on the screen of pregnant women being wrestled to the ground, of breaking car windows, of rough treatment of parents in front of their kids, of roughly hauling our neighbors into an unmarked van. The agent’s face is tired and conflicted as he seems to struggle with an unspoken answer. “What will you tell her?” the ad concludes.
The ads were produced to speak directly to the hundreds of ICE thugs who are creating chaos and cruelty in these cities, and others. They were meant to appeal directly to their shame and any sense of decency they may have been able to salvage. They were also meant to run counter to the anti-immigrant hyperbolic ads created by Kristi Noem designed to recruit new ICE agents.
What I like best about all this is that we are countering cruelty with a call to humanity, meeting hatred with faith that there still remains a lick of kindness, asking these men to imagine how history ( and their own families) will report the stories of their lives. Honestly, I’d like to send an ad to the Supreme Court, to the Cabinet, to those who are caving in to this regime. How will history report your lives? What did you do today? What will you say?
I know what we are saying. And I am proud to be standing next to so many fighters.
Happy Hanukkah everyone. It is the right time of year to think of shining a light in the darkness. And it is never in vain.
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