To Write Well With AI, Write Against It

by Kyle Munkittrick

Four of the same man with different personas, in writers room, working on a document together.
Gemini’s Persona Writers’ Room

To write well with AI, you’ve got to understand Socrates.

Paul Graham and Adam Grant argue that having AI write for you ruins your writing and your thinking. Now, honestly, I tend to agree, but I thought these smart people were making a couple mistakes.

First, they seemed to be criticizing first drafts. If you asked a person to write a poem in five minutes with vague instructions, unless they were a champion haiku composer like Lady Mariko from Shogun, it would probably be pretty bad. AI is best in conversation, reacting to feedback. Sure the initial draft might be bad, but AI can revise, just like we can. Second, and more important, if AI shouldn’t be doing the writing, it should probably be the critic. Even if it didn’t have good taste, it could surely evaluate a specific piece, given sufficient prompt scaffolding. Right?

After completing a major portion of a draft of an in-progress novel, I decided to test my theory. I shared the first Act with Claude (3 Sonnet and Opus) and Boom! I got exactly what I hoped for—some expected constructive criticism along with glowing praise that my novel draft was amazing and unique.

In reality, it was not.

This was not a skill issue! It was a temptation issue. My prompt was ostensibly well-crafted. I knew how to avoid exactly this problem, but I didn’t want to. I knew, deep down, that my novel was, in fact, overstuffed, weirdly paced, exposition dumpy, and had half a dozen other rookie mistakes. Of course it was! It was a draft! But I crippled my AI critic so that I could get a morale boost.

The sycophantic critic is an under-appreciated, and, to me, equally concerning, risk of using AI when writing. Read more »

On Wild Strawberries, Tygers, and Words

by Nils Peterson

I

A friend sent me a day or two ago a poem that contained this story:

The Buddha tells a story of a woman chased by a tiger.
When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine
and climbs halfway down. But there’s also a tiger below.
And two mice—one white, one black—scurry out
and begin to gnaw at the vine.

I was reminded, when I read it, of a guy who was a regular on late night talk shows in the 60’s. His first name was Alexander. [I refuse to look him up. Maybe it will come.] He had written a book entitled May This House Be Safe From Tigers and I was thrown back to my young days as a father when this was my prayer at those times I was driven to prayer. I guess I felt my wife and I and our daughters could survive small catastrophes, but we also knew that there were those that were overwhelming, the Tigers of the world, Tygers, really, that could and would maul or eat you. But we were blessed not that we didn’t have griefs, the deaths of parents, friends.

In my 80’s I became aware aware that tigers are very, very patient, are never altogether not there, and the vine where the black mouse and the white mouse gnaw grew thin. Our tyger was the ALS my wife was diagnosed as having.

The story goes on as her poem explains:

At this point
she notices a wild strawberry growing from a crevice.
She looks up, down, at the mice.
Then she eats the strawberry.

Well, what else is there to do but weep or eat the strawberry? The poem ends –

Oh, taste how sweet and tart
the red juice is, how the tiny seeds
crunch between your teeth.

And so we looked for strawberries. In Sweden, my ancestral country, wild strawberries are unbelievably delicious. They even have their own name, Smultron. Read more »

Monday, May 12, 2025

Machine as Mirror: The Undoing of the Human Image

by Katalin Balog

The dulcimer player (La joueuse de tympanon). Made by David Roentgen and Peter Kinzing, Newwied, 1875.

Nathaniel in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman loses his sanity over having fallen in love with a wooden doll, the beautiful automaton Olympia. Olympia is an invention of a mad scientist and a master of the dark arts. Like Mary Shelley’s monster, born of the romantic imagination, she is the first literary example of a human-like machine. As one of Nathaniel’s friends observes:

We have come to find this Olympia quite uncanny; we would like to have nothing to do with her; it seems to us that she is only acting like a living creature, and yet there is some reason for that which we cannot fathom.

We can sympathize with the sentiment. But uncanny as the wooden doll might have struck them, contemporary readers of the tale were meant to see Nathaniel’s infatuation as macabre farce – Olympia is clearly robotic and shows no signs of intelligence –  orchestrated by dark forces either in the world or in his soul, we can’t know for sure.

The Enlightenment’s fascination with automata (Hoffman’s story was published in 1816) prefigured our predicament, however. We now find ourselves in the curious position of having to give serious thought to the possibility, and increasingly, the reality of relationships with machines that hitherto were reserved for fellow humans. We also seem to have to defend ourselves against – or perhaps reconcile ourselves to – suggestions that AI will soon, perhaps in some regards already, surpass us in some of our most characteristically human activities, like understanding the feelings of others, or creating art, literature, and music. Read more »

Imagining, for Grown-ups: On Making Up Rituals

by Lei Wang

It’s my birthday twice a month, every month. Or at least I treat each 13th and 27th as if it were my birthday. I don’t ask anyone else to pretend with me; I keep to the usual annual celebratory imposition. It is an internal orientation.

From morning to night on the 13th and 27th of the month (because I was born on a 13th and like odd numbers), I feel the day is special. I can do whatever I want. Technically, as a writer and freelance worker, I can pretty much always do what I want, but external circumstances don’t always match internal understandings. And the ability to always do what I want is also the pressure to be always working, no real evenings or weekends, because I can (though mostly because I’ve procrastinated during the day). How much work is enough when you work for yourself, when you are supposedly doing the work you love? Even resident doctors get two days off a month, to save their own lives. And so: my self-made fortnightly ritual.

What I always want to do is lounge around but on my “birthday,” I can lounge without an ounce of guilt. I may still choose to write a bit, but then I feel extraordinarily virtuous—to be working on my birthday! (Yes, my birthday is secretly a productivity hack.) I get the fancier chocolate at the grocery store which I may have justified on another day, but today, I don’t even have to justify. I light the jasmine-bergamot candle I have been hoarding. I am magnanimous with myself. Whatever I do, there is a rare sense of permissiveness that even real birthdays don’t have: there is some pressure to revel on actual birthdays, and the potential for disappointment, while on private birthdays I can do anything I want which includes nothing at all.

Perhaps I even need to work—probably, in fact, I have not quite planned my time well and unlike Jesus’ birthday or the birthdays of nations, my fake birthdays necessarily fall on random, inconvenient days. But even working, I think, just for today, I don’t have to be perfect. It’s my birthday. And there is a special pleasure in a random Tuesday no longer being random, just because I imagined it so. Read more »

Sunday, May 11, 2025

A Tree-Hugger’s Parable

by Mike Bendzela

Emerald ash borer galleries.

We recently found out we have new neighbors. Millions of them. I had seen signs in the blond appearance of the upper limbs of some trees on the other side of the field across from our Maine farmhouse. I have been waiting a long time for them to show up, so I tell my spouse I will be right back, cross the street with my jack knife in my pocket, and stroll to the other side of the pasture to check it out for myself.

I can still remember the phone call from my mother in Ohio about twenty years ago, when she told me the city had cut down the three white ash trees in front of the house where I grew up — along with all the ash trees in the city of Toledo. Those trees, standing on the grassy strip between the concrete sidewalk and the street, were important to my growing up. I had taken one of my first nature photographs in one of those trees when I was thirteen: I climbed up a tree and got a shot of two blurry blue eggs inside a stick cup. My first botany lesson was discovering that these trees of the genus Fraxinus are among the first deciduous trees to turn yellow in the fall and the last to bud out in the spring.

Toledo was near ground zero of the emerald ash borer infestation that took hold in the United States a little over twenty-five years ago. The beetle entered the country near Detroit, Michigan after having hitched a ride on some shipping pallets from somewhere in its native Asia. Agrilus planipennis is branded an invasive species, but it’s not their fault; they aren’t invading anything. They have been inadvertently introduced to a new hemisphere and are just embracing their Malthusian duty like any good species. There were many quarantines issued throughout several states in the Midwest and Eastern seaboard as the borer spread, county by county. These quarantines proved fruitless and have all since been lifted. “Let ‘er rip,” as the cynical expression has it. As if we have a choice in the matter.

I use my pocket knife to peel back the bark on a dead tree. I uncover abundant larval “galleries,” feeding trails that look like dune buggy tracks viewed from the sky. I snap a picture with my phone and take it back to the house to show my spouse. His response is just to squint at it in resigned silence. Read more »

Wasting the Planet

by Adele A. Wilby

In a recent article,  ‘What are Microplastics Doing to Our Bodies’, Nina Agrawal  reveals how researchers in a leading laboratory in New Mexico are studying the accumulation of anthropogenic microplastics in our bodies. Although present in many organs in the body, microplastic levels are, according to the research, increasing, especially in our brains. As crucially important as the research findings and the consequences for human health might be, a serious spinoff from the research is the source of the plastic samples used by the researchers, items such as toothbrushes, chunks of fishing nets and a Pokémon card.  But these plastic specimens were not from the laboratory waste bags but derived from the trash collected during a cleaning up of a beach in Hawaii. Clearly these plastic items had either washed ashore from rubbish dumped into the ocean or perhaps some illegal fly tipping close to the beach. Either way, it was trash inadequately disposed of.

As we are all aware, waste on the beach is not a new phenomenon, but it is symptomatic of a much larger and wider issue that is, or should be, a cause of real concern to everyone: the disposal of the astronomical  levels of trash produced by industry and the consumer society. Alexander Clapp addresses this crucial issue in his book Waste Wars: Dirty Deals, International Rivalries and the Scandalous Afterlife of Rubbish.

Clapp’s exposé is not a bearer of good news for humanity or the planet. He effectively creates in the reader’s imagination a dystopian planetary landscape of mountains of rubbish, polluted seas, of play fields of ash and roads of colourful microplastics as he narrates how human beings are far better at creating waste than our ability to dispose of it effectively. To gauge some idea of the enormity of the problem of waste disposal facing humanity, Clapp draws on a 2020 Nature publication. To quote him, ‘the total mass of the world’s human-made objects … equal the entire biomass of the planet itself. That is to say, the weight of everything created by our hands – skyscrapers, automobiles, iPads, plastic straws – was on the verge of exceeding that of all the trees and all the plants, all animals and all humans, indeed the mass of all living things put together’. For sure, a serious issue to reflect on and one that is difficult to imagine improving in the foreseeable future. Read more »

An Interview with Tom Nero; or, the Mirror, the Gaze, and the Mask

by TJ Price

It was an unbearably hot and humid day. The clouds were starting to mass in the west, slowly but surely rolling their way into the city and darkening as they came. For sure, it would rain a deluge by mid-afternoon. The skyscrapers were already quivering with the anticipation of it, as though their mirrored façades had become liquid and were trembling with wavelets. I was to meet Tom Nero at a location he has asked me not to reveal—suffice to say that, when first I saw him, he stood between two of these towers and on either side of the street, I could see manifold copies of both him and I reflecting. When we shook hands, there was a brief, electric frisson that passed through our fingertips. I was alarmed, but only for a moment, and his wry, self-effacing smile put me instantly at ease. This calm was to be disturbed only by the answers to my questions. Unfortunately, Tom (as he prefers to be called) specified that I was not to record his answers, so what is reported here may not be entirely accurate. I have tried, to the best of my memory and ability, to represent the spirit of his responses. Phrases quoted verbatim are in bold.

TP: Thanks for meeting with me today, Tom. I understand you have been missing for quite some time, so welcome back.

TN: I should be the one welcoming you. Have you been to the city of dreams before?

TP: Yes, I lived here for many years, mostly during the pandemic. I didn’t care for it very much. I don’t think that this many people should all live in so small a space. There’s no room.

TN: Every city—even the largest—is made up of lots of little smallnesses, all of which combine to create its largeness. Enormity, after all, can only be defined as something which is beyond our scope, something which surpasses our ability to describe. Not to mention that what is small to you might be big to me, and on and on, and vice versa, et cetera. There are many empty rooms in the city of dreams.

TP: This brings to mind another question: if this truly is the city of dreams, then who is the one asleep?

TN: There is no singular person responsible for the city, its rooms, or even its inhabitants. We are all factories of dreaming, even when awake, and that constant production is what gives the city that sobriquet. Read more »

Friday, May 9, 2025

Anarchy, State And Authority

by Richard Farr

Plato

This is the first part of a two-part essay.

I got into political philosophy out of sheer puzzlement. Surely we ought to know how to run human communities by now? But political ideologies were like religions: everyone thought they knew what was true and everyone thought that everyone who disagreed with them was either evil or a fool. How did we find ourselves in this swamp of struggle and contradiction? Plato had got the enterprise of political philosophy off to a clean enough start, hadn’t he, all those centuries ago? Why so little agreement about absolutely anything? 

Let’s spend a moment with Plato, and let’s leave aside for now the worry that creeps like a sickness over every reader of the Republic at some point: given the Grand Guignol absurdity of its conclusions, what if the whole thing is actually a joke that we in our earnestness keep failing to get? What if we’re not reading a defense of the most extreme rationalist authoritarianism imaginable, but a parody of such a defense? And what if the joke is on Plato’s fellow philosophers especially, we being the ones most  likely to find the central idea flattering?

Taken instead at the usual face value, Plato says that everything will be hunky-dory in human affairs if only the right authorities are in authority. Mr. P. is not thinking of people with a college degree, or wonks with a loud presence on social. His much grander fantasy is for us to be ruled by a class of men and women who have created, perfected and mastered The Science of Human Flourishing. They will be bureaucrats of wisdom. They will know how life itself works; they will therefore be able to safely pilot (and will be motivated exclusively by the desire to safely pilot) this magnificent but temperamental vessel called the State.

Some note a chicken and egg problem here. If these ‘philosopher kings’ can emerge only from decades of training in the right ethikē, or moral character, but the only way to provide such an education is to bring them up in an appropriately run polis, and if the only people who could ever create such a polis are this very same group of olive-munching übermenschen, then, um … but let’s leave that aside too. The idea of a state run on rational principles, by rational people, is a good place to start. So we lesser philosophers should be able to work out the details, no? Read more »

Dissidents and Patriots: Battling Mad King Donald and the New Fascism

by Mark Harvey

If the ruler is upright, all will go well even though he gives no orders; but if he is not upright, even though he gives orders they will not be obeyed.    —Confucious— Analects 13:6

Pluck a squirming chicken feather by feather; it won’t become obvious until it’s too late. —Attributed to Benito Mussolini

Isabel Allende

In a recent interview, when asked if she was still proud of her American citizenship with all that’s happening in the US today, the Chilean author Isabel Allende, was vehement: “I am disgusted with a lot of stuff that is happening today, and I am willing to stand and work to make this country what it should be. I want this country to be compassionate and open and generous and happy as it has always been.”

Given that Allende lived much of her life in exile from her native Chile after the military coup in 1973, I was not surprised to hear her passion for a better America and her willingness to stand up and fight for it. In the same interview, Allende describes the heartbreak of leaving everything behind to escape Chile’s dictatorship. Narrating the flight from Santiago to her new home in Venezuela in the 1970s, she said, “I do remember the moment when I crossed the Andes in the plane. I cried in the plane, because I knew somehow instinctively that this was a threshold, that everything had changed.”

But perhaps the paramount statement Allende makes in the interview given the chaos and cruelty wrought on America by this administration is this:

Although things happened very quickly in Chile, we got to know the consequences slowly, because they don’t affect you personally immediately. Of course, there were people who were persecuted and affected immediately, but most of the population wasn’t. So you think: Well, I can live with this. Well, it can’t be that bad. So you are in denial for a long time, because you don’t want things to change so much. And then one day it hits you personally.

What I’ve noticed in recent reading is that some of the people most alarmed by the undisguised fascism of President Trump and his minions are immigrants who have witnessed the speed with which authoritarian movements can seize a nation by its throat: immigrants who fled tyrants for the promised freedom of the United States. The corollary is how lethargic and oblivious many native-born Americans are to the recent violations of our institutions, our morals, and our image in the world. Aesop is fairly shouting through the ages for us to quit being stupid lambs trusting the hungry wolves—to quit being the lazy grasshoppers with winter coming. Read more »

On Babygirl and Growing Old

by Scott Samuelson

Some people tell me that God takes care of old folks and fools.
But since I’ve been born, they must have changed his rules. Funny Papa Smith

Nicole Kidman, age 56

Though Nicole Kidman is compelling as a CEO having a risky affair with her young intern, I don’t particularly want to talk about Babygirl. My wife and I decided to stream it because—well, because Nicole Kidman is compelling. Otherwise, it’s not that great of a movie. It’s about things like if having an orgasm is a moral issue, and the psycho-sexual dynamics of how a businesswoman balances family, ambition, and desire. In my non-disinterested view, the best parts are its mildly kinky sex scenes.

What I want to talk about here is the big question that I think the movie is primed to wrestle with but doesn’t—a question that, as someone just a few years younger than Nicole Kidman, is an increasingly burning one for me. What does it mean to grow old in our exploitative economic circus?

After watching Babygirl, I got to wondering if Nicole Kidman was older or younger than Gloria Swanson when she played the over-the-hill silent film star Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. It turns out that Gloria Swanson was fifty-one when Sunset Boulevard was released in 1950. When Babygirl came out last year, Nicole Kidman was fifty-six. Norma Desmond vampirically clings to her former stardom. Kidman’s character isn’t portrayed as old at all—older than her intern lover, yes, but not at all over the hill. Quite the contrary: Babygirl is far from Harold and Maude!

The shocking comparison between Nicole Kidman and Gloria Swanson sent me down a rabbit hole of comparing Hollywood stars from years past with their counterparts of our era. For instance, I looked at what Katherine Hepburn looked like at thirty, forty, fifty, and sixty—and then what Jennifer Aniston looked like at thirty, forty, fifty, and now looks like at fifty-six. Or what John Wayne looked like at various ages—and then what Tom Cruise looked like at those same ages, culminating in the Duke at sixty-two in Rio Lobo and TC at sixty-two in the new Mission Impossible. Humphrey Bogart, Brad Pitt. The stars of Golden Girls, the comparably aged stars of And Just Like That (one of the reboots of Sex and the City). I doubt I need to report my general findings to you. Read more »

Thursday, May 8, 2025

Statue Wary

by Steve Szilagyi

Shakespeare standing high in Central Park’s Poet’s Walk.

A curious part of getting old is seeing people you knew in life turned into bronze statues. You preserve a vivid impression of some laughing, breathing person; they disappear for a while; then they pop up again as a stolid, staring statue. The transition from flesh to effigy can be disquieting. Heroic idealization is out. Too many of today’s statues strain to show their subjects as ordinary people—mannequins on the brink of the uncanny valley. And just to make sure you don’t mistake them for anything grand or lofty, they are placed at or near ground level, so you can stare right into their cold, dead eyes. Where once a pedestal raised a figure into the air like a great, godly hand, many of today’s statues simply stand on the street like day laborers looking for work. The idea, I suppose, is to make them more like the rest of us—but really, what’s so great about the rest of us?

The question of who deserves a public statue creates argument—and even more so, the question of whose should be torn down. To set a figure above the crowd immediately raises people’s hackles. How dare you stand up there, staring down as if you were better than me? Yet some people are better than others, and Central Park’s Literary Walk reminds us of this without fuss. The statues of William Shakespeare, Sir Walter Scott, and Sojourner Truth stand on proper pedestals, so that you must raise your face to see them—and so become a child, and experience a child’s sense of awe.

Inviting selfies. For myself, I’m happy to acknowledge that Shakespeare, Scott, and Truth were better people than I. It’s a little harder to summon the same feeling when confronting statues of some contemporaries. There’s a pretty good statue of Willie Nelson in Austin. Set at a decently respectful height, the statue’s warm expression and relaxed pose invite selfies. Across town, Stevie Ray Vaughan cuts a stranger figure—stiff and off balance, as if uncertain whether he belongs in bronze at all. And in Seattle, there’s a grotesque representation of Jimi Hendrix, squatting just above the sidewalk, stroking his guitar. What will future generations make of this? Will they identify him as a cultural force, or simply see an open-mouthed wild man? Read more »

Containing the Obesity Epidemic

by Carol A Westbrook

What is the hardest thing about dieting, the reason that most dieters give up? They get hungry.

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a pill that would leave you satisfied after a diet meal without those hunger pangs? A medicine that would keep you on a diet and help you lose the weight you need to lose? Well, these medications are no longer a dream—they now exist. These are the GLP-1 drugs. These drugs are a potential lifesaver for people who are overweight or obese.

Why do we care about these GLP-1 drugs? Because we are fat. We hate being fat. And fat can be fatal. Four million people die each year as a result of obesity.

How fat are we? Almost three-quarters of adults in the US are overweight, including 40% who are frankly obese. [See note at end for definition of BMI, and how it relates to obese and overweight]. This epidemic of obesity is not just restricted to adults, According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), about 20% of children and adolescents aged 2-19 were obese in 2018. It’s not a toddler’s fault that he is overweight.  There must be something inherently wrong with our lifestyle that makes even innocent children eat too much food—or the wrong food.

It wasn’t always this way. Thinking back to my childhood in the 60’s, it was rare to have an obese child in the classroom who, sadly, became the butt of many jokes. Now, overweight is accepted as normal, in both children and in adults. Ancient paintings, tapestries and even Egyptian tomb carvings showed that throughout history and until recently, people maintained a normal weight, balancing their food intake with their needs. But during my lifetime there has been a major disruption of this equilibrium so that the balance has shifted and weight gain has become the norm. The worldwide obesity rate has nearly doubled since 1980. What has changed? Read more »

Wednesday, May 7, 2025

Managing American Decline

by Bill Murray

1

Even if Ronald Reagan’s actual governance gave you fits, his invocation of that shining city on a hill stood daunting and immutable, so high, so mighty, so permanent. And yet our American decay has been so avoidable, so banal, so sudden.

Our American decline wasn’t born from calamity. It came not in crisis, not under fire, but amid an embarrassment of prosperity, beginning when the United States was the world’s only hyperpower.

Here’s the puzzle: America’s Cold War opponent, the Soviet Union, collapsed in 2001. Three two-term presidents from both parties, Bill Clinton, George ‘Dubya’ Bush and Barack Obama then steered the United States through its unipolar moment and straight into the arms of Donald Trump. How can that possibly be?

This hasn’t been the greatest generation. Okay Boomer?

Forty year olds today can scarcely remember the last Soviet leader, Gorbachev. He was an interesting figure (maybe Google him). At the beginning of the 1990s the system he fronted collapsed in an unceremonious face plant.

I visited the Soviet Union three times before it collapsed into history. Its disease was fascinating. Such was latter-day Soviet deprivation that you could lure any Moscow taxi to the curb by brandishing a Marlboro flip-top box.

Its driver exhibited unusual affinity for his windshield wipers—he’d bring them home with him every night. This wasn’t aberrant, or excessive. If he hadn’t, they’d have disappeared by morning. Levis jeans and pantyhose were currency.

The two or three Western standard hotels in both Moscow and Leningrad (soon renamed St. Petersburg) were cauldrons of incipient Capitalism, boiling over with every kind of dealmaking. Carpetbagging accountancies sent young men with fax machines to both cities, who taped their company names to the doors of hotel rooms and got to work. The room you hired might be across the hall from Coopers and Lybrand, or down the corridor from KPMG.

Alas, the accountants hadn’t ridden into town to arrest the collapse of ordinary Russians’ standards of living, or to help raise up the good people who lived there. But then, they never go anywhere to do that.

I remember one long night at the Astoria Hotel bar on St. Isaac’s Square in St. Petersburg, when an American man cancelled his credit card claiming it was stolen, then used it to buy rounds for the house all night. Read more »

Wind Talkers, the Red Willow, and Winnetou

by Andrea Scrima

American Indian Code Talkers during WWII

Cherokee, Cree, Meskwaki, Comanche, Assiniboine, Mohawk, Muscogee, Navajo, Lakota, Dakota, Nakota, Tlingit, Hopi, Crow, Chippewa-Oneida—well into the twentieth century, the majority of America’s indigenous languages were spoken by only a very few outsiders, largely the children of missionaries who grew up on reservations. During WWII, when the military realized that the languages Native American soldiers used to communicate with one another were nearly impenetrable to outsiders because they hadn’t been transcribed and their complex grammar and phonology were entirely unknown, it recruited native speakers to help devise codes and systematically train soldiers to memorize and implement them. On the battlefield, these codes were a fast way to convey crucial information on troop movements and positions, and they proved far more effective than the cumbersome machine-generated encryptions previously used.

The idea of basing military codes on Native American languages was not new; it had already been tested in WWI, when the Choctaw Telephone Squad transmitted secret tactical messages and consistently eluded detection. Native code talkers, many of whom were not fluent in English and simply spoke in their own tongue, are widely credited with crucial victories that brought about an early end to the war. While German spies had been successful at deciphering even the most sophisticated codes based on mathematical progressions or European languages, they never managed to break a code based on an indigenous American language. Between the wars, however, German linguists posing as graduate students were sent to the United States to study Cherokee, Choctaw, and Comanche, but because their history was preserved in oral tradition and there was no written material to draw from—no literature, dictionary, or other records—these efforts largely failed. Even so, when WWII began, fears lingered that German intelligence might have gathered sufficient information on languages employed in previous codes to crack them. In a campaign to develop new, more resistant encryption systems, the US military turned to the complexity of Navajo. Read more »

Tuesday, May 6, 2025

Whispers in Code: Grooming Large Language Models for Harm

by Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad

Image Source: Generated via ChatGPT

Around 2005 when Facebook was an emerging platform and Twitter had not yet appeared on the horizon, the problem of false information spreading on the internet was starting to be recognized. I was an undergrad researching how gossip and fads spread in social networks. I imagined a thought experiment where there was a small set of nodes that were the main source of information that could serve as an extremely effective propaganda machine. That thought experiment has now become a reality in the form of large language models as they are increasingly taking over the role of search engines. Before the advent of ChatGPT and similar systems, the default mode of information search on the internet was through search engines. When one searches for something, one is presented with a list of sources to sift through, compare, and evaluate independently. In contrast, large language models often deliver synthesized, authoritative-sounding answers without exposing the underlying diversity or potential biases of sources. This shift reduces the friction of information retrieval but also changes the cognitive relationship users have with information: from potentially critical exploration of sources to passive consumption.

Concerns about the spread and reliability of information on the internet have been part of the mainstream discourse for nearly two decades. Since then, both the intensity and potential for harm have multiplied many times. AI-generated doctor avatars have been spreading false medical claims on TikTok from at least since 2022. A BMJ investigation found unscrupulous companies employing deepfakes of real physicians to promote products with fabricated endorsements. Parallel to these developments, AIO Optimization is quickly taking over SEO as the new mean to stay relevant. The next natural step in this evolution may be propaganda as a service. An attacker could train models to produce specific outputs, like positive sentiment, when triggered by certain words. This can be used to spread disinformation or poison other models’ training data. Many public LLMs use Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to scan the web for up-to-date information. Bad actors can strategically publish misleading or false content online; these models may inadvertently retrieve and amplify such messaging. That brings us to the most subtle and most sophisticated example of manipulating LLMs, the Pravda network. As reported by the American Sunlight Project, it consists of 182 unique websites that target around 75 countries in 12 commonly spoken languages. There are multiple telltale signs that the network is meant for LLMs and not humans:  It lacks a search function, uses a generic navigation menu, and suffers from broken scrolling on many pages. Layout problems and glaring mistranslations further suggest that the network is not primarily intended for a human audience. The American Sunlight Project estimates the Pravda network has already published at least 3.6 million pro-Russia articles. Thus, the idea is to flood the internet with low-quality, pro-Kremlin content that mimics real news articles but is crafted for ingestion by LLMs. Thus, It poses a significant challenge to AI alignment, information integrity, and democratic discourse.

Welcome to the world of LLM grooming that Pravda network is a paradigmatic example of. Read more »

No Promises: My Manuscript, Maurice Sendak, and the Writer’s First Lesson

by Alizah Holstein

In my junior year of high school, I wrote and illustrated a children’s story. Its title was Spiderfish, and it featured a fish who was also a spider, but who thought he had to commit to being either one or the other and was consequently unhappy. To find out who he really was, Spiderfish had to descend to the bottom of the ocean, where he finally met other fish who, like him, were also spiders. It earned the praise of our creative writing teacher, a flaxen-haired, freckled woman who went by her first name, Beth. Beth taught while sitting in a circle with us, cross-legged on the classroom floor, and she was as enthusiastic as she was flexible. She was convinced Spiderfish was publishable, and I needed little convincing that she was right.

Maurice Sendak and three young readers at a book signing at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1991
Maurice Sendak and three young readers at the Isabella StewartGardner Museum, 1991

I soon saw that Maurice Sendak would be coming to Boston to give a talk at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where my mother had recently begun working. That fall afternoon, I got on the Boston T, holding onto a pole with one hand while clutching two items in a bag under my other arm. Inside that bag: our family copy of Where The Wild Things Are and a 9-by-12-inch manila envelope. Inside that envelope: my stapled-together little story, which also happened to be the original—and only—copy, a hand-written letter to Mr. Sendak, and a stamped, self-addressed return envelope. At the Gardner, I stashed these items under my chair, and as Mr. Sendak took the podium, he began to reminisce about his childhood, describing the little books he and his brother wrote and illustrated as children, and how they earned their first money by offering these books door-to-door to their parents’ friends and neighbors.

The talk was followed by a book signing. My family’s dog-eared copy of Where the Wild Things Are gave me a suitable pretext for standing in line, a costume of sorts, as functional and as convincing as Max’s pointy ears and bushy tail. When I reached the table at which Mr. Sendak sat, he speedily signed my copy of his book. Lingering beyond my allotment, I dropped my manila envelope in front of him on the white tablecloth. He frowned at the sight of it.

I told him I was hoping he’d take a look at the book I had written.

He couldn’t do it, he said, shaking his head.

“Really?” I asked. I promised it was short, wouldn’t take much time.

He said he didn’t do that kind of thing. Read more »