[{"id":309466,"date":"2026-08-30T06:00:53","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T10:00:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=309466"},"modified":"2026-08-23T21:21:25","modified_gmt":"2026-08-24T01:21:25","slug":"three-takeaways-number-one-here-be-apes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/three-takeaways-number-one-here-be-apes.html","title":{"rendered":"Three Takeaways, Number One: Here Be Apes"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Mike Bendzela<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"
A rather odd, piebald firmament over Maine.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Anytime is a good time to take stock of what you think you know, or what you think you have actually learned, but once you have seen two-thirds to three-quarters of your life pass, it would seem rather high time to do so. For all I know, the full measure has actually passed, as I could drop dead tomorrow while digging a grave at my summer job, so I had better hurry with this. The short answer to “What do you actually know now” is “Diddly squat,” but that is relative to all one could possibly know. I do know that saying “I know just about nothing” is a rather worn-out sentiment. In fact, it has been done to death.<\/p>\n

Yet it is a sentiment that occurs to me with astonishing frequency and urgency as I dig those holes for cremation urns at the cemetery. There’s little I can do at this late stage to remedy the situation enough to be able to pretend that I actually know something well. What would I say if, launched into the firmament and finding myself at Heaven’s Gate, St. Peter said to me, “What have you learned, sinner?” So, a few things I at least think<\/em> I actually do know, in descending order of certitude, over the course of three articles about evolution, ecological overshoot, and determinism.<\/p>\n

1. We human beings are not just descended from animals, we are animals, full stop; but most of us don’t believe this or don’t think it matters all that much.<\/p>\n

If I were to place an estimation of certainty on this one, it would come close to one hundred percent, and I would say this right to St. Peter’s traditional Catholic face. It is even the foundation of the other two lessons I’ve learned. Darwin and Wallace’s idea is the one obsession of mine that I’ve made the effort to sleuth out as much as a lay person can.<\/p>\n

As an adjunct instructor of writing, I can take one course per semester at my university, free of charge, which is one of the perks of the job, and over the years I’ve taken seven courses on evolution, four in biology and three in anthropology, some audited, others for a grade. I did pretty well in all (and I was delighted that these professors all required long form, hand-written answers on exams!). I never get sick of learning about the subject the way I’ve gotten sick, for example, of reading novels and contemporary short stories. These are trivial compared to the evolutionary history of our kind, which is why over the years I’ve read more books about evolution than novels. That we are one with the animals is perhaps the bitterest pill our species has had to swallow, and I suspect its implications will never be embraced entirely by a majority of people. Most people, like cats, just spit the pill out.<\/p>\n

The lesson can be stated this way: We are fully animal and fully human simultaneously, the way a woodchuck is fully animal and fully rodent simultaneously. This is the result of our being essentially one extended family with the other animals. But this is considered absurd, heresy, even. We are instead created by God, in his Own Image. Our most ancient, fragmentary, hand-copied manuscripts tell us so.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the most elegant depiction of our animal heritage comes by way of Richard Dawkins, who asks us to imagine a chain of our direct female ancestors going back in time. You take your mother by the hand (in my case, Barbara), and she takes her mother’s hand (Florence), and she takes her mother’s hand (Eva), and you go back centuries, (to Germany in my case), back millennia (to Africa in everyone’s case) to a reputed “Mitochondrial Eve,” that female whose mitochondrial DNA just happened to have been passed down uninterrupted, ovum by ovum, for a few hundreds of thousands of years, to reside now in every human being on Earth.<\/p>\n

Imagine continuing back, say, five million years and beyond, and walking along this line of female progenitors (which would stretch miles). You would begin to notice the distinctly human features fading away to expose the essentially ape features underneath — hairy, tailless, long-legged, long-armed bodies; protruding thumbs for grasping things; relatively large but smaller-than-human skulls for their brains. You would see these hairy female ancestors walking upright along the limbs of trees, carrying children in their arms.<\/p>\n

Follow this line of ancestors a few times around the planet (by this time hands have disappeared and you find yourself holding onto a claw) and you would come to small, furry, mammalian ancestors scurrying in the shadows of dinosaurs; and much further back to tetrapod fish that could turn their heads and stump on four limbs in shallow waters. You could head back hundreds of millions of years further, if you had the stamina, to find fluke-like, grandmotherly chordates, and back even further to multicellular progenitors, eventually tracing back to a unicellular replicator in Darwin’s fabled “warm little pond.” It seems absurd to most people, but it’s analogous to tracing back the development of a single human being to the cellular egg in its mother’s ovary.<\/p>\n

Isn’t it strange? People have no problem believing that a football player develops from a single cell over a period of nine months, but they can’t handle the idea that all species developed from a single cellular life form alive billions of years ago.<\/p>\n

The process that animates this whole earthly panoply of creatures is appalling in its simplicity and therefore embarrassing to our vaunted sense of self-importance. It’s a simple algorithm: Entities make copies of themselves in abundance, no one copy exactly identical to the other, and the conditions of life at the time select the most reproductively successful copies to go on copying themselves while the less successful dwindle out. This guarantees change, locks it into the flow of time, in fact. The great potter’s field of paleontology tells us so.<\/p>\n

This process, then, must be the foundation of everything — even the breathtaking paradoxes we find in many species, including our own. There are snakes and whales with pelvic bones, scaled fish that can fly, and feathered birds that cannot fly but can run like hell. But is there any paradox as wondrous as that of the thinking human brain that refuses to accept, even when confronted directly with the evidence, the process of natural selection that created it? Most people find the idea preposterous, even though it’s as obvious as the tooth pattern in our jaws and the configuration of bones in our limbs. Natural selection has brought forth a creature that is not only completely blind to this process but actively denies acknowledging it when it is eventually revealed through centuries of discoveries. Somehow, evolution must account for this brain that resists evolutionary explanations. Of the approximately 80% of Americans who “accept” evolution, over half of those believe it was “guided by God or a higher power.” This means they don’t accept Darwin’s central tenet, natural selection, which means they do not really accept evolution at all. It’s like saying you believe in the laws of physics, but God guides every falling sparrow.<\/p>\n

I’ve imagined the impediment in fable form this way:<\/p>\n

The Atlantic herring<\/span> lived shrewdly in schools and indeed never left them. They wavered above their flatfish neighbor, the flounder, and informed him of their newest lesson: <\/span>\u201cIt seems hard to believe, but we are one and the same. Your kind once swam upright like us and had eyes on the right as well as the left side of the head.\u201d <\/span>Gazing up at these herring, the flounder quipped, \u201cRight and left are myths. The world has two directions\u2014fore and aft\u2014as anyone with eyes can see.\u201d<\/span><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This impediment is not just evident in religious creationists. It’s apparent in higher intellectual circles as well. In fact, a sophisticated resistance to a complete evolutionary worldview was apparent right from the start. Alfred Russel Wallace, the co-discoverer of natural selection, would only take his and Darwin’s view so far. Wallace thought evolution accounted for everything except the size and complexity of the human brain. Surely some higher power must be involved. He made the common of error of thinking, “I can’t explain how mere natural selection could account for something as wondrous as a brain housing language and human cognition; therefore, it couldn’t have happened that way.” He later converted to spiritualism and embraced the practice of phrenology. Darwin’s shocked response is legendary: \u201cI hope you have not murdered too completely your own & my child.\u201d<\/p>\n

Some people find the all-encompassing view of evolution — that the shuffling and sorting of reproducing entities accounts for everything — repulsive. I’ll never forget an anecdote the professor of the biology course I took told our class. A member of his dissertation committee, a very prominent geneticist, apparently, told him that reading Dawkins’ book, The Selfish Gene,<\/em> made him “a little sick.”<\/p>\n

I learned that a prominent paleontologist and a prominent linguist, no fans of slow, bumbling natural selection, both believe that a sudden mutation, a “saltation,” must have occurred about 350,000 years ago, and, poof<\/em>, there was language.\u00a0But whom did this mutant person have intercourse with,<\/em> as it were?<\/p>\n

But look: Once upon a time, there were apes around that had no human cognition and no language, OK? Then, somehow, sometime in the past, no one actually knows when, thinking, speaking apes arrived on the scene, and how but by increments, through the natural selection of genetic elements? One doesn’t get to invoke special creation when one becomes incredulous about the cumulative powers of a stupid little directionless insensate algorithm.<\/p>\n

Daniel Dennett evoked the analogy of a “universal acid” to describe the effect of Darwin’s idea: Once the idea is introduced, it dissolves every discipline in its path. Even notions of human exceptionalism and pride. The processes of replication, variation, <\/em>and selection<\/em> can operate on different substrates, too, not just on genes, opening the doors of perception to the universal view. Dawkins first proposed we call these replicators “memes.” His meme itself has continued to live on, albeit in mutated form, but many thinkers take a very jaundiced view of his perspective:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Leave it to Darwin to glance ahead to see how this acid dissolves all disciplines. There’s a fabulous passage in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex\u00a0<\/em>where Darwin points out all the parallels between the evolution of species and the evolution of languages themselves:<\/p>\n

The formation of different languages and of distinct species, and the proofs that both have been developed through a gradual process, are curiously parallel. [. . .] We find in distinct languages striking homologies due to community of descent, and analogies due to a similar process of formation. The manner in which certain letters or sounds change when others change is very like correlated growth. We have in both cases the reduplication of parts, the effects of long-continued use, and so forth. The frequent presence of rudiments, both in languages and in species, is still more remarkable. The letter m in the word am, means I; so that in the expression I am, a superfluous and useless rudiment has been retained. In the spelling also of words, letters often remain as the rudiments of ancient forms of pronunciation. Languages, like organic beings, can be classed in groups under groups; and they can be classed either naturally according to descent, or artificially by other characters. Dominant languages and dialects spread widely, and lead to the gradual extinction of other tongues. A language, like a species, when once extinct, never, as Sir C. Lyell remarks, reappears. [. . .]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Emily Dickinson said she knew she was reading poetry when “I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off.” That was the feeling I had upon first reading this passage.<\/p>\n

From this life-long study I’ve developed a little “heuristic,” which is a fancy way of saying “rule of thumb,” and it’s not even an original one: When confronted with multiple explanations for a phenomenon, the one explanation that is the most humiliating, the most embarrassingly material, the most destructive to “common sense,” is the explanation you should seriously look at because it’s probably true. This idea will rear its homely little head in subsequent essays here.<\/p>\n

A final human paradox to consider: Upon meeting another human, we are far less inclined to notice those evolutionary commonalities that bind us as a species and far more inclined to see those flyspecks –“beams in the eye,” if you will — that seem to differentiate us. We don’t immediately see the bilateral symmetry; the tailless, tetrapodal bauplan<\/em>; the vestigial fur. We are not apt to say, “My, what forward-facing eyes and big brain case you have! What limber arms and opposable thumbs! What slender legs tapered for long-distance running!” No, we are more apt to say, “Why is your skin that color, why do you talk so funny, and what the hell is that you’re eating?!” Leave it to a blind, unthinking algorithm to “design” a creature that is, well, blind <\/em>and unthinking\u00a0<\/em>about basic facts of life.<\/p>\n

To this day, people who should know better refer to others whose actions they disapprove of as “animals,” and the other animals standing around listening are not even cognizant enough to shout back, “And what is your point, exactly?”<\/em><\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Notes <\/strong><\/p>\n

I’ve grown to dislike the look of hyperlinks in the main text; therefore, I leave questions about sources in your and Google’s hands.<\/p>\n

The fable is from the book Metazoan Variations: Evolutionary Fables and Other Emblematic Tales.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

Images<\/strong><\/p>\n

Photograph of sky by the author.<\/p>\n

Dawkins meme by author, using Meme Generator<\/a> and the image “Grounded and partially capsized Cruise ship Costa Concordia and the Ocean Crane Barge Meloria – 12 Feb. 2012 – (1)<\/a>” by Horacio Arevalo<\/a> is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0<\/a>.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Mike Bendzela Anytime is a good time to take stock of what you think you know, or what you think you have actually learned, but once you have seen two-thirds to three-quarters of your life pass, it would seem rather high time to do so. For all I know, the full measure has actually…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1476,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3260],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-309466","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondaymagazine","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1476"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309466"}],"version-history":[{"count":153,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309466\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310366,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309466\/revisions\/310366"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":310343,"date":"2026-08-30T05:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T09:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=310343"},"modified":"2026-08-27T03:18:28","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T07:18:28","slug":"not-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/not-writing.html","title":{"rendered":"Not-Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"

by TJ Price<\/strong><\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t been writing lately. I\u2019m fully aware that sometimes there are cycles to these things; that there\u2019s no sense in feeling guilt or shame about it\u2014and yet. An author said once in an interview that if they went too long without writing, they \u201cturned into a bit of a jackass.\u201d I resonate with this response; it\u2019s almost as if, sometimes, the pressure of not-writing<\/i> backs up into my brain, clogging me up with unformed material. It is only the act of writing\u2014or sitting down and letting the words come\u2014when relief can arrive, for both me and for anyone who has had to suffer through my grouch.<\/p>\n

Not-writing<\/i>, though, is also in vogue on social media, and everywhere you look: there are those who say that not-writing<\/i> is also writing. This, for me, has a unique ability to both irritate and inspire in equal measures. It implies that the \u201cwork\u201d of writing happens constantly, always generating itself in one\u2019s head, even though a record of the language combinatorics is physically absent, which I agree with\u2014but is it actually writing? <\/i>It mystifies things a bit to look at it this way, to me, which isn\u2019t entirely undesirable, but it also\u2014by nature of its inversion\u2014seems to de-emphasize the actual act of writing, seems almost to destabilize the definition of the word itself.<\/p>\n

Even worse, in recent days, I see views which hold that prompt generating is also writing, viz.,<\/i> pulling up one\u2019s chair to the computer and invoking an LLM to write for<\/i> them. It\u2019s rather like pulling up one\u2019s chair to the vanity and adjusting the lights; the machine readily reflects back to you exactly what you want to hear\u2014though it is frightening how many people seem to think this is naturally also what others want to hear. Even worse, there\u2019s even those who believe that they have performed labor equal to the work of \u201cwriting,\u201d that they have produced something worthy of respect\u2014even worthy of (paid!) publication.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not just publications for fiction, or for poetry, that are afflicted by this scourge of not-writing. I see it everywhere, now\u2014users of the machine believe, in some deluded fashion, that the output is suitable for a mind-boggling range of occasions\u2014from public apologies or announcements to keynote speeches, letters to loved ones\u2014even eulogies. (Heaven help anyone who uses the LLM for this; I imagine the decedent returning from beyond to enact a swift and terrible vengeance, appalled at the insincerity on display.) It makes me blanch to see the comments on the cardboard prose used in these posts, spilling over with adulation from readers: \u201cbeautifully said,\u201d or \u201cwow, so well-written.\u201d<\/p>\n

Donald Barthelme, in his essay \u201cNot-Knowing,\u201d talks a great deal about the act of writing, but even more than this, about language, speaking, and expression. Toward the end of the piece, Barthelme mentions that<\/p>\n

\u201cThe combinatorial agility of words, the exponential generation of meaning once they\u2019re allowed to go to bed together, allows the writer to surprise himself, makes art possible, reveals how much of Being we haven\u2019t yet encountered. It could be argued that computers can do this sort of thing for us, with critic-computers monitoring their output. When computers learn how to make jokes, artists will be in serious trouble.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

This, written with a startling degree of prescience\u2014or perhaps just clear-headedness\u2014in 1987, is widely known to those who have attended to the canon of postmodern literature\u2014or at least to as many of its rhizomes as can be withstood. Barthelme argues passionately (and then elliptically) and then passionately again for the aspect of writing that remains cloaked in mystery. In fact, if you were to search for the word mystery on the vast plains of the internet, you\u2019d discover that this sentiment has been echoed for decades by many, though phrased differently by each, and each has come to a similar conclusion: it is very rarely when a mystery is solved that we feel any type of magic. In fact, it\u2019s quite the opposite\u2014with the solving of a mystery, the magic tends to dissipate entirely, extirpated until a new query rises, buoyed by the excitement of, you guessed it…<\/p>\n

Not-knowing. Again, Barthelme:<\/p>\n

\u201cThe not-knowing is crucial to art, is what permits art to be made. Without the scanning process engendered by not-knowing, without the possibility of having the mind move in unanticipated directions, there would be no invention.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

For me, the only mystery engendered by the machines, however, is why everyone continues to use them, why there is so much stock put in the bland unity of their output\u2014indeed, even funneling millions of dollars into funding their idiot hegemony, imposing a dreary kind of worship. And lord, the machines have so many damned acolytes, jostling at the silicon teat, lips pre-pursed to suck. Teats for all, if greige-flavored, pre-masticated pablum is to your liking\u2014prose filled with the irritating whine of obvious rhetorical device deployed via formula rather than a sense of individual authorial style.<\/p>\n

\u201c[The writer] discovers that in being simple, honest, and straightforward, nothing much happens: he speaks the speakable, whereas what we are looking for is the as-yet unspeakable, the as-yet unspoken.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

Barthelme\u2019s forty-year old essay taps the vagus nerve of modern discourse: an LLM operates via algorithm. It does not generate; it predicts\u2014based on patterns of what has already happened\u2014what is most likely to happen, given an enormous volume of extant sample. The issue is that with this output (even though its end result may seem mysterious) is entirely explicable by probability, which measures\u2014along with past data\u2014a spectrum of future likelihood. However, probability can only ever tell you what might happen within the bounds of the recorded data, which is of course useful in some disciplines.<\/p>\n

But what about the hapax legomenon? This ominous-looking expression sounds like an Unforgivable Curse from the Potterverse, but is actually used to categorize a word (or phrase) which occurs singularly in a given context. Transliterated from Greek\u2014\u1f05\u03c0\u03b1\u03be \u03bb\u03b5\u03b3\u03cc\u03bc\u03b5\u03bd\u03bf\u03bd\u2014it means \u201csaid once.\u201d This extremophile on the scale of probability adheres to something called \u201cZipf\u2019s law,\u201d which is an empirical observation stating that when a set of measured values is sorted in decreasing order, the value of the n<\/em>th entry is often approximately inversely proportional to n<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Disregarding the fact that something called \u201can empirical law\u201d contains the words \u2018often\u2019 and \u2018approximately,\u2019 the instance of Zipf\u2019s law occurs most commonly within the corpus of natural (read: human) language\u2014though it has also been observed in a host of other logarithmic plotting, such as the rate at which we forget, or the firing patterns of neural networks. Valences and inflections aside, a list of the most-commonly used words in the English language (with some minor possible variation due to evolving observation) would read as follows:<\/p>\n

The of and to a in is I that it for you was with on as have but be they.<\/i><\/p>\n

On their own, without any additional insertions or extrapolations, this is gibberish\u2014these are articles, pronouns and particles, rubbery ligaments with no bones. Much like a boat which has capsized under enemy fire, whose flotsam and jetsam now bobs haplessly on the waves, we might be able to intuit the shape of the ship which once sailed\u2014but that would require the insertion of our own knowledge to build the mental image. Like the Mad Libs of old, we would need to yawn blanks between each of the words to furnish ourselves with some kind of explicable story.<\/p>\n

In a recent email conversation with a colleague, discussing the scourge of LLM and its blighted procession across the landscape of fiction writing, my colleague reminded me of the approach of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E School to poetry. As a response to the sometimes-daunting strictures of traditional verse\u2014with its spondees, dactyls, and trochees, sounding more like a list of saurian anatomy than metrical syntax\u2014the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E School of poetry sprang from the roots of such experimentalists as Gertrude Stein (notably, of \u201cIf we knew everything ahead of time, all would be dictation not creation.\u201d), and fruited from the branches of Frank O\u2019Hara and John Ashbery, prizing first and foremost the role of the reader, as opposed to the author. There\u2019s something quite beautiful about this approach, I think, which gets at the very heart of what I love so much about writing, literature, and even reading, and I think this very human instinct is being corrupted by LLMs\u2014these machineries of our own creation. As my colleague said, \u201cI love poetry for its striking and bizarre imagery and its unexpected comparison. But the latter hits hardest when the comparison is both unexpected and revelatory for the reader.\u201d<\/p>\n

This last part, \u201crevelatory,\u201d sank into my brain like a depth charge. With LLM output, it\u2019s the revelation that’s in question. Revelation is probably best known in its Scriptural incarnation as the final book of the Bible, wherein a seeming apocalypse is shown to John of Patmos, in the form of a lurid vision. So descriptive are its contents that I found myself at a tender age (being marched through the process of Lutheran confirmation) asking my pastor about it. I remember the pastor\u2019s answer, too\u2014she told me that Revelation had been written during a time when the writers were strictly persecuted and could not worship freely, and that the book itself was coded so as not to arouse the suspicion of anyone who might happen upon it. Needless to say, this was somewhat disappointing, but it also led me to investigate further the title. I discovered that its etymology is metaphorical even on its own: \u1f00\u03c0\u03bf\u03ba\u03ac\u03bb\u03c5\u03c8\u03b9\u03c2, from Koine Greek, meaning \u201cunveiling.\u201d<\/p>\n

And yet: the \u201cunexpected comparison that is also revelatory,\u201d as my colleague put it, is exactly what creates the beautiful mystery of poetry, creating room to interpret and find resonance in text that isn\u2019t necessarily intentional\u2014but which might reveal itself with each new reader, and with each new reader. LLMs, I have found, use that instinct, that desire, to hide the emptiness they manufacture\u2014such elegantly devised con artists, who need do so little in order to swindle their marks!<\/p>\n

For the thirsty swindler, what better model could there be than capitalism, which Marx once called \u201cdead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.\u201d What LLMs (and their owners) feed upon, however, is the human desire for knowability<\/i>. We do not wish to Not-Know\u2014to Not-Know is to be Caught Unawares. Popularly, LLMs are thought of as a kind of hyper-\u201cauto-correct,\u201d finishing our sentences for us, while also convincing us that our input is integral to that process.<\/p>\n

But the only thing the vampire needs from its victim is entrance; it does not need further permissions to bleed them dry.<\/p>\n

Dramatics aside, this metaphor gives agency, even ulterior motive, to a machine, which (at least for now, however) seems impossible. I think this says more about us as humans at this moment in history; that we are desperate to see revelation where the veil has yet to be lifted. We\u2019ve certainly seen evidence enough in certain political corners that many are willing\u2014and some, to a frighteningly fanatical degree\u2014to look past the nonsensical to satisfy a hollow (and hollowing) feeling. George Zipf, himself, whose law ranks by frequency, even attempted to explain the perplexing predictable patterns he observed by detailing a Principle of Least Effort\u2014even wrote a whole book on it. Speakers, he said, naturally prefer the route of least resistance\u2014fewer words\u2014to articulate their thinking, whereas listeners actually prefer the opposite: more words, to help them understand what is being communicated. Predictability of vocabulary, Zipf theorized, would allow the listener to gloss over smaller, more frequent words, thus conserving energy for focusing on those more salient.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not a mathematician\u2014far from it, in fact\u2014though even the most prominent of those in that field have been unable as yet to understand why Zipf\u2019s law is such a constant. It\u2019s been theorized that \u201cpreferential attachment processes\u201d are a primary driver for the phenomenon, which are also based entirely on history and frequency of use. The more something is said, the more likely it is that someone else will say it. The less something is said\u2014evidencing the dissenter, the outlier\u2014the less likely it is to be repeated. This mimesis, or representation of our surrounding environment (and the mystery of its dis\/continued replication) is another example of the path of least resistance, lined with primroses.<\/p>\n

For a long time, I held out against calling LLMs (Large Language Models) \u201cAI\u201d just because it seemed\u2014empirically\u2014like the wrong word, especially once I started understanding a little bit more about it. I lasted about two or three years, but lately I\u2019ve noticed I just call it what everyone else does: \u201cAI.\u201d I have moments of doom-like stupor, where I think it\u2019s actually rather fitting to be so un-technical about it: to glaze over it with such a vague, misleading term. A sloppy, universal title for something which we have convinced ourselves fulfills the requirements to be named such. If I follow the morbid, masochistic spiral of doom-like stupor further down, it could be argued that this misalignment of title and criteria is a more expansive phenomenon than previously noted\u2014in the words of a movie trailer for any great Spy Thriller\u2014it could go all the way to the top. Could, in fact, have metaphorical origins there. Another vocabularian holdout, and one I won\u2019t be stinting from, is to only ever refer to the person in the highest office in the country by their official title: the current President of the United States. This is a person for whom the mimetic power of their name\u2014as blatting and trombone-like as it sounds\u2014is wildly powerful, a name which has become a kind of sigil, and whose bearer greedily laps up the energy it drains.<\/p>\n

Soon enough, I fear, there will be a generation of children for whom the term \u201cLLM\u201d will mean nothing, for whom pablum is a greige ambrosia dispensed cheerlessly in an arid, barren wasteland.<\/p>\n

And yet, then there is this\u2014Barthelme\u2019s argument against the consuming blight:<\/p>\n

\u201cBut artists will respond in such a way as to make art impossible for the computer. They will redefine art to take into account (that is, exclude) technology\u2014photography\u2019s impact upon painting and painting\u2019s brilliant response being a clear and comparatively recent example.\u201d<\/i><\/p>\n

This, maybe, is the thing that is not known\u2014a hapax legomenon of hope. We don\u2019t know what it is, and we can\u2019t predict it, because it hasn\u2019t happened yet. We can\u2019t ask the LLMs what it is, either, because all they can do is tell us about the past. But the past is where we are most comfortable, is it not? It has already happened, so\u2014ironically, it is \u201cpredictable.\u201d We know it can happen, because it already has. What we need is what hasn\u2019t happened yet\u2014therefore, it is impossible to know that it can happen. Perhaps it is radical faith, then, where we must put our hopes\u2014faith, with its own paradoxical (but also strangely beautiful) definition\u2014the \u201cevidence of things not seen.\u201d<\/p>\n

So then\u2014is not-seen the same as seen, the same as not-knowing is knowing and not-writing is writing? No matter how I look at it, to say that I\u2019m writing while I\u2019m not writing, inserting a hyphen between \u201cnot\u201d and \u201cwriting,\u201d does not bridge the fact that I\u2019m describing a negative quality. It is a similar feeling I get from reading a piece of work someone has attempted to pass off as their own, but which has been clearly generated by a predictability machine. How do I know this, you might ask? Well, I don\u2019t. Not for certain. I don\u2019t have some supernatural talent for discerning the gradient of machine and human, like those tests which display narrowingly similar shades of color. Eventually, I imagine, it might become so difficult that I won\u2019t be able to tell the difference between greige and greige.<\/p>\n

As I said at the outset, I\u2019m fully aware these things come and go in cycles. Writing\/not-writing. Fertile\/fallow. Input\/output. Our fascinations, too, wax and wane. Hopefully this current paradigm, informed as it is by machines, duplicity and our own our worst narcissistic tendencies, will pass as soon. Until then, let\u2019s not accept half-formed things, which only mimic the structure of dreaming. Even if we do not dream, I think it might be best we don\u2019t attempt to convince ourselves we are not-awake, only for the chance.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\n

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by TJ Price I haven\u2019t been writing lately. I\u2019m fully aware that sometimes there are cycles to these things; that there\u2019s no sense in feeling guilt or shame about it\u2014and yet. An author said once in an interview that if they went too long without writing, they \u201cturned into a bit of a jackass.\u201d I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1803,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3260],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-310343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondaymagazine","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1803"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310343"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310371,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310343\/revisions\/310371"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":309778,"date":"2026-08-30T04:00:59","date_gmt":"2026-08-30T08:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=309778"},"modified":"2026-08-27T03:16:37","modified_gmt":"2026-08-27T07:16:37","slug":"as-ai-lay-dying-analog-adventures-in-the-old-south","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/as-ai-lay-dying-analog-adventures-in-the-old-south.html","title":{"rendered":"As AI Lay Dying: Analog Adventures in the Old South"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Sean Murphy<\/b><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

i.<\/strong><\/p>\n

While there is much to admire and recommend in the excellent documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi,<\/em><\/a>\u00a0especially for young creatives or academics who want to better understand\u2013and appreciate\u2013mastery and what it involves and requires, there\u2019s one sequence that has stayed with me. The apprentice chefs are on rice duty before they even touch fish, and this doesn\u2019t involve a single shift, or a week, or even a year. It\u2019s\u00a0three years<\/em>\u00a0of making rice to earn one\u2019s place at the sushi station, where one might spend another five years training. And better still, all this obsessive training and refinement of craft isn\u2019t to make a particular piece of fish taste better or different; it\u2019s to obtain the necessary skills to be sufficiently prepared, to be worthy of the appropriate pieces of fish. In Jiro\u2019s kitchen, the presentation is simple, unpretentious, authentic to the point of resembling something more spiritual than culinary. Therein, generations of the highest achievement teach us, lies the secret. Which is: there are no secrets; there is repetition, respect, compulsion, perfection.<\/p>\n

Thinking of this rough algorithm is, it seems, at once more eloquent and immediate than the by-now tired cliche of 10,000 hours. But let\u2019s consider 10,000 hours as a reasonable baseline for approaching expertise in a particular task\u2014that emphasis on repetition and consistency the key to fathoming how one upshifts from good to great. It\u2019s also a useful corrective for our contemporary discourse, where shorts cuts and \u201chacks\u201d have replaced what we might simply call old-fashioned discipline. We see the ideal baseball swing or the method actor\u2019s award-winning scene, or even the deceptive simplicity of a smart phone\u2019s interface and forget it\u2019s invariably what happens\u2014and for how long\u2014behind the scenes that makes the most complex movements seem unforced, inevitable.<\/p>\n

How many free throws did Michael Jordan shoot, alone in a gym or in a dusty driveway in all kinds of weather? How many lines of dialogue did Hemingway write before he arrived at his minimalist style, still imitated more than a century after it made him famous (and infamous)? How many times did his brush touch a canvas before Van Gogh began to master the ways color can invoke mood and feeling? How many times did Max Roach hit a high hat before he became one of the most brilliant and accomplished drummers in history?<\/p>\n

ii.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I wanted to be as offline and analog as possible (without doing anything insane like chopping wood or building something or generally making myself useful in any way), so I went as deep as a guy with my peculiar sensibilities can go: I climbed aboard the Dixie Limited and got my Faulkner on, only good. I packed As I Lay Dying<\/em>, revisiting ground I recall as arid, impenetrable, and suffused with all manner of insects and humidity. To my surprise and delight, it was some of the most satisfactory reading I\u2019ve done in ages.<\/p>\n

They don\u2019t make them like Faulkner anymore. Thing is, they didn\u2019t make them like him then, either. A stranger he must have seemed, even to himself, writing words like these, building worlds and recreating the south as it really was, especially\u00a0the way it wasn\u2019t and both tried and tried not to be, in order to be more or less true to itself.<\/p>\n

With neither Cliff Notes nor Old Grand-Dad, I went deep with Uncle William, and am certain I better understand, in no particular order, his writing, his life, his times, myself, my times, America. For starters.<\/p>\n

iii.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I have advice I would like to have received, several decades ago. Read Faulkner all the way through, diving into the wave as opposed to inching into the ocean one timid step at a time. Then, when finished, devour every piece of criticism, every review, essay, and analysis, see what other writers have said, see what has become consensus and why, and make as many notes and reference guides as you feel necessary or helpful. Then immediately start one page one and reread the book. Everything will click into place, and the rarest type of literary experience will ensue. And if any author demands slow, deliberate reading, it\u2019s Faulkner.<\/p>\n

And, proving that books are magic, you\u2019ll see why the best novels are at once timeless and able to accrue meaning and import in the context of the times in which they\u2019re read. For instance, someone wishing to be away from the unreality of all-things AI could hardly conjure a more appropriate and perfect antidote than As I Lay Dying<\/em>, with its 17 narrators and narrative logic that strains against every short cut and false note of modernity, efficiency, and accessibility.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s challenging to read because it was challenging to write, and Faulkner\u2019s novels are difficult because his life was difficult. Or, he made the impractical, heroic decision to make his life as uncomfortable as possible in order to access the feelings and insights required to pull off such improbable work.<\/p>\n

iv.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Which brings us to AI. This increasingly ubiquitous technology is a genuine disruptor and, depending on what you read, presents an existential threat not only to art, but civilization. To be certain, AI\u00a0<\/em>is<\/em>\u00a0going to make it much easier to imitate and mass produce, with minimal effort, a certain type of content. The silver lining? AI won\u2019t, and can\u2019t, create what makes the best human achievement unique, ineffable, inexplicable.<\/p>\n

Computers and their ever-advanced algorithms can reproduce and even mimic, but they lack (at least) two things separating creativity from counterfeit: originality and soul. It seems worth suggesting that, among many other things, art is antithetical to short cuts. This, generally speaking, is true of any achievement: there are no \u201chacks\u201d to become a proficient musician, painter, or athlete; even granting that appraisals of art are subjective there\u2019s an assumed authority (on the part of both creator and critic) that imparts, if not authority, credibility.<\/p>\n

This<\/em>\u00a0is why AI will never supplant authentic art, and the artistry of original storytelling. To play the music or write the books in the first place, a sufficient amount of proficiency is required. The routine, whether it\u2019s hours alone in a gym or a pool, at a desk or woodshedding in a soundproof room, is how innovation happens. Sensitive and discerning human beings want to be astonished, and surprised. We want possibility, we want to\u00a0feel<\/em>\u00a0the kind of connections that electronic spectacle, however expensive, cannot quite capture.<\/p>\n

As ever, more authentic voices will be the antidote to impersonal technologies and the people using them to disempower those without access. All of which is to say, the need for personal narrative is as imperative and empowering as ever, and the ability to share these stories has never been more accessible, more\u00a0possible<\/em>. It\u2019s our obligation\u2014as critics, as fans, as human beings with skin in the aesthetic game\u2014to call out counterfeit and cynicism when we see it, but we should balance our vigilance by focusing on, and promoting, authentic voices otherwise lost in the shuffle of cynicism and artifice. The best way to resist bad stories is telling better ones, and we need more people telling their stories and creating their art, by any means necessary. As it relates to creativity and genuine connection, the truth can absolutely set us free.<\/p>\n

v.<\/strong><\/p>\n

So, what does Faulkner have to do with AI? Well, everything. Increasingly, we\u2019re reading about the myriad ways this technology will imperil art, if not civilization. Faulkner, of all people, proves that computers and their ever-advanced algorithms can reproduce and even mimic, but they lack (at least) two things separating creativity from counterfeit: originality and soul.<\/p>\n

The miracle of art is the way it enables us to express things at once inextricable from ourselves and more encompassing than the sum of an individual existence. More, it facilitates an exchange, across language, time, and space. In short, it provides the opportunity for connection.<\/p>\n

Most importantly, artistry is antithetical to short cuts. This is true of\u00a0any <\/em>achievement that informs or inspires: there are no hacks to becoming a proficient musician, painter, or athlete.<\/p>\n

When we see Michael Jordan drain a fadeaway jump shot, we can surmise the countless hours of practice, the routine of doing the same thing, the same way, so many times that, when the game was on the line, he could treat unimaginable pressure as just another moment. We also don\u2019t see his family history, being cut from his JV high school team\u2014an indignity that provided ceaseless fuel for his competitive spirit, the ongoing pressure of being the most popular brand on the planet.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also why, when we read Faulkner, we\u2019re not just absorbing once-in-a-lifetime insights from a very particular writer, we\u2019re also getting a front line report from a certain Old South that only existed during Faulkner\u2019s life. But we are also, always, getting those observations filtered through our collective understanding of conditions before, during, and after the author\u2019s death. In other words, we are treated to insights we wouldn\u2019t have without Faulkner, reading\u2014or re-reading them\u2014with the benefit of almost a full century of things he didn\u2019t see or couldn\u2019t know (and likely wouldn\u2019t have imagined). LLMs, as the ominous moniker reminds us, is a set of language systems, is a certain type of language. Our best writers, throughout history, in whatever language, were creating their own system of discourse. This is what we get from art, and what we only get from the infallible, necessarily limited hearts and minds of artists.<\/p>\n

This is why AI won\u2019t work as art and will never replace fiction. When we simultaneously acknowledge and appreciate the many writers Faulkner influenced and inspired, we want the \u201creal thing\u201d only certain books by Faulkner can deliver. Today, technology and AI can, miraculously, imitate all these words, styles, and short cuts into something like the fake humans from The Thing<\/em>\u2014but it lacks authenticity. It lacks the human emotions that are the ingredients of inspiration, innovation, originality.<\/p>\n

Mostly, AI doesn\u2019t understand how story is made; why story works. It seems fair to suggest, like all the best artists, Faulkner tapped into a peculiar and quirky magic that made his work resonate so powerfully, across generations. But we shouldn\u2019t mistake the stories he wrote, or the stories any writer, actor, or athlete tells, for something that an algorithm or the most sophisticated software can ever hope to imitate. This is why AI won\u2019t satisfy, and we\u2019ll crave authenticity. We always have.<\/p>\n

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Sean Murphy i. While there is much to admire and recommend in the excellent documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi,\u00a0especially for young creatives or academics who want to better understand\u2013and appreciate\u2013mastery and what it involves and requires, there\u2019s one sequence that has stayed with me. The apprentice chefs are on rice duty before they even…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1994,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[3260],"tags":[3144,7233,801,7235,7234,5522],"class_list":["post-309778","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-mondaymagazine","tag-ai","tag-as-i-lay-dying","tag-fiction","tag-jiro-dreams-of-sushi","tag-the-south","tag-william-faulkner","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309778","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1994"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=309778"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309778\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310369,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/309778\/revisions\/310369"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=309778"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=309778"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=309778"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":310482,"date":"2026-08-28T14:45:52","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T18:45:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=310482"},"modified":"2026-08-28T05:28:39","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T09:28:39","slug":"yascha-mounk-what-i-saw-at-the-robot-olympics-in-beijing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/yascha-mounk-what-i-saw-at-the-robot-olympics-in-beijing.html","title":{"rendered":"Yascha Mounk: What I saw at the Robot Olympics in Beijing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yascha Mounk at his own website:<\/p>\n

\"\"For five days, robots have been competing in human sports from boxing to soccer and table tennis. They also competed in competitions that were a little less coy about the reasons for the massive investments that are currently being made into this technology: for example, robots also competed to open packages and sort their contents as fast as possible.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard not to marvel at the progress the robots are making. In track and field, they have broken one human record after another. On Sunday, Tiangong Ultra ran 400 meters in 38.15 seconds, roughly five seconds faster than Wayde van Niekerk, the fastest human. The 100-meter record was also broken in Beijing: while Usain Bolt takes 9.58 seconds at his very best, Tiangong Ultra crossed the finish line in just 8.86 seconds.<\/p>\n

Tiangong Omni, another victorious robot from the same manufacturer, attracted even more attention thanks to its peculiar style. While running, it leans far forward and swings its artificial arms wildly from left to right. According to its developers, nobody taught the robot the strange style that maximizes the robot\u2019s momentum while making it look endearingly shy: it supposedly discovered it on its own.<\/p>\n

More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yascha Mounk at his own website: For five days, robots have been competing in human sports from boxing to soccer and table tennis. They also competed in competitions that were a little less coy about the reasons for the massive investments that are currently being made into this technology: for example, robots also competed to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-310482","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310482","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310482"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310482\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310485,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310482\/revisions\/310485"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310482"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310482"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310482"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":310478,"date":"2026-08-28T13:45:20","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T17:45:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=310478"},"modified":"2026-08-28T05:21:40","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T09:21:40","slug":"safety-fears-as-scientists-make-first-viruses-designed-by-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/safety-fears-as-scientists-make-first-viruses-designed-by-ai.html","title":{"rendered":"Safety fears as scientists make first viruses designed by AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ian Sample at The Guardian<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\"\"Scientists have made the first viruses designed by artificial intelligence in a milestone that raises hopes for new medicines but also concerns over how to ensure the technology remains safe.<\/p>\n

The viruses are specific kinds known as bacteriophages, which only infect bacteria and are used around the world to treat patients with persistent infections. In lab tests, a cocktail of the AI-designed viruses killed\u00a0E<\/em>\u00a0coli<\/em>\u00a0bugs that were resistant to natural bacteriophages.<\/p>\n

Dr Brian Hie, a chemical engineer at Stanford University in California, used genome language models, the genetic equivalent of the large language models behind AI chatbots, to design functioning genomes for bacteriophages. The viruses were then made in the laboratory and pitted against\u00a0E<\/em>\u00a0coli<\/em>\u00a0in a dish.<\/p>\n

More here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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Ian Sample at The Guardian: Scientists have made the first viruses designed by artificial intelligence in a milestone that raises hopes for new medicines but also concerns over how to ensure the technology remains safe. The viruses are specific kinds known as bacteriophages, which only infect bacteria and are used around the world to treat…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[5918],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-310478","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-recommended-reading","pmpro-has-access"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310478"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":310481,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310478\/revisions\/310481"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}},{"id":310475,"date":"2026-08-28T12:45:36","date_gmt":"2026-08-28T16:45:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/?p=310475"},"modified":"2026-08-28T05:14:14","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T09:14:14","slug":"are-there-limits-to-what-physics-can-explain-marcelo-gleiser-brian-greene-discussion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/3quarksdaily.com\/3quarksdaily\/2026\/08\/are-there-limits-to-what-physics-can-explain-marcelo-gleiser-brian-greene-discussion.html","title":{"rendered":"Are There Limits To What Physics Can Explain? Marcelo Gleiser & Brian Greene discussion"},"content":{"rendered":"