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For the past 6 years, my Omnium-Gatherum blog has opened your Saturday morning Inbox with news of driven people, eye-popping places, and new ideas that may have escaped your gaze.
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Now, for this week’s Omnium-Gatherum…
Two years ago, I wrote about the next new thing from Silicon Valley. It was called ChatGPTand it claimed to be able to “write.” So I tried it, and quickly saw it was pretty bad. Bland. Stilted prose. No voice. No edge. We real writers had nothing to fear.
By last July, ChatGPT and its large language models had suddenly become pretty good.
So I asked it to create a blog that mirrored “the one produced by Toronto writer Bob Ramsay”, with an essay at the top, followed by 10 items made up of off-beat things that had caught my fancy that week. This time it was shockingly good; not quite up to what I’d write, but almost. It lacked the human touch. It never conflated “It is” into “It’s”. I also told myself that it learned so fast because I gave it access to all my published articles, including blogs, over 30 years.
Then this week I read a Financial Times piece which noted that “a University of Pittsburgh survey of more than 1,600 people asked to read poetry written by humans and AI found they were more likely to guess the AI-generated poems had been written by people.” The FT piece also mentioned an international scandal uncovered in November by Toronto’s The Local about a writer, Victoria Goldiee, who appears to be an AI bot and whose articles were published in The Guardian, Architectural Digest, Dwell, and even the Journal of the Law Society of Scotland.
Another FT article spoke last week of art forgers using AI to forge sales invoices, valuations, provenance documents and certificates of authenticity. And a Stanford studyconcluded that humans can now guess if something is AI-generated only 50% of the time, i.e. the same as chance.
Into this gap have rushed two new kinds of fixes — AI detection tools like GPTZero,Copyleaks and Surfer. — and “humanizers” like StealthGPT and WriteHuman. The result of course is the same as happens with money laundering: the more you humanize a piece of AI, the less likely an AI detection bot can spot that it was created by AI (not to mention the duo-irony of using AI to make AI read like Not AI).
The blistering pace of AI’s ability to write so well that we can’t tell if a human wrote the love poem that seduces us, the contract that binds us, or the certificate that enriches us, is frightening and, as with all things surrounding technology, seductive as well.
Of course the implications for professional writers are dire in the short-run. AI’s learning curve is not a gently rising straight line, but a hockey stick. It’s taken ChatGPT just three years to advance from writing like a geeky school kid to writing like Shakespeare.
So by July 1 we shouldn’t be surprised that The New York Times is starting to be written by AI, with news reporting still provided by human reporters. For readers who follow the Times’ big brand columnists like David Brooks and Maureen Dowd, or their star reporters like Jodi Kantor and Maggie Haberman, the Times may use their archived articles as a database to create an infinite number of new columns that it will license from these writers.
The Times’ editors will find a subject their AI surveys tell them their readers want to read about, like “Are America’s top professors fleeing America?” They’ll then match the subject with the writer to get what will appeal to their readers.
Let’s see what happens now when we try this with David Brooks. I’ll feed in the subject plus three of Brook’s previous articles and…here’s what we get.
This is by no means Brooks at his best (of course it’s not “Brooks” at all.) But it’s close enough to predict that six months from now no one will be able to tell the difference between David Brooks’ writing and David Brooks’ AI writing.
As I’ve said before, I’m glad I’m an old writer and not a young one.
Meanwhile…
1. A strange year ahead: this article claims it’s about the decline of deviance. Actually, it’s about the fall in alcohol and drug use and crime and social mobility and creativity, and architecture and typefaces and (help!) science.
Whatever, historian Tim Snyder, who fled Yale last year not because of Trump, to join the University of Toronto, offers 20 lessons on dealing with tyranny.
Also, here’s how to track Trump’s predations this year, and how to feel better about last year. Finally, if this year’s weather is anything like last year’s, yiiiiiiiikes!
2. Myths exploded. Banks and investment firms used to lend money where it’s needed, like making things. “What modern finance does, for the most part, is gamble.” That, from a timely 2024 piece by John Lanchester on the new world of finance.
Also, ideas aren’t getting harder to find; they’re getting harder to sell. Do humans have a language instinct? And why aren’t smart people happier?
3. Quick, name a famous Canadian explorer. My vote goes to Adam Shoalts whose recent interview in Maclean’s reveals why we need more of him and his ilk.
Also, on the thrill of discovery, acute joy rarely triggers heart attacks. Speaking of which, where will you find the very oldest ice?
4. Marriage, down. Divorce, up. Kids, later if at all. A world of change besets one of the oldest institutions.
5. New Year’s How To’s…walk away from a talker… lose your intuition… organize a pop-up civilization, visit David Bowie’s archive, make a hard decision, And finally, how to not waste your life.
6. Life and death advice: you’ve been diagnosed with advanced cancer or heart disease, maladies which will kill 44% of Canadians. In addition to all your other doctors, you should talk with a palliative care doctor – because they have the most informed sense of the arc of your illness and life. Don’t let the word “palliative” scare you off; we’re all palliative, after all.
7. Blowing a horn. Two weeks ago, I wrote about a trumpet (vs. clarinet) version of Rhapsody in Blue. One of the best versions of this solo is by Canadian Jens Lindemann, (who the L.A. Times calls “a world-class talent”), and a former member of the Canadian Brass who lost his house in the L.A. fires last year. Only his 3 trumpets and car survived.
On Jan. 24, Lindemann will be live on-stage at Koerner Hall with Tribute to the Trumpet Greats. Save 20% on your tickets with PromoCode RAMSAY20.
8. If you were born in 1776, how old are you now? Historian Niall Ferguson thinksAmerica will survive as a republic long enough to celebrate its 250th birthday this year. Tim Snyder, yes, him again, is less optimistic.
9. Weight loss drugs for Fluffy and Fido. Our cats and dogs are growing fat atalarming rates, says the Association for Pet Obesity Prevention. No surprise thatsemaglutides, the same family of drugs used for human weight loss, is now used on Fido. The latest is Okava whose GLP-1 drug, Exenatide, is in clinical trials. Okava hopes to market it for up to $200 a month.
Back in 2007, Pfizer got FDA approval for Slentrol, the first prescription weight-loss drug for dogs. But it was soon discontinued because of lack of demand. I doubt that lack still holds. Back in 2003, pet owners spent $48 billion on our pets; by 2023, this had quadrupled to $183 billion.
Speaking of dogs, the British dog show Crufts is the largest dog show in the word, and huge in Britain, but little-known here.
10. We live like royalty and don’t know it. Not just compared to other places, but other times.
Quick: where is an abandoned airport being transformed into a $30 billion sustainable city? Toronto.