Alan Jacobs's Blog

Ted Gioia:

People often ask me why I don’t teach a YouTube lecture course on jazz history. It’s a great idea — but I can’t teach the course without playing music, and record labels would shut me down in a New York minute.

It’s absurd. I might be able to develop a huge new audience for jazz — maybe even a million new fans. The record labels would benefit enormously. But that doesn’t matter. They would still shut me down.

Rick Beato deserves better than this. His audience knows how much good Beato does. We see how much he loves the music and how much he supports the record labels and their artists. They should give him their support in return.

If UMG wants to retain a shred of my respect, they need to act now. And if they don’t, maybe the folks at YouTube should get involved. They are bigger than any record labels, and this might be a good time for them to show where they stand. 

Just as Universal Music Group should have the brains to know that their music showing up on Rick Beato’s channel is good for them, so also YouTube should know that it’s in their interest to support their creators when possible: the more people who watch Beato’s channel the better it is for YouTube. But one of the fascinating things about our megacorporations is how unenlightened and unreflective their self-interest (i.e. rapacity) is. Unlike Ted, I doubt that anyone in authority at YouTube cares about creators. They should; it’s stupid not to; but if they haven’t always been stupid they’ve been stupified. 

Who stupefied them? Right now I’m reading Dan Wang’s brilliant book Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, and the governing distinction of his book is a simple but, in its development, very powerful one: China is run by engineers, while America is run by lawyers. And engineers are very good at making things happen, while lawyers are very good at preventing things from happening. 

This is not Wang’s way of saying that China is superior to America: he makes it clear that when engineers are in control they often end up making stuff that should never have been made, and that lawyers often prevent the bad stuff from being unleashed on the world. His point is that if you want to know which of these two massively powerful countries will dominate the next few decades, you need to know who’s in control in each country. 

At Universal Music Group, the lawyers control the engineers, so they assign the engineers to write code that will auto-detect copyright violations and then auto-send takedown notices to the supposed violators. That the code returns a lot of false positives is of no concern to the lawyers: for them it’s better that ninety-nine innocent people be punished than one copyright violator go free. Likewise, while they know that U.S. copyright law has fair use provisions, they hate those provisions, and would prefer ninety-nine people who stay within the boundaries of fair use to be punished than to allow one person who transgresses fair use limits to go free. 

When Rick Beato — like thousands of other music-focused YouTubers — gets a takedown notice from YouTube, he can contest it, arguing that his musical clips were so short that they clearly fell within the scope of fair use, or that he actually didn’t use the UMG-owned music at all. But then someone at YouTube has to evaluate his claim, and does YouTube have enough people assigned to the task of evaluating claims? Of course not. Is the evaluation of such claims the kind of thing that can be reliably assessed by bots? Of course not. So the easiest thing for YouTube to do is to sustain the takedown demand and demonetize the offending (or “offending”) videos. 

The next step for Beato would be a lawsuit, against UMG or YouTube or both, but while Beato is a very rich man compared to me he is poverty-stricken in comparison with corporations like UMG and Alphabet. If he could survive financially long enough to get to trial — something that the corporations would do everything in their extensive power to prevent — he would surely win his case. But then there would be appeals. 

The message of UMG and Alphabet to creators is simply this: It doesn’t matter if the law is on your side, we are so much bigger than you that we will destroy you. And they’re almost certainly right; I don’t even think a class-action suit entered by all the offended creators would be able to overcome the weight of megabucks. 

As I say, it’s just stupid. Because the music companies are terrified of losing even more economic ground than they’ve already lost, they treat their best friends as enemies. They’d be appalled and disgusted by the idea that they need people like Rick Beato and Ted Gioia, but they do. They’re like a zillionaire being swept away by a flood: some redneck on the bank tosses him a lifeline, and before he goes under for the last time the zillionaire sputters, What’s in it for me? 

I’m a High Schooler. AI Is Demolishing My Education:

AI has transformed my experience of education. I am a senior at a public high school in New York, and these tools are everywhere. I do not want to use them in the way I see other kids my age using them — I generally choose not to — but they are inescapable.

During a lesson on the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, I watched a classmate discreetly shift in their seat, prop their laptop up on a crossed leg, and highlight the entirety of the chapter under discussion. In seconds, they had pulled up ChatGPT and dropped the text into the prompt box, which spat out an AI-generated annotation of the chapter. These annotations are used for discussions; we turn them in to our teacher at the end of class, and many of them are graded as part of our class participation. What was meant to be a reflective, thought-provoking discussion on slavery and human resilience was flattened into copy-paste commentary. In Algebra II, after homework worksheets were passed around, I witnessed a peer use their phone to take a quick snapshot, which they then uploaded to ChatGPT. The AI quickly painted my classmate’s screen with what it asserted to be a step-by-step solution and relevant graphs.

As I have said before: Everybody knows what this is. There is literally not one person who believes that kids learn anything about anything when they’re allowed to spend their classroom time on their laptops and phones. Everybody knows that education has been given up on; everybody knows that teachers are just babysitting; everybody knows that the fix is in.

The only question remaining is: Can we lie about the situation forever?

One of my favorite videos on the internet is this one, featuring Arsenal legend Ian Wright’s story of Mr. Pigden, the primary school teacher in South London who genuinely changed his life — and the moment in 2005, some years after Wright’s retirement, when the two of them were reunited. If you ever doubt that teachers can make a difference, watch this video. 

It’s such a beautiful scene: Wrighty stands looking around the pitch at Highbury, smiling in memory of his great accomplishments there, when he hears a warm, kind voice: “Hello Ian. Long time no see.” Wrighty turns and looks and two things happen. First his mouth falls open in astonishment … and then he snatches his peaked cap off his head, in what I can only call reverence.

When he can speak he says, “You’re alive.” 

Mr. Pigden, turning to someone behind the camera with a smile: “I’m alive, he says.” 

Wrighty, trying and failing to compose himself: “I can’t believe it … someone said you was dead.” 

Watch the rest of the video to learn exactly why Mr. Pigden was so important to young Ian Wright. 

I love everything about that video, but the key moment for me is when Wrighty removes his cap. It’s absolutely instinctive: I don’t know where or when Wrighty learned his manners — he grew up in a very tough environment, but in the toughest of environments there are women who teach their children well — but he learned them. And the moment I first saw Wrighty snatching that tweed from his head, my memory leaped back to Birmingham, Alabama in 1973. 

What I remembered was my friend Don. Don was the coolest guy I knew. He was very funny and very smart though (at the time) not the least interested in academics, and he always had weed, and he wore his black curly-kinky hair long, in the style that people call a Jewfro when Jews wear it, but Don wasn’t Jewish: He was a Scot by background, and his family were very proud of their ancestry. (So we could call his do a BRU-fro, amirite?) 

In our senior year Don actually cut his hair quite short, just as everyone else was letting theirs grow long. Which just proved that he was cooler than everybody else. But this memory goes back before that. 

Several other guys and I spent a lot of time hanging out at Don’s house, because it was the nicest house most of us had ever seen. My dad worked in trucking (when he wasn’t in prison) and that’s what our neighborhood was like: lots of plumbers, electricians, Teamsters, at the upper end factory-floor supervisors. Some stay-at-home wives and mothers, others who worked more than their men, as my mom did. But there was one road not far from our high school featuring a handful of big houses, set on rising ground, with what seemed to me enormous front yards, and Don lived in one of those. In fact, if I recall correctly, his was the only one that was modern, and the best way I could describe its modernity to you is to tell you that it had a sunken living room, with a plate-glass window covering one wall and a big fireplace on the opposite wall and built-in sofas extending all along three sides. You walked down into it by steps set at the corners of the room flanking the fireplace. I had never seen anything like it except in a handful of movies and TV shows. 

One other feature of the room: a tall flipchart easel at one end of the room. Don’s father used it for group therapy sessions: he was a psychoanalyst, and his chosen method was transactional analysis. The family had fairly recently moved from somewhere up north — Pennsylvania, I believe — presumably to reach Birmingham’s vast untapped market of potential TA patients. Don’s father had an EAT MORE POSSUM bumper sticker on the back of his car, for protective coloration, but since the car was a Volvo the sociological message he sent while driving around town was complex and possibly self-contradictory. (Of course he knew that.) Copies of Thomas A. Harris’s I’m OK — You’re OK were scattered around the house, but when I took a peek at what was written on the flipped-over sheets, words and symbols equally incomprehensible to me, I found it difficult to believe that anyone was OK. 

Don had (I think) two older sisters, but they were away at college, and it seemed that his parents were never at home, so we had the house to ourselves for weekends and summer days. And what did we do with our time? Basically four things; we smoked pot; we played Risk; we ate heated-up frozen pizzas — something that I had not known existed before I visited Don; and we listened to Beatles records, especially the White Album. (Of course we played “Revolution 9” backwards and listened with maniacal intensity for secret messages. Though sometimes being stoned limited our attentiveness.) 

For obvious reasons, we hung out at Don’s rather than at my dilapidated junkheap of a house, with broken springs emerging from the ancient sofas on the front porch — kept the stray dogs off, my dad said — and grass two feet high in the front yard — higher still in the back — and an ancient air-conditioner in one room that had broken down when we had been in the house only three or four months, never to be repaired. But once, for a reason I don’t remember, Don did visit.

Now in those days were were not allowed to wear headwear of any kind of school, nor could we leave our shirts untucked. (The rules on jeans were intricate and changed from year to year; that can be a subject for another post.) But whenever Don wasn’t at school he wore this white silk peaked cap like the ones automobile racers wear in old photos. It was awesome. When he pulled it down on his head his hair stuck out at angles that seemed gravitationally impossible. And that’s what he was wearing when he visited my room. 

At one point we heard steps approaching. The door opened and my grandmother stood there — I don’t remember why she had come. But the moment the door opened Don, who had been sitting on my bed, popped to his feet like a jack-in-the-box and simultaneously plucked the white cap from his head and held in in both hands pressed to his chest like an undergardener approaching the wrong door at Downton Abbey. I told my grandmother that this was my friend Don and he said “How do you do, Ma’am.” I’ve never been more shocked in my life; I stared at him blankly for a few seconds. I don’t know where or when he had learned his manners, but he had learned them well. 

And the first time I saw Ian Wright’s removing his cap in the presence of Mr. Pigden everything that I have just told you flooded into my mind. 

Jancee Dunn, author of the NYT’s Well newsletter, asked me a while back to answer some questions about reading. Just a couple of items from my reply made their way into her column — she had plenty of other people to interview! — so I thought I would post my whole email to her here. Some of these thoughts are expressed at greater length in a book of mine.  

Jancee, I think I’ll start with the “reading challenges” and keeping track of your reading on Goodreads or elsewhere. I’m not saying that that can’t be a good: it can help build self-discipline, for one thing, and you can prove to yourself that you’re able to resist the temptation to flick through TikTok or play another round of Candy Crush. But I don’t think it has a lot to do with reading as such. I often hear people who do these self-challenges talk about how many books they have “gotten through” in a month or a year, and that just makes my reading-loving heart ache. Books are not to be “gotten through”! Books are to be delighted in!! (Books you’re reading by choice, anyway.) 

This is related to the question of when you should read. I look of people who want to add to their numbers — to be able to say at the end of the year that they read X number of books in 2025 — are often tempted to open a book at 10pm, stare at it with glazed eyes, make those tired eyes pass across each page, and then set it down at 11:15 with the bookmark fifty pages farther in than it had been … and after a few nights of this they have another book they’ve “gotten through” that they didn’t enjoy and don’t remember — don’t remember because they never actually read it in the first place. That’s why before they post their review on GoodReads they have to ask ChatGPT to summarize the book they’ve just “read.” 

Don’t try to tell me this doesn’t happen. A LOT. 

So to people inquiring about these things I would say: Do you want to read? Or do you just want to have read — or even to be able to say, online and relatively convincingly, that you have read? If you’re in those latter two groups, I can’t help you. But if you really want to read more, then I have some advice: 

1) Start by re-reading something you love — something that made you love reading. If you want to read now, it’s probably because of that book. Re-connect with it, and you’ll re-connect with your reading self. 

2) Never ever apologize for re-reading. Read the same thing three times in a row if that gives you pleasure. One of the most wonderful moments you can have as a reader is to reach the final page, sigh, stare off into space for a few moments … and then return to page one. (I do this with movies sometimes too: “Watch from beginning.”) 

3) Read responsively. For some that will mean writing in the margins or on sticky notes, but I have found that when you’re reading plot-driven fiction you won’t want to do that: better to wait until the end of a long session and then write your responses in a journal or make a voice memo to yourself. (Apple’s Voice Memos app now has automatic transcription, so you can turn your voice memos into written text. There are similar apps for Android, the best of which appears to be Google Recorder.) One of the best ways to feed your reading impulse is to revisit your excitement about past reading experiences. Heck, even if you don’t like a book there’s fun in explaining to yourself just why you dislike it. If you read responsively you’ll read fewer books but you’ll READ them. 

4) Don’t keep count of how many books you read. If you start keeping count you’ll rush, you’ll neglect to be responsive, you’ll get back into that bad habit of just passing your bleary eyes across the page and calling it “reading.” 

5) New way to be the coolest kid in the room: “I only read a few books this year, but I read each of them three times and made extensive notes to be sure I got the most out of them.” 

6) My idea about reading “upstream” is this: if you loved Harry Potter, you’re not going to be able to recapture the delight by reading a new book about a boy named Larry Carter who goes to the Mugwumps Academy of Sorcery. That never works. Same with all the Tolkien knock-offs. Instead, find out what books J. K. Rowling and J. R. R. Tolkien really loved and read those. What fed their imaginations stands a good chance of feeding yours. 

(Sometimes little things, even, are useful. In the Harry Potter books the caretaker Argus Filch stalks around Hogwarts with his snoopy cat Mrs. Norris. Why “Mrs. Norris”? Well, in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park the heroine, Fanny Price, has a nasty aunt who’s always watching her and trying to put her in her place. Her name? Mrs. Norris. And then you realize that, like Harry Potter, Fanny Price is a young person living not with her parents but with an aunt and uncle … hmmm. Suddenly connections start to form between two stories that on the surface don’t look alike at all.) 

7) I always smile when people tell me they don’t enjoy or don’t understand or are intimidated by poetry. I ask them, “How many songs can you sing from beginning to end?” The answer is probably: hundreds. And songs are poems set to music. A fun exercise: look for poems in rhyme and meter and see if you can find a good tune for them. The easiest poet to do this with is Emily Dickinson, because she always wrote in what’s called “common meter” or “hymn meter.” So you can sing all of Emily Dickinson’s poems to the tune of “Amazing Grace” — or, even more enjoyably, to other songs that are not hymns but are in that meter. For people of my generation, I would suggest the Gilligan’s Island theme song. And then you can do a Gilligan’s Island / “Because I could not stop for death” mashup. Sing it with me: 

Because I could not stop for death 
He kindly stopped for me 
The carriage held but ourselves 
And immortality, 
And Gilligan, the skipper too, 
The millionaire and his wife… 

If you want to develop a love of poetry, reconnect it with music, which is its origin. You’ll not only appreciate poems better, you’ll find yourself memorizing them! Then you can gradually move on to poems that are less obviously musical. (Though all really good poems have music to them.) 

8) Libraries are great places to find things that no algorithm would ever suggest to you. This is important because we are collectively losing our faculty for total random surprise — for serendipity. Libraries are serendipity vendors. Unfortunately, in our time libraries are becoming less common, and the ones that still exist are becoming less like libraries. But if you live anywhere near a university, university libraries tend to be open to the public, and also tend to preserve their collections longer than public libraries do. Even if you can’t check out the cool random book you discover, you can sit down with it for a while. And then if you love it you can buy your own copy. 

I used this Gahan Wilson cartoon a while back to illustrate the ed-tech business model: the big ed-tech companies always sell universities technology that does severe damage to the educational experience, and when that damage becomes obvious they sell universities more tech that’s supposed to fix the problems the first bundle of tech caused.

This is also the AI business model: to unleash immense personal, social, and economic destruction and then claim to be the ones to repair what they have destroyed.

Consider the rising number of chatbot-enabled teen suicides: OpenAI, Meta, Character Technologies — all these companies, and others, produce bots that encourage teens to kill themselves.

So do these companies want teens to kill themselves? Of course not! That would be stupid! Every dead teen is a customer lost. What’s becoming clear is that they’re hoping to give teens, and adults, suicidal thoughts. Their goal is not suicide but rather suicidal ideation.

Look at OpenAI’s blog post, significantly titled “Helping People When They Need It Most”:

When we detect users who are planning to harm others, we route their conversations to specialized pipelines where they are reviewed by a small team trained on our usage policies and who are authorized to take action, including banning accounts. If human reviewers determine that a case involves an imminent threat of serious physical harm to others, we may refer it to law enforcement. We are currently not referring self-harm cases to law enforcement to respect people’s privacy given the uniquely private nature of ChatGPT interactions.

So that’s Step One: Don’t get law enforcement involved. Step Two is still in process, but here’s a big part of it:

Today, when people express intent to harm themselves, we encourage them to seek help and refer them to real-world resources.

Well … except when they don’t. As they acknowledge elsewhere in the blog post, when conversations get long, that is, when people are really messed up and in a tailspin, “as the back-and-forth grows, parts of the model’s safety training may degrade.”

Continuing:

We are exploring how to intervene earlier and connect people to certified therapists before they are in an acute crisis. That means going beyond crisis hotlines and considering how we might build a network of licensed professionals people could reach directly through ChatGPT. This will take time and careful work to get right.

This I think is the key point. OpenAI will “build a network of licensed professionals” — and when ChatGPT refers a suicidal person to such a professional, will OpenAI take a cut of the fee? Of course it will.

Notice that ChatGPT will, in such an emergency, connect the suicidal person to a therapist within the chatbot interface. You can go to the office later, but let’s do an initial conversation here. Your credit card will be billed. (And for how long will OpenAI employ human beings as their chat therapists? Dear reader, I’ll let you guess. In the end the failings of one chatbot will be — in theory — corrected by another chatbot. And if you want to complain about that the response will come from a third chatbot. It’ll be chatbots all the way down.)

So then the circle will be complete: drawing vulnerable people in, encouraging their suicidal ideation, and then profiting from its treatment. That’s how to “help people when they need it most” — by manipulating them into the needing-it-most position. Thus the cartoon above. Sure, some kids will go too far and kill themselves, but we’ll keep tweaking the algorithm to reduce the frequency of such cases. You can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs!

I sometimes ask family and friends: What would the big tech companies have to do, how evil would they have to become, to get The Public to abandon them? And I think the answer is: They can do anything they want and almost no one will turn aside.

A few years ago I said that vindictiveness was the moral crisis of our time. But some (not all, but some) of our rage has burned itself out. The passive acceptance of utter cruelty, in this venue and in others, has become the most characteristic feature of our cultural moment.

Brad East:

In Linebaugh’s treatment of Scripture the church is nowhere to be found. For that matter, equally absent are tradition, liturgy, the sacraments, and the Holy Spirit. The result, if I may put it this way, is an account of the Bible and its message that is maximally and perhaps stereotypically Protestant. By this I don’t mean the book is “not Catholic.” I mean that it is so intensely focused on the “solas” — Christ alone, grace alone, faith alone, Scripture alone—that it leaves by the wayside other essential features of the gospel.

Disclosure: Jono Linebaugh is a friend of mine, but then so is Brad, and I’ve written in commendation of both of them, so I think all that cancels out.

If “an invitation to Holy Scripture” must also give an account of “tradition, liturgy, the sacraments, and the Holy Spirit,” then it will be the size of the Church Dogmatics and won’t be an “invitation” to anything. For the same reason that I think it would be fine to write an invitation to the sacraments that does not also give an account of Holy Scripture, I think it’s fine to write an invitation to Holy Scripture that’s just about Holy Scripture. If we think every book has to be about everything relevant to the topic of that book, then we’ll never find a book worthy of our praise.

“You have to make your voice heard!” – so the exhortation goes, though the remainder of the sentence usually goes unsaid: “… on the issue that at the moment I think to be the most important.” Nobody thinks you have to make your voice heard about everything all the time, which in any case would be impossible. The same unspoken addendum fits onto “Silence is violence.” All these exhortations have the same essential meaning: If you do not care about what I care about in the way that I care about it, you are a bad person. The language of alliance works the same way: If you say what I want said and do what I want done you are my ally — and if not you are my enemy.

The problem with all these exhortations is their failure to understand how society works. A society or a culture is a vast corporation, a vast body of persons and things that functions only if the principle of division of labor is acknowledged and put into thoughtful practice.

Consider an army: Would an army function if everyone strove to fight on the front lines? Of course not. But that is just what the people who demand that you “make your voice heard” and “get involved” and “take sides” want us all to do: rush to the front and try to overwhelm the enemy with our sheer numbers. (One other unconfronted assumption of this way of thinking is that the other side won’t be acting the same way.) A successful army requires warriors but also generals, strategists, doctors and medics, supply systems, and, before all that, training systems. And a healthy society requires even greater diversity and specialization than an army does.

I often think of a woman I met some years ago whose life is devoted to rescuing abandoned or abused dogs. If she never thinks a thought or says a word about the issues that dominate social media, who cares? She is doing the Lord’s work. Not everyone should do what she does; but she should do what she does.

When I observe my country I am regularly horrified and outraged by the great evils done by our government and by our largest and most powerful businesses. I want to protest, I want to “make my voice heard.” But As I look around I find myself thinking not that  too few people speak up, but that too many do: too many people with uninformed minds and unconstrained emotions. We have a surfeit of people who want to fight and not enough willing to train and supply. I often think about something Bob Dylan once said:

There’s a lot of things I’d like to do. I’d like to drive a race car on the Indianapolis track. I’d like to kick a field goal in an NFL football game. I’d like to be able to hit a hundred-mile-an-hour baseball. But you have to know your place. There might be some things that are beyond your talents. Everything worth doing takes time. You have to write a hundred bad songs before you write one good one. And you have to sacrifice a lot of things that you might not be prepared for. Like it or not, you are in this alone and have to follow your own star.

Well, what’s my place? As a teacher, I hope to train and liberate minds; as a writer, I supply people with ideas and contexts, with substantive frameworks to shape and interpret thought and aesthetic experience. Over my forty-three years of teaching, I have gotten used to the rhythm of my life: training and encouraging people as best I can, and then sending them out into the world as well-equipped as I can help them to be. And writing, of the kind I do anyway, is not so different: it too is a kind of provisioning.

In such matters it’s good to remember what the Preacher says, “In the morning sow your seed, and at evening withhold not your hand, for you do not know which will prosper, this or that, or whether both alike will be good.”

When I get the itch to shout or protest or condemn, I remind myself of my place: training and supply. And I remind myself of what is not within my power to control. It brings me peace in convulsive times to remember that I am, after all, following my own star. Which star should you follow?

The first thing to know is that I don’t call it AI. When those of us in the humanities talk about “AI in education” what we almost always mean is “chat interfaces to large language modules.” There are many other kinds of machine-learning endeavors but they’re not immediately relevant to most of us. And anyway, whether they’re “intelligent” is up for debate. So the word I’ll use here is “chatbot,” and the question is: What’s my policy? What do I think about your using chatbots for work in my class?

I’ll start to answer that by turning it around: If I forbade chatbot use, would my stated policy have any effect whatsoever on your actions? Pause and think about it for a moment: Would it?

For some of you the answer will be: No. And to you I say: thanks for the candor.

Others among you will reply: Yes. And probably you mean it. But will your compliance survive a challenge? When you’re sitting around with friends and every single one of them except you is using a chatbot to get work done, will you be able to resist the temptation to join them? When they copy and paste and then head merrily out for tacos, will you stay in your room and grind? Maybe you will, once, or twice, or even three times, but … eventually…. I mean, come on: we all know how this story ends.

So let’s be clear about three things. The first is that if I make assignments which you can get chatbots to write for you, that’s what, eventually if not immediately, you’ll do. The second is that if I have a “no chatbot” policy and you use chatbots, you’re cheating. The third is that cheating is lying: it is saying (either implicitly or explicitly) that you’ve done something you have not done. You are claiming and presenting to me as your work what is not your work.

Now, this has several consequences, and one of them — if I don’t catch you, and I don’t plan to spend my precious senior-citizen years trying to catch cheaters — is that I will end up affirming that you have certain skills and abilities that you do not in fact have. Which makes me, however unintentionally, complicit in your lie. That reflects badly on me.

But that makes a problem for you, too, because sooner or later the time will come — perhaps in a job interview, or an interview for a place in a graduate program, or your second week in a new job that doesn’t have you in front of a computer all day — when your lack of the skills you claim to have will become evident, to your great embarrassment and frustration. You’re probably not worried about that now, because one of the most universal of human tendencies is — I use the technical term — Kicking The Can Down The Road. Almost all human beings will put off dealing with a problem if they possibly can; the only ones among us who don’t are those who have learned through painful experience the costs of can-kicking. (This is in fact one of the very few ways in which we Olds are superior to you Youngs: we’ve been there. We have so been there.)

And then I’m a Christian, and I’ve read the parable of the talents. I want to see you multiply your gifts, not leave you exactly as you were when you came to my class, only with a little more experience in writing chatbot prompts. (Would a personal trainer be happy if you instructed a robot to do pull-ups and crunches for you? Would he think he had done his job?)

Perhaps the most worrisome consequence of this whole ridiculous circus in which (a) you’re trying not to get caught cheating and (b) your professors are trying to catch you cheating is how thoroughly dehumanizing it is to all of us. All of us end up acting like we’re in a video-game boss fight. Modern education, with its emphasis on credentialing and therefore on grades, is already dehumanizing: as Tal Brewer of UVA says, we’re not teachers, we’re the Sorting Hat. The chatbot world makes that all crap so much worse. Now we’re Boswer and the Sorting Hat.

But I just want to help you to be a better reader, a better writer, and a better thinker. If you can learn these skills, and the habits that enable them, I believe you will be a better person — not in every way, maybe not even in the ways that matter most, but in significant ways. You’ll be a little more alert, a little more aware; you’ll make more nuanced judgments and will be able to express those judgments more clearly. You may even grow in charity and self-knowledge. I want to do what I can to encourage those virtues.

I don’t want to be trying to outwit you and avoid being outwitted. I don‘t want to enable your can-kicking. I don’t want to affirm that you have skills you don’t have. I don’t want to have to say, at the end of the day, that the only thing I taught you was better prompt engineering. Above all, I don’t want to make assignments that become a proximate occasion of sin for you: I don’t want to be your tempter. So I simply must — I am obliged as a teacher and a Christian — keep the chatbots out of our class, as best I can, and to do so through the assignments I devise. If you pray, please pray for me.

NetChoice is a massive coalition of internet companies — look who’s in it — that is throwing enormous resources to block any law or proposed law in any and every state that requires age verification for access to websites. Given the technical challenges that make reliable age-verification schemes difficult if not impossible, I might have sympathy for the NetChoice companies if they weren’t who they are. (Oh the moral dilemma: thinking that laws are probably unconstitutional and yet wishing they succeed because you find the companies the laws target utterly loathsome.) 

So in fighting a Louisiana law NetChoice recruited a supposed expert named Anthony Bean to affirm that social media use is not bad for young people in any way. As Volokh explains, the Louisiana Attorney General’s office took a look at this expert report and discovered that 

None of the 17 articles in Dr. Bean’s reference list exists…. More, none of the 12 quotations that Dr. Bean’s report attributes to various authors and articles exists (even in the original sources provided to Defendants).

A cursory comparison between Dr. Bean’s report and the disclosed original sources would have alerted NetChoice that something is amiss. In fact, just reading Dr. Bean’s report would have done so. His reference list makes no sense, (a) citing website links that are dead or lead to entirely unrelated sources and (b) citing volume and page numbers in publications that are easily confirmed to be wrong. And his report itself is strangely formatted, not least because, well, it looks and reads like a print-out from artificial intelligence (AI).

Dr. Bean’s report bears all the telltale signs of AI hallucinations: completely fabricated sources and quotations that appear to be based on a survey of real authors and real sources. 

(More like Mister Bean, amirite?) It’s kinda fun to look at the contents of their reply to Dr. Bean’s testimony: 

Etc. There’s a joke going around that A.I. will create jobs because when a company turns a job over to chatbots it’ll then need to hire two people to find and correct the chatbots’ hallucinations. 

Two predictions: 

No matter how many organizations get burned by reliance on chatbots, new organizations will always buy in, thinking Well, we won’t get burned No matter how many people get caught farming out their work to incompetent chatbots, new people will always buy in, thinking Well, I won’t get caught 

Most human beings are, it seems, genetically predisposed to believe that there really is such a thing as a free lunch and that it’s just waiting for them to pick it up. The question is: How long will be take for people who are rooted in reality, and therefore perform due diligence, to outcompete the mindless herd? 

Whittaker Chambers, in a 1954 letter to William F. Buckley Jr. and Willi Schlamm:

If I were a younger man, if there were any frontiers left, I should flee to some frontier because, when the house is afire, you leave by whatever hole is open for whatever area is freest of fire. Since there are no regional frontiers, I have been seeking the next best thing — the frontiers within.

 

I get up early in the morning, feed and walk Angus, make some coffee, check email and my RSS feeds while drinking the coffee I made, answer emails, post links or images to micro.blog and/or sketch drafts of posts for the big blog … and then get off the internet until late afternoon.

I have an old easy chair where I usually work, and before 8am I am sitting in it with

booksarticles (printed out)my notebookmy Travelerpencils, pens, highlighters, sticky notesmy Sony voice recordervinyl records or CDs on the stereo

The key point is this: I do not have any internet-viewing device with me as I work. The nearest one is my Mac, across the room. I get up and use it when I have to check some piece of information I can find only online, but that happens rarely, and I try as I’m working to make note of what I need to search for so I can do all the searches at once at the end of the work day.

The internet is a dark realm which I do not visit except upon compulsion. My old chair is Hobbiton; the internet is Minas Morgul. I would not go there except upon compulsion.

Most of the time I write in the margins of the books I read, or on their endpapers, or on sticky notes appended to their pages. When I have longer things to write, I do that on the Traveler, which uploads files to a website from which I can retrieve them and edit them on my Mac. (That’s my only internet connection when I’m at my chair.)

Or, and this is increasingly common, I record my thoughts on my Sony voice recorder.

Here’s my workflow for audio notes: First, I record thoughts and in some cases whole drafts on the Sony, which uses the MP3 format. Then, near the end of the work day, usually around 3pm, I rise from my comfy chair and

plug the Sony into my Mac;use an Automator action I wrote to (a) open a recording in QuickTime Player, (b) export to M4a, (c) open in Voice Memos, (d) quit QuickTime Player; after which…Voice Memos transcribes the audio file, the text of which…I copy and paste into a chatbot text field with the following prompt:

I’m about to paste in a chunk of text. Please punctuate it, add capitalizations and quotation marks where necessary, eliminate repetitions and grammatical errors, but otherwise leave the text unchanged.

It doesn’t really matter which chatbot I use — they all do an adequate job, and adequacy is what I want here: I still have to write the post or essay, I just want at the outset something that’s easier to look at than a huge block of unpunctuated text.

(I use chatbots for this, for summarizing product reviews, and for helping me write AppleScripts. That’s pretty much it.)

Now, I could simplify this whole process by dictating in the Voice Memos app, which would then automatically transcribe my words. But that would mean dwelling in Minas Morgul all day. Not worth it.

Then, in the evenings, I might read a book, or listen to music (probably on vinyl or CD), or watch a movie (probably on disc). When I’m walking Angus, or just walking, I listen to Morning Prayer on the Church of England’s excellent Daily Prayer app, and when I go to bed I might listen to a podcast. Also, I watch a lot of soccer on TV, and streaming makes that possible. But overall, these days the internet plays a smaller role in my life than it has in … 25 years, maybe? Yes, there are days when I need to be at the Mac for extended periods. But overall, it has become normal to me once again to experience the internet as a place I occasionally (and for some specific purpose) visit rather than the place where I live.

And this feels great. I am happier, more serene, more centered. I feel that I am spending my time more wisely and more enjoyably. I understand, of course, that many (most?) people will not be able to detach themselves from online life to the extent I have. But then, a couple of years ago I wouldn’t have thought it possible for me to detach this much. If you take it one step at a time you might discover that you can do more than you think.

For instance: I used to subscribe to Netflix and Disney Plus, but when I ditched those I suddenly had the money to start building up my Blu-Ray collection. Many video discs are quite inexpensive new, and it’s easy to find good used ones; Blu-Ray players are also pretty cheap. In a short time you can have a nice collection of your favorite movies, all of which will, to you, be worth watching repeatedly. You’ll often (always, if you buy Criterion editions) have some special features on the discs that enhance your appreciation of the movies. Once you start a movie you’ll probably watch it through, because the temptation to switch over to something else will be much reduced. And everything will work even if your internet goes out.

I could tell the same story about how I listen to music and have built my music collection. Also about what I read. It’s remarkable how many sites and periodicals I used to read religiously I now avoid religiously.

It occurs to me that if I could just ditch my footy habit I could probably cancel my home internet and get by with cellular service. Now that’s something to aspire to … but I love footy too much.