The Content Generation

Why you should embrace generative AI, and why you should resist it.

The boardroom soap opera of the past week seemed an appropriate punctuation to a year in which generative artificial intelligence went from esoteric CompSci topic to something we all needed to be concerned about.  Like a handful of pebbles thrown into a pond, the launch of ChatGPT, barely a year ago, created ripples which continue to expand and overlap. “Knowledge workers,” who for years looked on complacently as digital automation put checkout clerks and assembly line workers and travel agents out of a job, suddenly confronted a future in which they too could be replaced by machines. CFOs salivated over OPEX savings that would come from swapping out messy, inefficient humans with computers. Luddites and other contrarians split semantic hairs, chortling over ChatGPT’s mistakes, and arguing that these models were no closer to “general intelligence” than your smartphone’s auto-fill function. Money poured in. The rest of us kept ourselves entertained asking ChatGPT to write poems and break up with our boyfriends.

I come neither to bury GenAI nor to praise it.  Like any technology, GenAI is neither inherently evil nor inherently good. Scoffing at it or ignoring it won't make it go away. Deifying it, despite OpenAI’s lofty mission statement, will not bring about the betterment of humanity.

Granted, there is a lot to worry about.  I won’t even touch the hypothesis that a paperclip-maximizing AI will wind up annihilating humanity. The doomers may be right in the end, but humans seem to be perfectly capable of coming up with ways to annihilate themselves without the aid of a large language model. I do worry about the stuff that GenAI models make up as they respond to a prompt. The term “hallucinations” -- evoking dreams and psychedelia -- is deceptively benign; “lies” is more appropriate. In 2024, citizens of many countries including the US will elect their next leaders amidst a swamp of artificial words and images indistinguishable from real ones, and I think we’re in for some seriously ugly scenes. 

And yet, retreating to our pencil-and-paper sanctuaries and refusing to engage isn't a good answer. Your job will (or already does) involve interacting with AI at some level. GenAI models will make your life easier, especially by automating certain repetitive tasks. Working alongside a GenAI, if you do so skillfully, will liberate you from a whole lot of drudgery – think writing meeting minutes, summarizing long documents, cleaning out emails, etc. Rather than doing your job for you, GenAI can actually enhance the work that you’re doing. To paraphrase medical futurist Bertalan Meskó: professionals will not be replaced by GenAI, but professionals who know how to use GenAI will replace those who don’t.

Amid all the chatter, I think it’s beneficial to consider a question that I don’t hear very often when generative AI is discussed: What do humans lose when they stop writing? What happens to them when they no longer devote time and energy to the practice of composition, when they delegate that activity to a machine? 

Content generation is among the lowest-hanging fruit for companies looking to improve their P&Ls using GenAI. Without a doubt, ChatGPT can churn out, adapt, and optimize mountains of text a lot more efficiently than you or I can. The marginal cost of producing another unit of content approaches zero. And a funny thing starts to happen. Words, and the ideas they signify, become reduced to units of economic output: manufactured, ingested, excreted. The relationship between the source of the content and its consumer becomes purely transactional. More than that: the “reader” becomes nothing more than a vessel through which content passes as supply and demand curves seek equilibrium. 

I get a similar feeling sometimes when I think about money. My salary, direct-deposited into my bank account while I sleep, effortlessly sluices through me on its way to my creditors, thanks to the “auto pay” function I’ve set up. I have forfeited my agency, like we’ve forfeited many things, for the sake of convenience. We get out of bed each morning to keep feeding the machine.  

Yet I still see glimmers of hope. A few months ago, I was asked to write a one-page memo summarizing a strategy presentation my team and I had put together. This could have been accomplished in a few seconds by uploading our 50-or-so slides into a GenAI model. However, the presentation was confidential, so a public model like ChatGPT wasn’t an option, and we hadn’t yet stood up an in-house model. So I spent two or three hours drafting the memo myself. And in the act of writing it – putting one sentence after another, searching for the right words and flow, crafting a few paragraphs to convey a set of ideas – something interesting happened. I became able to articulate our strategy more clearly. I found that I actually understood the story we were trying to tell much more deeply than I had beforehand.

If you've ever kept a journal, perhaps this sounds familiar. Our appreciation for experiences, situations, people, ourselves, you name it, becomes much stronger, fuller, realer, when we try to write about them. Writing helps us make sense of our world, which seems even more important at a time when the world is full of a lot of stuff that seems senseless. As Flannery O’Connor said, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”

Writing prose, as opposed to just consuming it, also forces us to reflect at least fleetingly on the human being who’s eventually going to read it. We consider our words, not only for their accuracy, but for the impression we wish them to leave on another person. Writing is a solitary and often lonely activity, but, perhaps paradoxically, it fosters empathy. Will this speak to my audience?  What is their state of mind when they sit down to read it?  How will it “land?” All part of a delicate but critical maneuver which requires that the writer place herself inside the head of her reader.

When humans stop writing, I would argue, they become less human. Or at least they become lesser humans. They get mentally and spiritually flabby. They become Matrix-like vessels for forces that do not have their best interests in mind. They think about other people less. They succumb to powers of this world that rebel against God.

So, yeah: understand what GenAI is and what it isn’t. Get comfortable with ChatGPT. Learn to work with GenAI tools, just like you’ve learned to use a word processor.  But at the same time make sure you don’t surrender the opportunity to create prose of your own. Take the time and make the effort to work with language, to put words together, to create meaning. At the very least, it’s good for your health. At best, as George Saunders puts it, “purifying one’s prose style is a form of spiritual dedication; working with language is a beautiful and noble way to spend one’s life.”

Wastin' Away Again

The start of Labor Day weekend brought news of the passing of Jimmy Buffett (no relation to Warren).  He was only 76, the same age as both of my parents. If you’ve come anywhere near classic rock radio and/or Times Square recently, you’re familiar with Buffett's work, especially “Margaritaville,” the catchy, calypso-infused 1977 single which he parlayed from modest chart success into a multibillion-dollar empire of themed restaurants, resorts, cruises, and senior living ("55 and Better") communities. The song and the enterprises it spawned all celebrate a singular statement of purpose: the sea, the sun, and (especially) frozen tequila-based cocktails will deliver succor and redemption in the face of life’s hardships, be they severe foot injury, regrettable drunken body-art-related decisions, or existential angst represented by misplaced dispensers of sodium chloride.

Like no other artist of his generation, Buffett’s trajectory and philosophy were the ideal representation of Boomerism: youthful hedonism co-opted by the comforts of American-style capitalism.  All of the tourists covered in oil were not just objects of artistic reflection from a porch swing: they were a market to be catered to. Which Buffett and co. did, cultivating a lifestyle of tasty waves and cool buzzes which particularly appealed to those in their autumn years.  As a few cocktails at the end of a long day make everything feel all right now, so would the Margaritaville lifestyle deliver a breezy coda to one’s retirement. No bad days, as the bumper sticker says.

What keeps the narrator of “Margaritaville” just on the right side of sympathetic is his sheepish acceptance of responsibility. Some may blame their exes for their misfortune, but by the third chorus, he's ready to concede that it’s his own damn fault.  By all accounts, Buffett himself was a decent guy: he spent generously on conservation and hurricane relief. He bailed on the Florida Keys after they became too commercialized, perhaps understanding that the hazy good times would not roll on forever; that sooner or later Americans, especially those close to the shoreline, would have to contend with the bummer consequences of limitless consumption. I wonder if he appreciated the irony of building a business empire based on a scene that will most likely be underwater by the end of the century.  Or maybe he understood it perfectly, and concluded that strumming his six-string all the way to the bank was as good a response as any.

Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair

A gray rain fell without ceasing on the 41st Annual JP Morgan Healthcare Conference.  People huddled in hotel doorways and waited on Ubers. The bellman offered me a plastic sleeve for my umbrella as I shook it out. “Water and marble don’t go well together,” he said. In San Francisco, we didn’t get the heavy flooding and evacuations seen in SoCal, but our phones lit up with alerts of a dangerous and life-threatening situation.

Security was heavy at the Westin St. Francis. I hadn’t picked up my badge yet, so a blazered guy with an earpiece pointed me to the side entrance, where I navigated another three security people before making it to the roped-off “presenting company check-in” section. My QR code wouldn’t scan, but the friendly young woman in a white silk top said she trusted me. She handed over my badge and lanyard and a bone-white canvas tote bag with a blue embroidered JP Morgan logo. The bag was of a heft and quality that assumed there was a decent chance that its recipient would own a matching sailboat.  

The corridors and stairways of the Westin teemed with characters who in one way or another were looking to make their fortunes in pharmaceuticals.  Tall, bearded banker bros; C-suite executives in dark suits and European eyeglasses; female buy-side analysts with blonde hair yanked straight back who looked like they spent their pre-dawn hours astride a Peloton; South Asian PhD/MBAs. The Colonial Room was SRO, so I leaned against the back wall and listened to our CEO talk about how we are transforming the practice of medicine and how our operating margin was on track to reach 32% by 2025.

I spent most of my week down the hill at the Omni, shuttling between conference rooms. The company I work for is Large Cap (nestled between between Mega Cap and Medium Cap), and as such my days were stacked with one-hour blocks of presentations from different small-to-medium biotechs looking to “partner” with us. Between two and ten people would show up for each meeting, their eagerness for partnering generally in direct proportion to the number of people there.  

In general, each of these folks was either a Science Person or a Money Person. The Science People wore clothing suggesting a teenager being dragged to a wedding. Many had one minor but unignorable physical characteristic: a wandering eye, excessive ear hair, dermatitis. The Money People clustered at both ends of the fashion spectrum, either wearing suits, or going for venture capitalist casual chic: fleece vest or quarter-zip sweater over a checked button-down shirt and high-end running shoes. On’s were in abundance. Despite being Money People, they were not necessarily slick: I observed one BD woman inspect her split ends assiduously through our entire meeting.

As they spoke to us of novel therapeutic targets and cytokines and mouse models, I would regret that I had selected English as my undergraduate major. 

“Never drive a fancy car,” a former boss once said to me, “Because we don’t want to give the impression that we are profiting off of the ill health of the American public.” I suppose it’s tempting to look at all this cynically and to disapprove of the baser desires behind it. The industry has done plenty of unsavory stuff over the years. My favorite communist podcasters would go a step further and call out the unsustainability of the entire system: look no further, they might argue, than the contrast between the bright lights, fancy presentations, and carbon footprint over at the Westin St. Francis, and the rising flood waters outside.    

I can’t argue with any of that. I also know that I’m not in a position to work for free, and I suspect you aren’t either. And despite my attempts at clever commentary above, the people I spent time last week with were not caricatures; they were intelligent people trying to do decent work. Meanwhile, people are still getting sick and dying from nasty diseases.  If, God forbid, one of our kids were to come down with one of these diseases, we would pray for someone to show up with some medicine. We can all dream of a day when our elected representatives prioritize medical research over DDG 51 Burke-class Aegis Destroyers. But in the meantime, the powerful and greedy pharmaceutical industry is our best hope. Wish them luck.    

Transit

For a moment, it felt like we were on top of things, but by the last couple of days in Geneva our possessions had gotten the better of us.  We did manage to get rid of a lot – friends of one of our musician friends were happy to take the washing machine and a lot of the furniture and appliances – but, inevitably, a few loose ends remained on Wednesday morning at 5 when the taxi came to remove us. 

Geneva Airport was less crowded than the last time I was there back in March, but there was no shortage of check-in tension.  We were flying KLM through Amsterdam, and a few days earlier the Dutch authorities had issued a new regulation requiring a negative PCR test before boarding any plane into the country.  Fortunately, I had received an email from the airline over the weekend, so we were able to scramble and get tested at the private clinic in Champel.  Others, including a group of Irish kids returning from a ski holiday, were not so lucky and were queuing up across the hall to have their flights rebooked.

My main source of worry leading up to the trip was going through security with the cats, which would require me to take them out of their carriers and walk them through the metal detector thing.  Fortunately, my nightmarish images of their clawing their way out of my arms and disappearing somewhere in the bowels of the airport went unfulfilled, and the other passengers were treated to the image of a middle-aged man in stocking feet walking back and forth three times through the metal detector, each time with a different Siberian clutched to his chest.  The cats themselves were basically fine for the rest of the trip, save some complaining and panting from Nocturno the larger male.  I put his carrier on my lap and petted him through a slightly unzipped opening in one of the doors, and that calmed him down a little.

There were maybe ten people in the normally heaving passport control area at Logan.  We handed the documents for L&C’s immigrant visas to the Customs and Border Protection guy in his booth.  These were in manila envelopes that I had picked up at the embassy in Bern a few weeks before, all edges of which had been sealed with packing tape and rubber-stamped with warnings not to open or the applications therein would be invalidated, which lent a silly cloak and dagger vibe to the whole process.  The CBP guys try hard to project a stern and menacing aura (and I’m sure the experience is not at all pleasant for some people trying to enter the US), but they can’t completely suppress their innate American friendliness.  The guys downstairs who gave our bags a final run through the x-ray seemed more interested in admiring the cats than in sussing out any contraband.  I breathed a slight sigh of relief, realizing that I would not have to explain the sourdough starter and kombucha scobys in plastic bags deep in my suitcase.

We took a taxi to the apartment we had rented, sight-not-exactly-unseen, but only seen through a YouTube video.  The driver took us up 93 and around Cambridge, along the Mytsic River and then along 16 which snakes alongside Alewife Brook.  These are not the prettiest parts of town, especially in the grey sogginess of winter.  L&C commented how everything looked like a movie to them.

Rob the property manager, well-groomed and wearing a property-management-branded mask and a dark necktie, was waiting for us when we arrived.  We trundled bags into our apartment, which felt bigger than in the videos.  We released the cats and showed them where the litter was.  Later we would take an Uber back to the airport to pick up the rental car.  We could have done this right when we arrived, but the idea of dealing with the shuttle bus and another line at the rental car place after 14 hours of travel was too daunting. 

It was already dark as we drove back into town.  I opted to go the longer way, over the Longfellow Bridge and through the middle of Cambridge.  Still disoriented with jet lag, we realized we were hungry, so I stopped by the Clover in Kendall Square.  For the uninitiated, Clover (officially Clover Food Lab) is a chain of healthy fast food joints started by a Harvard MBA, with a highly optimized user experience and killer rosemary fries.  As we pulled up, the seating area was empty, and a lone person puttered in the kitchen area, so I thought for moment it might be closed.  The door swung open though, and I entered a makeshift vestibule, walled off with three big plexiglass screens in a half-hexagon.  The young woman on the other side explained that they were only doing pick-up service, but that we could order online, and she pointed me to a QR code taped to the door.  We ordered and paid for our food from my phone, and the website told us that it would be ready in 7 minutes.

8 minutes later, we ate our food – chickpea fritters and hummus and Japanese sweet potatoes and egg and eggplant platter and ginger soda – sitting in the parked car.  I felt the stress and anxiety of the long day of travel displaced by, for lack of a better term, fun.  Fun that America, with its market-honed ability to comfort and gratify, is especially good at enabling.  Fun which I know in the longer-term can lead to some dark and unhealthy places.  But that night I chose not to think about it so much, and I reached into the compostable bag for another handful of fries.

A confession

Okay, one last thing about the election and then I’ll get back to writing about Thomas Merton and running and stuff.

I have a confession to make.  I didn’t vote for Hillary Clinton in 2016. 

Of course I didn’t vote for Donald Trump.  I didn’t vote at all.  I can offer excuses.  Getting an absentee ballot from overseas is kind of a hassle.  I vote in Massachusetts, as reliable a blue state as they come, so my vote wasn’t going to change anything.  I was lulled into complacency by the pre-election polls, all of which characterized a Clinton victory as a metaphysical certainty.  I also have to admit that the Democratic nominee was not exactly the most compelling candidate ever, for various reasons which aren’t worth exploring here, but I think you know what I mean.  I suspect that many people of my political persuasion didn’t bother voting either.  We all know what happened after that.

My hope was that 2020 would be different.  Chastened by 2016 and four subsequent years of incompetence and nastiness, Democrats would turn out in far greater numbers. Perhaps even some of those who voted for Trump in 2016 as a kind of protest would come to their senses and vote for his opponent, or at least sit this one out.  This year, I dutifully emailed my absentee ballot to the Scituate Town Clerk in September.  And everything worked out like I hoped.

Sort of.

Let’s be honest: I am not shouting the DNC platform from the rooftops, and I hold no deep passion for Joe Biden (though I do admit he has grown on me over the past couple of months).  My vote, and probably yours, was cast primarily out of disgust at the current occupant of the White House.  Running as the antithesis of a vulgar con artist was an effective strategy for the Democratic party in 2016, but it’s not going to be so useful in the long term.

And while Proud Boys and the QAnon crowd make for good television and enable us to feel all glib and superior, it should be clear by now that Trump’s supporters are not the lunatic fringe.  57% of white Americans (and 55% of white women) voted for Donald Trump last week.  So did 26% of nonwhite people, 28% of GLBT people, and 42% of college graduates. 

The Democratic party has some serious reckoning to do.  For starters, they need to find a way to skillfully incorporate the left wing of their party.  Long before anyone had called PA, the media (from Fox News to the NYTimes) was already trying to drive a wedge between so-called “centrist” Democrats and "The Squad” (see also Biden's bizarre “I am the Democratic party” line in the first debate).  Bernie Sanders may or may not be your cup of tea, but the issues that he is hollering about – the disastrous state of the US healthcare system, the climate crisis, the collapse of American manufacturing – are not going to solve themselves.  They’re certainly not going to be solved by a return to the good old days of neo-liberalism with some BLM-friendly branding tacked on.  Let’s not kid ourselves: if these issues are left unaddressed, the US could very easily find itself right back at the brink of fascism, or worse, in the not-to-distant future.  So, fellow "progressive," I ask you: what are we willing to do, and to sacrifice, to prevent that from happening?  

Autumn Leaves / Late Capitalism

from October 20, 2019 – Cambridge, MA

Writing is wonderful because it forces you to pay attention (i.e., appreciate) things, and because, through the act of writing about your experience of something, it becomes in some ways richer and more concrete.

Writing is also awful because all the richness and complexity and mystery of experience is crammed into the confined space of one’s writing ability and vocabulary.

* * * *

The Geneva 20k is in a couple of weeks, and today I ran the last of my long runs (13 miles) before “tapering” which I’m not sure if you’re supposed to do for a 20k like you do for a marathon, but which is the best part of training for a marathon, so I’m allowing myself to taper.  I left the apartment around 8am, after the sun had risen and the temperature had warmed up a bit. 

This weekend is the Head of the Charles regatta, or I should say the BNY Mellon Head of the Charles, as it’s now sponsored by a bank, or, per its website, “The Investments Company for the World (sic?).”  There wasn’t much evidence that anything special was going on up near the Longfellow Bridge, but as I moved west of Mass Ave and the river started narrowing, the telltale signs of the “Head of the Chuck” started to appear.  A village of sponsors’ tents: Yakima roof racks, Peet’s Coffee, food trucks including something calling itself the “Butter’d Lobster Experience,” and, gilding the lily, Brooks Brothers.  Middle-aged couples wearing worn baseball caps and sunglasses, torsos warmed by fleece and goose down.  I lost count of the number of school lacrosse jackets I saw – each with lax sticks crossed above the wearer’s heart.  Exeter, Dartmouth, a few schools I hadn’t heard of but had compounded names (i.e., “The X and Y School”) which sounded old and rich.

The Head of the Charles is known in some circles as the signature autumn event in Boston, and today was tailor-made: leaves in golden mid-explosion, crisp air warmed by acutely angled rays of sunlight.  Part of me can appreciate and enjoy all this, and applaud the kids in the boats, rowing away, working as a team, etc.  But the symbolism here hits you dead in the face: a celebration of (overwhelmingly white) wealth and power, cheering itself on as the next generation straps itself in (facing backward) to the vessels that will carry them along the calm waters, while they execute repetitive, uncreative motions to power the machine. 

By the time I got back to the Mass Ave Bridge, they were preparing for the “8s,” and the wide part of the river was dappled with dozens of boats.  From a small inflatable dinghy out in the middle of the river, a woman with a bullhorn was trying to keep them all organized in the staging areas as they approached the starting line.  The sight of all those boats on the water was truly impressive, in the way that I imagine the ships approaching Normandy on D-Day must have been.