Yelling at your editor
In earlier writing here on mentorship, I noted that you do not have to actually like your mentors to have a fruitful relationship with them. In one post, “Mentorship without Friendship,” I wrote: “A mentor sees in her or his mentee a devotion that is shared – or that could be – to a craft, a topic, or to an art. (It is almost never a shared devotion to a person.) … Friendship, if it happens, happens elsewhere, and later.”
I recalled these pieces while reading this wonderful interview with Robert Gottlieb in The Paris Review. Gottlieb, who passed away the other day, was an editor whose list of authors was so outlandishly esteemed, prolific, and indeed truly great, as to be, literally, incredible – but there you go, all those books are there and they surround us with art and majesty and more than a half century of true culture. In The Paris Review interview Gottlieb’s words are surrounded by those of numerous authors (Toni Morrison, Joseph Heller, Doris Lessing, John le Carré, and others you all know), to illustrate the relationship between authors and their editor.
My favourite remarks came from Robert Caro, which oddly elated me:
I have a bad temper and, though Bob [Robert Gottlieb] would deny it, so does he. While we were editing we were always jumping up and getting out of the room to cool off. Now he, of course, had the great advantage over me because when we were working at Knopf he could leave and go to somebody else’s office and transact some business, but I had no place to go but the bathroom. I went to the bathroom a lot, as I remember. And oh, his tone! If you heard his tone! It gets me so angry I have to try to drown it out. I try not to hear the insulting things he’s saying because, as I said, I have a very bad temper. …
Bob and I would have big fights over colons and semicolons. Semicolons are not quite as forceful as colons. And dashes are very important to me—I establish my rhythm with them. We could spend a long time fighting over an adjective. We had such fights that sometimes he would bring in another editor as a buffer. …
In all the hours of working on The Power Broker [Caro’s book on Robert Moses] Bob never said one nice thing to me—never a single complimentary word, either about the book as a whole or about a single portion of the book. That was also true of my second book, The Path to Power [about President Lyndon Johnson]. But then he got soft. When we finished the last page of the last book we worked on, Means of Ascent, he held up the manuscript for a moment and said, slowly, as if he didn’t want to say it, Not bad. Those are the only two complimentary words he has ever said to me, to this day. …
We have, basically, no social relationship whatsoever. When the Book-of-the-Month Club bought the first volume of the Lyndon Johnson trilogy they had a lunch for me. Al Silverman, who was then the president, started the conversation saying, Well, you two must see so much of each other . . . There was an embarrassing silence—at that point Bob and I hadn’t seen each other socially for years.
They shared a devotion to the same thing: the book. You couldn’t say they did not care about one another, because they did and they absolutely had to, but neither saw any need to like the other.
Copyright laws have always been a real bear
Ted Goia’s Substack newsletter is enlightening – with truly startling frequency – about things I probably should have known about already. From yesterday’s post:
The most extreme case of music copyright comes from Elizabethan England. Here the Queen gave William Byrd and Thomas Tallis a patent covering all music publishing for a period of 21 years. Not only did the two composers secure a monopoly over English music, but they also could prevent retailers or other entrepreneurs in the country from selling “songs made and printed in any foreign country.”
If anybody violated this patent, the fine was 40 shillings. And the music itself was seized and given to Tallis and Byrd. They probably had quite a nice private library of scores by the time the patent expired.
But that’s not all. Byrd and Tallis’s stranglehold on music was so extreme it even covered the printing of blank music paper. That meant that other composers had to pay Tallis and Byrd even before they had written down a single note. Not even the Marvin Gaye estate makes those kinds of demands. [link mine]
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Rethinking is thinking.
That’s my motto as the summer semester starts (orientations today).
There will be a million more of these articles:
“Prompt Engineering”
Even before my friend Chet fully explained to me what this term meant, I was on board with it. From Forbes the other day:
The democratization of Artificial Intelligence and, specifically, the generative models boom seems to have changed everything. The same is true in terms of how we interact with machines. Conversational models such as ChatGPT or Bard and generative systems like Midjourney and Dall-e 2 are unpredictable and they are constantly learning. Consequently, to obtain quality answers, the questions we ask and how we ask them are increasingly crucial.
All this has led to the rise of a new job: the “prompt engineer.” This new professional is extremely well-remunerated and in high demand. On the one hand, these engineers are responsible for training AI with natural language and, on the other, thoroughly checking search results to create the perfect “prompts.” …
Andrej Karpathy, well-known scientist and co-founder of OpenAI, refers to these new professionals as “AI psychologists.” The idea behind this term is that psychology can play a crucial role in developing and applying this technology. Psychologists can provide insights on the human mind, cognition, behavior and interactions, something which may be fundamental to be able to design more effective, ethical and user-centric AI systems.
Be fair and be good to the artists
Artist and writer Molly Crabapple, whose work I have long admired, has written an open letter “imploring publishers to restrict their use of A.I.-generated illustrations.”
I signed.
Since the earliest days of print journalism, illustration has been used to elucidate and add perspective to stories. Even with the advent of photography in the 19th century, hand-drawn illustrations continued to have their place, both as a synthesis of the artist’s vision and the writer’s meaning. The illustrator’s art still speaks to something not just intimately connected to the news, but intrinsically human about story itself.
With the advent of generative-image AI technology, that unique interpretive and narrative confluence of art and text, of human writer and human illustrator, is at risk of extinction.
Based on text prompts, these generative tools can churn out polished, detailed simulacra of what previously would have been illustrations drawn by the human hand. They do so for a few pennies or for free, and they are faster than any human can ever be. Because no human illustrator can work quickly enough or cheaply enough to compete with these robot replacements, we know that if this technology is left unchecked, it will radically reshape the field of journalism. The result will be that only a tiny elite of artists can remain in business, their work selling as a kind of luxury status symbol.
AI-art generators are trained on enormous datasets, containing millions upon millions of copyrighted images, harvested without their creator’s knowledge, let alone compensation or consent. This is effectively the greatest art heist in history. Perpetrated by respectable-seeming corporate entities backed by Silicon Valley venture capital. It’s daylight robbery.
If you think this sounds alarmist, consider that AI-generated work has already been used for book covers and as editorial illustration, displacing illustrators from their livelihood. As a result artists and illustrators have already started suing certain creators of AI art generators for copyright infringement.
Why, beyond the immediate effect on individual artists, does this matter? AI purports to have the capability to create art, but it will never be able to do so satisfactorily because its algorithms can only create variations of art that already exists. It creates only ersatz versions of illustrations having no actual insight, wit, or originality. Generative AI art is vampirical, feasting on past generations of artwork even as it sucks the lifeblood from living artists. Over time, this will impoverish our visual culture. Consumers will be trained to accept this art-looking art, but the ingenuity, the personal vision, the individual sensibility, the humanity will be missing.
This is also an economic choice for society. While illustrators’ careers are set to be decimated by generative-AI art, the companies developing the technology are making fortunes. Silicon Valley is betting against the wages of living, breathing artists through its investment in AI.
Generative-art AI is just beginning. If illustrators want to stay illustrators, the time to fight is now. Molly Crabapple and the Center for Artistic Inquiry and Reporting call on artists, publishers, journalists, editors, and journalism union leaders to take a pledge for human values against the use of generative-AI images to replace human-made art.
Media publishing takes intellectual property rights very seriously. Its business would not exist without upholding the laws and values that protect such rights. If newsrooms aim to resist corporate theft, they must commit to supporting editorial art made by people, not server farms.
Everything will be suspicious
Longtime NoContest.ca friend Chet Wisniewski has “Three Cybercrime Predictions in the Age of ChatGPT.” I don’t know anyone who writes more clearly and helpfully on these things.
Organizations (like my own) have trained their employees to recognize phishing and other types of scams. Such training, it seems, will likely be almost useless going forward. In this piece written for the Forbes Technology Council, Chet writes,
We’ve relied on end users to recognize potential phishing attacks and avoid questionable Wi-Fi—despite the fact that humans aren’t generally as good at recognizing fraud as we believe.
Still, employees have previously had some success in spotting fishy messages by recognizing “off-sounding” language. For example, humans can notice language irregularities or spelling and grammar errors that signal phishing attempts, like a supposed email from an American bank using British English spelling.
AI language and content generators, such as ChatGPT, will likely remove this final detectable element of scams, phishing attempts and other social engineering attacks. A supposed email from “your boss” could look more convincing than ever, and employees will undoubtedly have a harder time discerning fact from fiction. In the case of these scams, the risks of AI language tools aren’t technical. They’re social—and more alarming.
Developing programs to detect ChatGPT content and to warn users will run into this dilemma, though:
Many legitimate users already using the tool to quickly create business or promotional content. But legitimate use of AI language tools will complicate security responses by making it more difficult to identify criminal instances.
For example, not all emails that include ChatGPT-generated text are malicious, so we can’t simply detect and block them as a blanket rule. This removes a level of certainty from our security response. Security vendors may develop “confidence scores” or other indicators that rate the likelihood that a message or email is AI-generated. Similarly, vendors may train AI models to detect AI-generated text and add a warning banner to user-facing systems. In certain cases, this technology could filter messages from an employee’s inbox.
It’s a thrilling and unnerving time to be a business communications professor. I have a ton to learn and think about before my next term starts.
Best answer yet to that question
It’s worth it for me to remember that, because I am a bit of a snob formalist when it comes to evaluating published writing (prose or verse).
The NYTimes “By the Book” series is always fun, especially when writers put on airs when trying not to. As in Janet Malcolm:
What books are on your nightstand?
I take it you mean the imaginary Doric column that supports a teetering pile of current and old books that the interviewee wants to bring to the reader’s attention. My actual nightstand is a small wood table with a box of Kleenex, a two-year-old Garnet Hill catalog and a cough drop on it. When I go to bed I bring with me the book I am reading during the day. Right now it is the British edition of Sally Rooney’s brilliant, enigmatic new novel, “Normal People.”
I own all of Malcolm’s books and will always mourn that I never met her, no matter how much she might have disapproved of me.
New at No Contest
We have added two news-feeds, for Artificial Intelligence and Universal Design for Learning (UDL), to go with our feeds on Social Media Policy and Kwantlen Polytechnic University, and we’ve significantly expanded our resources list at the top of the page. We’re grateful to everybody for checking in as often as you do.
Phonics and the State of the Union
Our friend Jonathan Mayhew has been wondering whether the “balanced literacy” approach to teaching reading has neglected fundamental ways the brain apprehends and organizes sound itself, to the detriment of a generation or more of young would-be readers.
Professors of education are not neuroscientists, but perhaps they should be. … I’m thinking that language acquisition begins with prosody, and so little children are very good already at sound.
Mayhew’s post reminded me why I would not be watching – that is, listening to – tonight’s State of the Union address by President Biden. No spoken set-piece is less mellifluous than this thing, its aural rhythms undermined by round after round of applause as if at the point of a cattle prod. (I might have it on silent, though, to catch any actual “action.”)
