Artificial Stupidity

 Freddie deBoer says something that has also bothered me about much of the marketing for "AI", although with a bit more swearing than I would do (but the swearing is perhaps justified here):

Watch this Apple Intelligence advertisement. The explicit message of this ad - the explicit message - is that the product being sold is for the dumbest fucking people alive. Our main character, Warren, is so utterly dense that his boss is flabbergasted when Warren writes a formulaic 50-word email without tripping on his dick. Everything about the advertisement is designed for you to understand that the fundamental appeal of having “AI” on your iPhone - and you could do this just as easily in the web browser, but never mind - is so that you, a deeply unintelligent being, can operate as a minimally-competent human. They’re selling this thing to people who look at Warren and say, yeah, that’s me, to the absolute dullards. The mentally incompetent. The too stupid to live. I mean that’s exactly what that commercial is conveying, right? They create a protagonist who is intended to appear as helpless and intellectually vacant as possible. They then demonstrate the great value of the product they’re selling, Apple Intelligence, by having it take an email he spends 30 seconds writing and converting it into a more professional email that any human being who doesn’t have some sort of serious cognitive disability could also write in 30 seconds. And Apple is not the only company that’s selling AI by demonstrating its ability to shepherd the tragically stupid through life.

But it's even worse than that, I think; what I think grates me about much of the marketing for AI is that, even trying as hard as they can to make it seem must-have, they can't avoid presenting it as if it will make you more stupid. That is, I think, the real irritating thing. It's not really so much that they are marketing to people who are already stupid; it's that they are marketing to everyone the attractions of having something that lets you be stupid. The marketing is never, "This makes this complicated process easier for better results'", which is how other technological innovations are generally marketed, but "Why do anything that requires intelligent work when you can take the lazy route of being artificially stupid?"

Perhaps deBoer is right that the root cause is hype inflation; in particular, we have something that is very technological impressive if we consider its development, but that currently, almost by definition, just does what we already do anyway. The closest we can get to making the effect sound impressive is putting some results of intermediate-level skills just in reach of people without those skills, like being able to produce an OK illustration without being an amateur illustrator or hiring a professional illustrator, which is not something most people need very often -- or trying to convince people that they need a means to do what requires very few skills at all, and that they can already do, like following a business email template.

I suppose the real irritation, though, is that this kind of scammery often seems to work on people.

Fortnightly Book, January 26

 The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries were a religious ferment and chaos. Multiple new devotions spread throughout Europe, institutional structures shifted, certain classes of laity suddenly found themselves confronted with religious and moral questions that had before only been dimly anticipated. Pilgrimage became a major form of both religious practice and recreation. Reading of devotional works -- whether by reading them oneself or having them read to one -- became more common. And as often happens in such times, there was an explosion of mystical and ascetical theology, one that pervaded large portions of society, as people of all sorts of backgrounds turned from merely following along with the religious experience formed for them by institutions and in some sense took charge of their religious experience, or at least large parts of it, for themselves.

Into this ferment plunged Margery Kempe. Born somewhere around 1373 as Margery Brunham (or Burnham), to a well-to-do and influential family in the busy and important port city of Lynn (now officially known as King's Lynn, of which her father was the mayor), she benefited from a surge in the good fortunes of the bourgeois and mercantile classes. We don't know what kind of education she had, although we do know that she never learned to read, but we also know that she seems to have had a good memory, and could retain a great deal of anything read to her. In 1394, at about the age of twenty she married John Kempe, a local official in Lynn, with whom she would eventually have fourteen children. We don't know exactly when her mystical experiences began, but she was definitely struggling with them shortly after the birth of her child, and they seem to have never let up. She eventually forced her husband to accept a chastity agreement and began actively engaging in pilgrimage; everywhere she went, her devotion was as public as it can get, with loud prayers and weeping sobs and sudden strange reactions that put everyone around her off (an effect that has never entirely vanished, because her practices of religious devotion were, shall we say, very far from common ideas about religious devotion today). She was tried for heresy several times (always acquitted, because it was never really her beliefs that were causing the problems others had with her).

Eventually she dictated the book, now known was The Book of Margery Kempe, that is sometimes considered the first autobiographical work in the English language, giving in detail her accounts of her devotions, her many trials, her pilgrimages, and giving us one of the clearest snapshots of the religious practices, people, and pilgrimage places of the day, many of which she knew personally. (One of the most famous scenes of the book is when she met Julian of Norwich, and it is very clear that, despite being a very different person from Julian, she is giving a very close and accurate account of their exchange.) She had difficulty getting people to help her to put the book together. Then after her death, at some point in the sixteenth century the book disappeared, except for a pamphlet with a few extracts, and was only re-discovered in 1934. And of course, The Book of Margery Kempe is the next fortnightly book.