"AI utopians believe humanity will find more of life’s meaning elsewhere, because while the machines are busy doing the drudgery..."

"... of daily living, they’ll be set free to explore. Maybe they’ll discover poetry they never had time to read, or go on more hikes. Maybe they’ll be able to spend their days in profound discussion with cherished friends, rather than in front of screens — or maybe they’ll spend all day in front of screens after all, having conversations with robots."

Writes the Washington Post Editorial Board in "We asked an AI bot hundreds of questions. Here’s what we learned."

I've already read enough machine-written text to want to avoid it whenever I can, but unfortunately, much human-written text resembles the work product of ChatGPT... including what I just quoted above. There's a positive side to that, though. Sensitized to the the loathsomeness of machine-written text, I can defend more vigorously against the mechanical writings of the human being.

IN THE COMMENTS: Stephen wrote: "A machine would never have written that phrase…or is that what a machine would like me to believe?"

It's like the — or should I say "the the"? — way Rand McNally would add a nonexistent town to each map or the ancient Persians would weave a mistake into each carpet. 

Children's books made with Midjourney/Dall-E 2/ChatGPT suffer from a "Whimsy Gap" — they are "moralistic, but not transporting."

The "images... are sometimes cute, even beautiful, but somehow off, with distorted proportions or elements of an idea mashed up to discordant effect."

Writes Alyssa Rosenberg in "Why AI will never beat Maurice Sendak" (WaPo). She tested the tools, trying to make children's books.

So far, these tools are limited to the data sets their creators have used to teach them about language and images. If AI is moralistic, limited in imagination or — as in the case of a powerful new avatar generator — inclined toward porn, that’s on the humans.

Oh? I don't know how she's so sure of that, but it sheds some light on an article I saw the other day that said AI wrote better and more "moral" opinions than the Supreme Court.

I can't find this right now. Did the lawprofs who wrote it withdraw it — perhaps because someone pointed out the flaw in their reasoning? The more "moral" opinions were, as you might imagine, more in line with the political left, and the machine may have been fed that point of view.

But I did find this:

"Despite his best efforts, Jake has recently hit a wall in his career and personal life. He feels stuck..."

"... and unfulfilled, and has begun to question whether the path he has chosen is really the right one for him. Jake is intelligent and resourceful, but he can also be impulsive and reckless. He has a tendency to act without fully thinking things through, which has gotten him into trouble in the past. Jake is good-looking and charming, but he has never been able to settle down in a committed relationship. He has had many casual flings and short-term relationships, but has never found someone who truly understands him. Overall, Jake is a complex and multifaceted character who is struggling with a deep sense of uncertainty and disillusionment. He is at a turning point in his life, and the events of the story will force him to confront his fears and doubts, and to ultimately make some difficult decisions about his future."

That's A.I., responding to a fiction-writer's request for a good fictional character, quoted in "Could an A.I. Chatbot Rewrite My Novel? As a young fiction writer, I dreamed of a technology that would tell me how to get my characters from point A to point B. Could ChatGPT be it?" by Jay Caspian Kang (The New Yorker).

It's terrible — isn't it? — or do I just need it to be terrible because I don't want any machine-written fiction? But am I clinging to a desire to love real, human fiction-writers? Maybe A.I.'s idea of a good fictional character is bad, and it's actually as good as what the humans do? If so, my desire to hate any machine-written fiction could lead me to hate the human fiction writer.

Here's what the real human writer — who needs us to continue to want him (and perhaps has never found someone who truly understands him) — has to say: