Who Gave You the Right?
thoughts on authority, poetry, and A.I.
It’s impossible lately for me not to think about authority and what it means to have it, but also what it means to write with it. I don’t, naturally. It’s why I haven’t written public posts on the internet for a long time. It’s also why I left social media three years ago.
But just after dawn one morning last week, before anyone else in my apartment was awake, I woke up thinking about the word. And a Joni Mitchell lyric started looping in my head:
You know the times you impress me the most
Are the times when you don’t try
When you don’t even try.
These are the last on the song “Woman of Heart and Mind,” in which Mitchell says she’s a woman “with time on her hands, no child to raise.”
I’m thinking about this and the longer I’m a parent, the less space I feel between me, a woman with children to raise, and those other people with, apparently, time on their hands. I’m dubious about that time. I’m dubious about our differences. There is only so much time for any of us. And there is so much to raise right now. What authority do any of us have to do any of it?
One of these children I’m raising, my 11-year-old, has friends who play a videogame called Dress to Impress. In 325 seconds, one player must make up and outfit their character, after which other players rate their look. The point of the game is to try very hard to impress your ostensible opponents.
But really the point of the game is to keep playing, to stay distracted, to try and try and try on this particular game’s interface so that very little trying offline happens. The game wants power over the player, even if the player does not know it.
There are a few lines of Grace Paley’s poem, “Responsibility,” about exactly how much authority and lack thereof an artist ought to have.
It is the responsibility of the poet to stand on street corners
giving out poems and beautifully written leaflets
also leaflets they can hardly bear to look at
because of the screaming rhetoric
It is the responsibility of the poet to be lazy to hang out and
prophesy
It’s a poem I think of often lately because Paley uses humor to soften what the whole thing runs on, which is an earnestness that is discomfiting and galvanizing. The poet should shout, not to impress, but to unnerve. Also, the poet should chill. (Implied here: the poet is not in charge.)
I used to write about parenting, for money, on a website that paid me per article. I knew I had no clue what I was saying, and I did point that out, I swear, but there was also an undaunted rhythm to many of these brief little thought churns: first, I’d express that I was miffed about something; then, came the tremulous uncertainty about the topic at large and my own personal understanding of it (what the hell do I know?); at last, arrived a swell of assurance, of, here it comes, authority. Writing this way, I’d sometimes bring myself to tears, either because I was imagining a future for the tiny person in my care or because I was overwhelmed by my own power and my struggle to wield it without clumsiness.
There’s a conversation I’ve been having lately about AI. Last weekend, my sister reminded me not to endow the dreaded bot with human qualities. “It isn’t human at all!” she said, or something like that.
But I fear it’s too late. It is becoming more human every day. Last month, I read aloud an article about AI hallucinations to the college students I teach. In it, I frightened us all with this final line:
“What the system says it is thinking is not necessarily what it is thinking,” said Aryo Pradipta Gema, an A.I. researcher at the University of Edinburgh and a fellow at Anthropic.
What is more human than that? Saying something but not meaning it? The humans I know do this all the time, to my immense frustration, but of course I’m sure I’m guilty of it too. We make shit up! We lie! We think one thing and we say another! And we swear we mean what we say even when we don’t! We want to mean what we say even if we don’t.
Why we humans do this might be different from why A.I. does it, but each of our reasons for lying are variable along a spectrum that stretches between nobility and cowardice.
It’s worth asking our chat bots and ourselves what Mitchell does: “Do you really smile when you smile?”
We speak with authority we do not have. We speak without authority, even though we feel we have it. We fake our way forward every day, for better and for worse, depending on who is doing the faking. I guess that’s really the issue. Can we cop to our fakery? Can we bear (and share) our doubts and uncertainty and absolute lack of authority? Or are we, like the artificial so-called intelligence sucking the earth dry, destined to pretend?