After a year of AI

I’ve been dabbling with Perplexity AI for nearly a year now and decision time is looming. Should I renew my subscription. Or should I look elsewhere (e.g. Halomate)? Or should I swear off AI altogether?

At the moment, I feel no need to look elsewhere. I try to be circumspect in my use of AI, so I have not attempted to exploit the full potential of Perplexity. Therefore, in spite of occasionally being tempted by the latest bells and whistles offered elsewhere, I see no point in starting again with something else.

The question of whether I should abandon AI is less straightforward to answer. There is a real case to be made against its use. As far as I can see, that case boils down to two arguments:

• AI encourages mental laziness. We are tempted to accept what it tells us as true without critical engagement. Often, the output is so polished (at least superficially) that we are tempted to submit it as our own work – hence the deluge of AI slop on the Internet.
• The environmental argument. AI data centres put extreme demands on power and water supplies. They run so hot that they raise temperatures in their locales measurably above what would be expected (at the same time, overheating rivers with waste cooling water). Some have massive backup diesel generators which produce great quantities of air pollution. And these ills are growing exponentially with the AI bubble. On top of this, there is the psychological harm to the humans who are employed (often on low wages in developing countries) to monitor and censor inappropriate outputs.

I’m not terribly bothered about the threat of mental laziness. The crucial point is always to treat the output of AI in the same way as you treat any other secondary source – always insist on references (and always check them) and never plagiarize. In any case, unlike many chatbots, Perplexity AI is essentially an AI-powered search engine and that is how I use it (as a Google search on crystal meth).

But I remain conflicted on the environmental and wider social issues. Yes, AI speeds up my research at a time of life when I may not have very much time left. But does the improved efficiency of my research justify my implicit support for the damage that AI is doing on a global scale? If I were a rugged individualist like so many tech bros, the answer would be an unequivocal ‘yes’. But I’m an Orthodox Christian, so I have to balance the goods of AI (not just my vanishingly small contribution to the sum of human knowledge buts its role in pushing forward the bounds of our knowledge in so many fields) against the environmental and social ills. I’m unable to come to a clear view on this, so I suspect that I will continue to use Perplexity for the time being.

Seeing with other eyes

if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them sees, that each of them is (Marcel Proust, The Captive, p.277)

And that is precisely what the great novelists, poets, musicians, artists, photographers, etc. enable us to do.

Marcel Proust on seeing the world with other eyes

if we visited Mars or Venus while keeping the same senses, they would clothe everything we could see in the same aspect as the things of Earth. The only true voyage, the only bath in the Fountain of Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to see the universe through the eyes of another (The Captive)

And that is precisely what the great novelists, poets, musicians, artists, photographers, etc. enable us to do.

Barthes on significance

When a great many people agree that a problem is insignificant, that usually means it is not. Insignificance is the locus of true significance. This should never be forgotten.(Roland Barthes, The Grain of the Voice, p. 177)

This is true across so many disciplines. Consider, for example, the state of physics in about 1900. That year, Lord Kelvin, one of the most eminent physicists of the nineteenth century, told the British Association for the Advancement of Science, ‘There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.’ In the same year he told the Royal Institution that only two clouds remained to obscure the ‘beauty and clearness’ of Newtonian physics. One of the problems he dismissed as clouds led ultimately to relativity theory; the other to quantum theory. Together these new theories amounted to a revolution in our understanding of the physical world.

On perfection and simplicity

I found the following quote in an interview with the landscape photographer Andris Apse:

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. (Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars, chapter 3)

I like that. It seems to have all sorts of applications. Apse quotes it in relation to his search for perfection in photography, but it could equally well apply to writing. I can certainly think of any number of books that would have been improved by judicious use of the red pen.

Beyond the realm of the creative arts, it reminds me of the process of abstraction that is necessary in solving most physics problems. Back in the dim and distant past when I taught physics, it struck me that students most often got into difficulties because they didn’t simplify enough.

And, come to think of it, it could also be an expression of simplicity as a Christian discipline – that radical process of self-emptying which cuts away all the clutter, internal as well as external, until all that is left is the image of God.

NaNoWriMo?

Nanowrimo (National Novel Writing Month) began on Wednesday. It would be the perfect way to restart my fiction writing. Unfortunately, I have a paper to write for a conference at the beginning of next month. The thought of trying to write 1500–1600 words a day on top of that is just too daunting. Besides, if past attempts at novel writing are anything to go by, the 50,000 words that NaNoWriMo reckon constitute a novel would amount to less than half of what I’d be likely to write.

Enter the Glasgow SF Writers Circle. They have set up an informal NaNoWriMo Discord channel so that folk can share their progress. So I have announced my intention to attempt a MinNoWriMo (a minimal novel writing month). I can’t hope to manage 1500 words, but I do plan to write something (even it is only a paragraph or two) every day. The point is to regain my daily writing rhythm. In time, I hope to get back to at least 500 words a day (that’s a good-sized fantasy novel in a year).

Writing is not a spare-time activity

The theologian Scot McKnight offers some wise words about writing on his blog (here). In brief, he explains why it is impossible to treat writing as something that can be done ‘on the side’. Of course, he is writing as an academic theologian for other theologians and academics, but I think his comments hold true for other kinds of writing. As he says,

writing is a lifestyle, a way of life, a way of being, a modus operandi, a way of breathing and eating and drinking. Better yet, writing is a way of learning, a way of coming to know what someone wants to know, a way of discovering.

Writing is not something to do when everything else is cleared off the desk; no, it is something that makes order of the desk. I don’t get up wondering what I will write about, but I write about what I’m wondering. … In other words, as Augustine spoke of ‘faith seeking understanding,’ so writing is a pen seeking understanding.

This reminds me of Rowan Williams’s comments on writing as self-discovery, which I blogged about here.

Read well to write well

Some advice on writing from an unexpected source:

Given a sharp and eager mind, eloquence is picked up more readily by those who read and listen to the words of the eloquent than by those who follow the rules of eloquence. (Augustine, doc. Chr. IV.3.4)

Of course, he was referring to preaching and rhetoric (Augustine was one of the great rhetors of his day), but the advice applies equally to the written word.

Actually, the advice is probably redundant for any decent writer. Certainly, all the professional writers (of fiction) I know became what they are because of their love of books. They could no more stop reading than they could stop breathing. By the same token, anyone who has to be told to get their nose out of the guides to writing a bestseller and read some good books instead will probably never be a good writer (successful, perhaps, but never really good because they write for the wrong reasons).

Writing as self-discovery

Some interesting words from Rowan Williams speaking at Heffers Bookshop in Cambridge back in 2008 (you can find a transcript of the entire talk here):

you only discover what you have to say in the doing of it. Saunders Lewis, the Welsh poet, used to quote somebody saying – a child saying – ‘How do I know what I think until I see what I say?’ and I have always resonated rather with that. And that means that for me in writing even a straightforward prose essay or a short book or a lecture, there is that awkward moment when, if you like, the engine is turning over a bit and you are wondering exactly at what point you are going to discover what the argument is. . . . Writing isn’t translating something in here onto the page. Writing is an act. . . . it is an action of self-discovery and an action of trying to put something into being . . .

That certainly resonates with me. In my experience, no matter how carefully I try to outline a story or an article or a lecture, there is something about the process of turning the outline into polished English that surprises. Only when the words stare back at me from the page (or the computer screen) do I really know what I think.

And even then it is not always clear. There have been occasions when I have given a talk and, during the question and answer session, someone has asked me something like ‘You said X, does this mean that you believe Y?’ And I have thought, ‘Gosh! I hadn’t realized that I believe that, but she is right! And that means . . .’

Creativity: turning grass into milk

The Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem offers an interesting metaphor for the creative process:

A cow produces milk—that is certain—and the milk doesn’t come from nothing. Just as a cow must eat grass in order to produce milk, I have to read large amounts of genuine scientific literature of all kinds—i.e. literature not invented by me—and the final product, my writing, is as unlike the intellectual food as milk is unlike grass. (Microworlds, p. 25)

I like this image. It is a useful reminder that creativity is rarely a matter of plucking ideas from the air. In its light, my compulsive reading and note-taking becomes a matter of grazing: gathering the essential raw materials for the creative process. And the image also highlights the fact that writing of any value is never merely the regurgitation of what you have grazed. It is always about creating a new synthesis of the raw materials (milk rather than partially digested grass).

Collingwood on being a slow thinker

The philosopher R. G. Collingwood makes the following revealing comment about his thought processes:

I know that I have always been a slow and painful thinker, in whom thought in its formative stages will not be hurried by effort, nor clarified by argument, that most dangerous enemy to immature thoughts, but grows obscurely through a long and oppressive period of gestation, and only after birth can be licked by its parent into presentable shape. (Autobiography, p. 107)

I can certainly identify with this description of the struggle to formulate one’s thoughts. And gestation is a very good metaphor for a process that can take months or even years.

On creative borrowing

Here’s an interesting passage on borrowing and creativity from an interview with the American artist Joy Garnett in the journal Cultural Politics:

[V]isual art functions according to the principles of open source, and it always has been open source – art can’t be made otherwise. In other words, borrowing and direct referencing – various forms of ‘copying’ – are the basis of creativity. You would think we might understand that by now, that our understanding of art history would take us well beyond the cliché of artist as lone inspired genius conduit. In truth, all creativity is collaboration, whether one is conscious of it or not. What we call ‘influence’ is nothing if not quotation and allusion. Our culture is generated and driven collectively, and the whole point is to dip in and take parts and change them, to make them ‘new’. To make art is to copy on some profound level, and to copy is of course to communicate: to act as receiver, transformer and transmitter.

The words jumped out at me because I have often thought the same about writing fantasy, and even more so about doing theology! Certainly, this is the case with Christian theology – novelty is not a theological virtue; theologians should only express themselves in new ways if the novelty is necessary for them to remain faithful to the gospel in the face of a changing culture and language.

Kurt Vonnegut on writing

Kurt Vonnegut certainly knew how to write, so any advice from him is certainly worth taking seriously. Here are some tips from him, which were originally published in IEEE Transactions on Professional Communications Vol. PC-24, no. 2 (1980), pp. 66–67 (you can find a pdf of the original here):

• Find a subject you care about
• Do not ramble, though
• Keep it simple
• Have guts to cut
• Sound like yourself
• Say what you mean
• Pity the readers

One thing I disagree with is the closing section of his article in which he advises people to go to Strunk and White’s Elements of Style for more detailed advice. To understand why this is really bad advice, one need look no further than Geoff Pullum</a>’s excellent article ‘The Land of the Free and The Elements of Style’. His conclusion is worth quoting:

The Elements of Style does real and permanent harm. It encourages the waste of precious resources – time spent by teachers, students, and copy editors; money spent by English departments and publishers. Genuine faults in writing go neglected because time is spent on nonsense like which-hunting. And worse than that, sensible adults are wrongly persuaded that their grasp of their native tongue is imperfect and their writing is incorrect. No good purpose is served by damaging people’s self-confidence in this way.

How to win a Nobel Prize

Paul Krugman, winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Economics, has some interesting advice on his website for anyone embarking on a piece of research, which can be summarized thus:

• Listen to the Gentiles: Read outside your discipline. In his own words, ‘Pay attention to what intelligent people are saying, even if they do not have your customs or speak your analytical language.’
• Question the question: The questions asked in any academic discipline are theory laden. There is no such thing as a bare fact in any subject. Everything is affected by the presuppositions of the discipline, so Krugman rightly advocates paying critical attention to those presuppositions.
• Dare to be silly: Don’t be content with the safe and the familiar. Dare to strike out into uncharted territory. My favourite example is that of Richard Feynman: the research that led to his Nobel Prize was inspired by asking why a dinner plate thrown across a dining room at Cornell University wobbled as it flew!
• Simplify, simplify: Keep shaving with Ockham’s razor. Personally, I prefer A.N. Whitehead’s approach: ‘seek simplicity, but distrust it’. Or, to paraphrase Einstein, theories should be as simple as possible, but no simpler.