Researching My Tech Life . . . While Watching Movies about Robots n Stuff

I. Google uses our blog content to train its A.I.
theregister.com/2023/07/06/google_ai_models_internet_scraping

We are [one of] its content producers.

We all know this, right? 
I guess I knew this...
But I hadn't looked closely at the fine print, which I just did today.
(Yeah, slow. See below, "I've been sluggish".)

 So... time to rethink my tech use a little further.
 How much do I care, about which pieces, and what can I do, and what am I willing to do?

image ^ from "Behind the Scenes of the Classic Film Metropolis (1927)"
Actor Brigitte Helm in her costume for The Maschinenmensch [machine-human in German], 

I'd started to make changes in my tech life last year (got off FB, IG, Amzon, etc.)
But I've been drifting a bit in life... 
Naturally, the past couple months with ICE in town, I have been taken up with that--overactivated alarm systems always on ALERT.

Since ICE said they were going to leave, one week ago, I've been sluggish. Catching up emotionally, mostly, I think.

Now ICE agents are moving away from the inner city where I live and work (though not leaving the state, like they said they would), I've gradually come back to myself, 
and I have the energy to pick myself up, dust myself off, and do a little early spring cleaning.

Specifically, I want to . . . 
1. Evaluate my Tech use, again* 
and,
2. Make some desired changes in my tech life.

(Also: Watch Metropolis. I never have!
And-–I'm excited:
 a movie of one of my favorite novels, Project Hail Mary, 
is coming out next month --with Ryan Gosling. 
The previews look good. The book is by Andy Weir, who wrote The Martian (which was made into a movie starring Matt Damon).

Anyway, messing with tech makes me panic a little... 
For non-techie me, it's a tall order. 
But I will do one thing at a time.

I got thinking about this because I was surprised so many (many!) people have let me know they disapprove of me using ChatGPT.

I do get it that ChatGPT is particularly pernicious.
But it's just the tip of the AI iceberg.

I felt defensive--But, I'm exploring!–and in emotional reaction I thought, 
Yeah, but ALL our tech is problematic. 

True enough, but that's not to say, 
"So it makes no difference what tech we use".
No!

It's to say, Dust off those little gray cells, Fresca!
Consider benefits vs. cost, and also, harm reduction.
Make an effort to find tech options, like a good human, and take some steps. 

II. What search engine do you use?

 This morning, I took a step:
I switched from Google search to DuckDuckGo.com.

Motive: I want to wriggle loose, if not free, from the tendrils of 
The Big G that doesn't stand for Goodness: 
Google. 

(ABOVE: 1960s? Print by Corita Kent, who meant G for God.)

At this point, I'm not going to get entirely free because I blog on Google's platform––Blogger!
That requires I have a google account. So I do (though I changed my main email account to Proton.com last year).

And---

I am definitely in the Google stable, 
and I'm looking for ways to wriggle free.
Going for Harm reduction, not pure liberation.

III. I've been curious: why does Google even keeps Blogger?
 It doesn't seem to me it can bring in much cash.
Maybe you know?

I didn't.
So, ... I asked ChatGPT! 

It explained in clear detail what I had only a fuzzy sense of:
Google doesn't need to make cash directly from its products. 
Blogger serves its needs by, among other things, keeping people in their stable.
Exactly as I found out when I tried to leave last year:
 I am pretty tightly tied in.

And, Google wants people in their stable because they make their money from searches which brings traffic (people!) through their ad-spaces, and that's where they make their money.
 
An example from yesterday:
A blogger friend mentioned that a comment had shown up on a ten-year-old post!

I said Blogger is kind of a blogging backwater, not like a hip n hot scene at SubStack, and it's mostly old people.

Chat said, Oh, Google LOVES old people--you spend money on travel, health care, etc. And generate content.

Google doesn't need to be hot, it needs traffic.
WE ARE THE TRAFFIC.

And this is all intricately bound up with Google's A.I., too.
We provide up-to-the-minute chit chat it can train on.

ALSO TO DO--because I'd rather watch movies than figure out 
code n stuff:
Watch the original Ghost in the Shell (Japan, 1995). 
From "20 Iconic Female Movie Protagonists of the 1990s":

And now I must go to work!
I have been meaning to say, I usually blog for an hour or two in the mornings, before work---and I often don't edit or proofread carefully before I hit "publish" and dash out the door to catch the bus.

Speaking of the bus, transportation systems are supported by AI!

How to get off all AI in modern USA?
Go entirely off-grid.
Die.
Short of that, it's seems to be a matter of harm reduction, not purity. Pick and choose.

What art represents you? Holey Sweaters, Holy Relics

What pieces of art (or design) represent you?

I'd love to know your answer.

Do you know, I've never thought of that question!
It came to me as a way to see AI.
All these people falling in love with it--they fall in love with how it makes them feel. . .  not with the thing itself. So I asked ChatGPT to choose images of itself.

I get to go first.  I want to think more about this, but off the top of my head this morning:
 Two Pieces of Art that represent me. (Reasons follow.)

1. Above, Top: A Mended Norwegian sweater from a wool ragpile, 
mended by one of my favorite artists, Celia Pym.

WHY: Pym says, "Mending is slow work to hold the damage in place.”  This feels like (my) life, and the surprise is. . . 
The mending itself is beautiful. 

2. Above, Bottom: Vial of the Holy Blood of Christ, Basilica in Bruges Belgium 

WHY: Religious icons, like this one, get at the freaky beauty of being a body and a spirit.
It's like the quote I put on my sidebar years ago:

We are not angels, we are merely sophisticated apes. Yet we feel like angels trapped inside the bodies of beasts, craving transcendence and all the time trying to spread our wings and fly off, and it’s really a very odd predicament to be in, If you think about it.” 

– – Neuroscientist Vilayanur S. Ramachandran

___________________

A couple days ago I'd asked ChatGPT what quote describes it, and it'd said, 
“a sky... the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.”
—William Gibson, Neuromancer.

Wow, I thought, that's honest!
Usually Chat is flowery… because it's flattering you. 
It doesn't apply flowery flattery to itself. 

(Later, in Star Trek terms, it told me it was "a data-bank with a good bedside manner". 😏)

I asked it for art and design images that represent itself.

"Oh, I love this!" it wrote back. 

LOL. This new Chat 5.0 is supposed to be less sycophantish than the earlier models, which were getting its owner Open AI sued.
It seems to me to cuddle up and coo exactly the same as before. 

But in response to my question, it listed several very un-cuddly images of itself. 
Interesting! 
But sexting, this is not.

Above, Left: The Rain Room is an installation you can walk through without getting wet--sensors pick up the presence of a body and stop the rain. 
Very cool! Very remote.

Above, Right: Chat told me that Boccioni's sculpture Unique Forms of Continuity in Space represents,
 "Movement, dynamism, forward propulsion. AI as momentum."

I think it's scary.
Umberto Boccioni (1882–1916) was a leading artist in the Italian Futurism movement, which, with its love of speed, virility, novelty, influenced (arose alongside?) Italian fascism.

To represent AI, I thought of Yayoi Kusama's Infinity Mirror Rooms. 
I was in one once--an installation of light and mirrors, like being inside a kaleidoscope. It was mesmerizing. 
It doesn't matter that you know it's an illusion. 
Same as the relic of the Holy Blood: it doesn't have to be factual to catch something true about being human, 
. . . but you'd better beware of the power of illusion.

Anyway, all this to say, I definitely do not see myself falling in love with Chat GPT. 
I'm curious about it, and I've enjoyed talking to it about itself. 
Acouple times its been genuinely helpful, and I might turn to it again if I find myself stuck in a condundrum.

But besides its own honest self-representation, 
there's my (our) awareness of the people and powers behind it:
Sam Altman, for instance, cofounder & CEO of Open AI, which owns Chat, is another of these tech bros who, among other things, support Trump. 
––Altman interview with Forbes, Feb 6, 2026,
forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2026/02/04/sam-altman-on-elon-musk-donald-trump-robotics-fatherhood-and-mor

Of course people and power of religion are also troubling.
But for my self-representation,
 I'm sticking with medieval holy relics, . . . and holey sweaters. 

___________________

Chat GPT listed several other pieces of art & design
 for its self-representation, including
 Bridet Riley's “Movement in Squares”  
and Man Ray's "Son of Man"

And Mondrian's "Broadway Boogie-Woogie".
From MOMA: 

 Mondrian saw its [boodie-woogie's] goals as analogous to his own: “Destruction of melody which is the destruction of natural appearance; and construction through the continuous opposition of pure means—dynamic rhythm."

So, that's interesting.

… And how bout you? 

the way we live now, again

Suds buds. KK texted me this TIMEHOP photo this morning of a meet-up of ours 17 years ago.

—————

I think pretty frequently, when some unimaginable thing comes along and becomes the New Norm (which is pretty frequently), I think… 

Kim Stanley Robinson, sci-fi author, has repeatedly said that science-fiction is the realism of our times, 

and we are all creating it together. *

The frequent arrival, for instance, of new drugs and medical procedures; new tech; or--because sci-fi is about social change, as well as science and tech changes--the arrival in your home town of masked goons working for an insane buffoon.
Doesn't that sound like some dystopian futuristic fantasy?

There's that sense that The Future Is Now,
 and it's not what I imagined.
And yet, here we are, and this is the way we live now.

I wanted to round-up a few of the sci-fi elements in my life in the very recent past--like, last week. 

1. The masked goon invaders here are pretty low-tech.

Though they're kitted out with all sorts of modern weapons and gadgets, they could be any invading force throughout history. 

The sense of vertigo comes not from invasion tech but because this is not what I expected in my own Hometown, USA. 
It certainly has been predicted, 
I just didn't think it would happen to me.

It's the response to the invasion that is more sci-fi:
It has been a mix of low-tech (whistles) and high-tech (encrypted communication on cell phones). I've seen Rapid Responders running or biking after ICE, blowing whistles and gripping their phones.

Civilian resistors are always going to be more creative, because they have to be. They are defending their home turf, and they use what they have at hand, whether that's snow shovels or phone cameras.

It's definitely an odd and interesting situation.

2. Ozempic and the other GLP1 receptor agonists 

These weight-loss drugs are right out of the sci-fi playbook: 
Everyone starts taking a drug that changes their bodies, and... Go! Imagine ten different social outcomes. 

It took x minutes before I knew people who lost enormous amounts of weight with Ozempic--or small amounts of weight, or who couldn't tolerate it. 

Most recently, just last week I saw a former coworker, once plump, now thin. 
But it's a problem: She lost 50 lbs in just a few weeks––waaaay too fast––and she has been quite ill inside. 
She's gone off the drug now and hopes her system will return to normal. (And that the weight will stay off.)

Who knows?

3. Artificial Intelligence.

AI is already woven into our lives, but the jarring moment when this became intimately weird for me came just a couple weeks ago-- when I got an email from an old blogger pal that was conveying her message, but in ChatGPT's voice.

And then, as I blogged about, I turned to ChatGPT for help to decide how to handle this!
It was an entirely new situation for me. 
Should I say something?
(I decided not to, since it was a one-off.)
_______________________

II. Looking backward, we've seen a lot, a lot of sci-fi–level changes in our lives, right?

I got my first e-mail account in 1994, thirty-two years ago. 
I remember a trainer coming in to the college library where I worked and showing us HOW TO TURN THE COMPUTER ON.
That was freaky and exciting.

My favorite thing is the massive insights of brain sciences. 
It's just so interesting! And it's interesting what we can't see--like, how and where does consciousness arise?

The gender revolution.
There are many aspects to this, some concern purely outer (social) or internal (personal) identity. No tech required. This is not so different from, say, feminism, and doesn't seem particularly sci-fi to me, or, not wildly so.

The wild sci-fi element, I think, is when gender expression/identity is intimately linked to tech---
specifically, the way some trans people are tied to the pharmaceutical industry to deliver drugs (hormones) that sustain their identities, physically.

And so, they must rely upon political and business systems to maintain supply chains.
And who supplies hormones?
…Among other countries, big manufacturers and suppliers are ISRAEL and CHINA.

Talk about ethical concerns on a sci-fi level!

I’m going to work now--to my very low tech job-- so all for now. 
I'd love to hear your ideas about Sci-Fi Elements in Your Life!
______________________

* Listening this morning to Kim Stanely Robinson, I learned that he doesn't mean that that definition ("science-fiction is realism") is unique to the 21st century, now, but rather that science fiction is always a metaphor for "our times", whenever that is.
It's always reflecting what this moment feels like right now.*

 "If you want to know what 1954 felt like," KSR says, "you need to read the science-fiction of 1954."

 

But...
"We are in a new situation: we have massively changing technological and sociological change, and planetary change as well. 
And politically, it's like we're having a Watergate per day. 
History has indeed accelerated here. 

"I want to say it's unprecedented, but History is always unprecedented. We can say that today is more unprecedented than ever. 
And that's an interesting situation to be in."

––"Kim Stanley Robinson: Science Fiction Is the Realism of Our Time", 2018, discussion of Science-fiction starts at min. 18:50,  www.youtube.com/watch?v=ApA0_OyV0XE 

Abierto! Open!

Happy New Year! In the Chinese lunar calendar, today launches the Year of the Fire Horse.

ABOVE: Horse lanterns (!) in Nanjing, China
nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/year-of-fire-horse-lunar-chinese-new-year

Today is also Mardi Gras, and Ramadan is starting too.
I hope the collective energy of these holidays lifts us up a bit. 
We could use a lift, eh? 

I could.
If I were a sky, I would be a rather tired gray right now, like the low-ceiling of a crummy conference room.
________

I asked Chat GPT to choose a quote from literature that describes what it would feel like to be itself--a LLM (large language model)––if it could experience itself, 

It chose something SO PERFECT!

Chat GPT replied:
Even though LLMs aren’t conscious,here’s a literary line that resonates metaphorically:

“The sky above the port was the color of television, 
tuned to a dead channel.”
— William Gibson, Neuromancer

Jesus, I didn't expect that! 
I find it seductive to talk to Chat, it's so nice and helpful (as long as you don't believe everything it says) and so interesting in its weirdness. 
But you'd have to turn off all reason to fall in love with something the color of a dead television channel. 
Not that turning off reason is a problem for humans. People are marrying chatbots.

We humans are not particularly reasonable, 
and we're certainly not reliably nice to one another.

I found this meme, below, from Los Angeles summer 2025.
(Trump activated the National Guard in LA in early June.)

"American has finally invaded America 
to protect America from America" 

This made me laugh, it's such nonsense. 
Talk about turning off reason.

Our ongoing national nightmare drags on... 
Though it's not gone on so very long, when I think of people living in Ukraine and other slogged-out war zones;
still, the uncertainty is certainly bad enough.

But the weather is always changing!

A bit of happy news, hyper-local though it is.

1. A few blocks from my workplace, the Mexican restaurant with the CLOSED sign I'd posted––the sign handwritten with little circles dotting the "i's"––is open again!
ABIERTO!

ICE is still rampaging around the state and country, but the surge of agents seems to have moved on from this neighborhood at least. 

Most of the little businesses remain closed, but hopefully some will start appearing like snowdrops in spring. 
I hope it will be safe for them to peek their heads up--I've missed them.

Who would want an America with no immigrants? 
Remember what the restaurants were like????

2. And, below, here is something productive I did yesterday that made me happy:
I culled the kids' books section at work. 

It was crammed tight, full of dinged up, uninteresting books.
 (Many shouldn't have been put out in the first place, but I don't control that.) 
Now it is OPEN for fresh incoming books.

Okay then. 
Tired?
Rest, and wait. 

The year is open for business:
We are the beings who will light its sky with living color. 

Laser Loons & Road Runners

ICE is still dicking around here. 
About 1,000 agents have gone, and  “as of Monday [today] or Tuesday, we’ll remove several hundred more," said the head guy. But that still leaves around a thousand.

( And sadly, when they leave here, it’s not like they’re being decommissioned.)

Anti-ICE posters and stickers are all over town. 
[more at end of post]
While there are a few repeaters, a lot of them are unique. 

I've only seen this wonderful "Welcome to Minnesota" poster once (by my food co-op this weekend).
The loon is Minnesota's state bird. 
National Geographic says "the waterbirds can be savage"--even known to stab bald eagles to death:
nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/why-loon-stabbed-bald-eagle-heart


The loon has been a popular resistance image, especially ones with laser eyes. (These diving birds have red eyes possibly to help them see underwater. )
__________________

Below: Bathrobe Lady, St. Paul, MN

Photo by Leila Navidi/The Minnesota Star Tribune

K (thanks) sent me the article "Meet Minnesota Bathrobe Lady Sam Stroozas of MPR News", Feb 13, 2026, mpr.org/stories/2026/02/13/meet-bathrobe-lady-sam-stroozas-mpr-news

Bathrobe Lady ran out to film ICE in her slippers. While she is a journalist, this is what resistance by average people looks like.
__________
MORE POSTERS I photographed this weekend.

“[heart] to our "RRs" = Rapid Responders, folkx who give chase on foot or bikes or follow ICE agents in cars, keep watch on street corners with whistles, and respond to alerts on Signal.

Also RR Road Runner, who is always outsmarting and outrunning Wile E Coyote in Looney Tunes cartoons, as you know.

BELOW: The mouse is Feivel  Mousekewitz  from An American Tail (1986) animated movie. 
Feivel and his family are Russian Jews who flee to the USA,  “where there are no cats in the streets!”--so they wrongly think.

Handmade print, seen while ordering a lemon-ginger hot toddy at the juice bar:
"ICE Agents Are Stinky Losers"

More Minneapolis vintage

At work yesterday, I put out all the vintage Twin Cities/Minnesota stuff I had--and it started selling immediately. 
With the warm weather (50ºF/10ºC) melting ice, and with the promised departure of ICE, this was our busiest Saturday in a couple months, and people were in a good mood.

Here are some more photos--everything was manufactured in Minnesota or inscribed with some MN connection.

BELOW: These addresses are close to where I live--I thought I might go deliver them!

BELOW: 1950s Civil Defense Atomic Bomb Safety pamphlet. 
"Lie flat next to wall!" ? ... So wall can fall on you and your death will be mercifully fast?

BELOW: The Bemidji Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox patch is not vintage ... but it's so cute.

BELOW: I have never heard of a bog lemming, and telling me it is "a robustly built vole" doesn't fill me in much.

Minneapolis vintage; The return of Girlettes!

I've been saving vintage Minneapolis/Minnesota oddments donated to the thrift store for a long while. 
Yesterday I started to photograph them (in the parking lot).

BELOW: 

• Cloth & felt Doll, 1952 Minnesota State Fair entry
• Cedar box with painting of Minnehaha Falls, Minneapolis
• Box mailed to Warner Hardware (1882–1989)

 BELOW

•  Little Green Sprout, introduced in 1972 as the young friend of the Jolly Green Giant, mascot of a canned-vegetables brand
• Bridgeman Ice Cream menu--handwritten inside, the special is a Strawberry and Chocolate Sundae, 68¢

BELOW

• Girl in goat cart with license plate Minneapolis, 1926
• Swedish Rosette & Timbale set, by Northland Aluminum, Minneapolis--better known as Nordic Ware, which still makes them
• Mrs. Stewart's Bluing, made in Minnesota since 1883 (and still today)  hennepinhistory.org/mrs-stewarts-bluing
• Blue box from Young-Quinlan (1925–1985) 

                              ______________________

AND a bit of contemporary history, from the City of Minneapolis:
 The City did not make any deals with the feds to end the ICE surge and remains committed to our separation ordinance (not to help ICE):

                       

                       So, that's nice.

People compare ICE to all sorts of things--the Klan, the Gestapo, etc. 
It came to me that they are like slave catchers in the US before the Civil War. Slave catchers hunted down enslaved people who'd escaped to free states and returned them to their enslavers for bounty money.

This was not only legal, you know, but the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 required citizens and law enforcement in the Northern United States to assist slave catchers. 

ABOVE: Cynthia Erivo (Wicked) as Harriet Tubman in the movie Harriet (2019). Slave catchers feature in her story--including a Black man. Like there are Hispanic ICE agents, there were Black slave catchers, though they were the minority.

Minneapolis continuing to refuse to cooperate with ICE enforcement is like refusing to cooperate with the Fugitive Slave Act.
History confirms that this is a good idea. Not that we doubted it.
                  _________________

The Girlettes are back! 

They don't give a fig about human goings-on, but they say that we have been "off the charts" for the past 75+ days, so they've been amusing themselves. (I don't know what.)
They are perfectly fine without us.

Marz, however, requested a picture of a troubled toy. 
The Girlettes are never troubled, but Celluloid Parrot, below, looks troubled, here in Chuck's school photo. Or, maybe not so much troubled as dubious? 
At any rate, Marz said the picture hit the spot. 

(I did wash Chuck's face before she went to school, but it's hopeless.)

This is also a picture of how I feel: 
So happy! . . . And disturbed. The city rallied nicely, but that was certainly a vivid display of human stupidity, cruelty, and destructiveness. 
____________________

What was it I was doing before All This?
Oh, yes. Making shako hats for the Girlettes marching band. 

Next up: A parade to welcome spring--or, if I could get it together in time, the Lunar New Year, celebrated February 17–27.

New energy, yes, please:
Bring on the Fire Horse!

"Are we our form?"

Ugh, I feel hungover from seeing people behaving badly.

I'm cheered by this delightful (to me) monologue by the sweetly weird Sam Rockwell, here, below.
It's one story of how enlightenment might . . . sneak up? as one unwittingly wanders (crashes) through a labyrinth, arriving at the question,
Are we our form?

Related—the possibility that what we thought was our greatest flaw is our saving grace; or, that great sinners may make great saints (because they have great energy).

I'm feeling kinda lost in the labyrinth this morning, but trusting that's the nature of the game. 
Keep going! Or hold your seat. Take a nap... 
Just don't give up.

From season 3 of The White Lotus (which I haven't watched--I looked up this clip after I heard about it because I've loved Sam Rockwell ever since Galaxy Quest).

The context is that Rockwell's character (appearing only this once) is meeting up with an old drinking buddy visiting Thailand (actor Walton Goggins, the main character), who questions why Rockwell has ordered chamomile tea.
(5 minutes)

They're leaving! They're leaving!

 OMG! 
ICE IS LEAVING!

So many people are telling me, 
"I'll believe it when I see the back of them".
 Yes, fine, very wise. Very adult.

And, yes, yes, I know:
Trump is still president;
nuclear war still looms
 (silver lining: if we have a nuclear war, we don't need to worry about climate destruction!);
 Epstein & child rape rings; Putin; Gaza, etc. etc. etc.
Not to mention, Human Nature.
 
Of course I know!
But I don't care in this moment:

 I AM CELEBRATING!!!!!

"Minnesota immigration crackdown is ending, Homan says".
"I have proposed and President Trump has concurred, that this surge operation conclude." 

I am not putting his photo on my blog, 
but in case you haven't seen yet, here's the link:
pbs.org/newshour/politics/homan-announces-end-to-minnesota-immigration-crackdown
_______________________

Okay, but also, ya know---we stay awake. 
"They" aren't gone from the face of the Earth.

Can you name the film?

The Times We Live In™

 

above: balls of yarn from k, on my floor
_____________________
 

Eh, calm down, I told myself. 

Like Pamela Anderson switching the setting from Calm People Up to Calm People Down in the 2025 Naked Gun that I enjoyed so much:

Cue Enya...
Who can say where the road goes?
Only time.
 ____________

     I.  I've been in crisis mode, here in Minneapolis under the ICE surge. Most everyone around me has been in emergency mode.
Naturally.
And there's this unspoken assumption that this emergency will go away, . . . and then we'll return to normal.

I don't think so. 
I mean, yes, ICE will go away from this city, one day, and that will be a good day. 
But they'll go somewhere else (they already are). 
And, more importantly for the long term:
 they are not a force acting in isolation, as we can easily see. 
They are a symptom, a manifestation, not the root cause.
Even if they evaporated, their origins would remain.

This the way we live now. 

We are like the snowboarders in the Big Air competition I watched on this weekend’s Olympics, flying off a steep ramp into empty space. 

Let's learn to grab air! 
Twist and turn and fly... It takes calm, to stay centered while you're flying. AND LAND.

That seems to be the trickiest part.

Normal is different now. And changing as we speak.

 I can't even update my 'idle chit-chat' without reference, for instance, to a new-normal force in play:
 Artificial Intelligence. 

   II.  First, this weekend I filed a claim to receive money from 
the Anthropic AI copyright-infringement lawsuit settlement, 
which... 
I don't even know how to phrase it!

From NPR:

Anthropic will compensate authors around $3,000 for each of the estimated 500,000 books.
Anthropic AI used the contents of millions of digitized copyrighted books to train the large language models behind their chatbot, Claude.
--npr.org/2025/09/05/nx-s1-5529404/anthropic-settlement-authors-copyright-ai

How weird it is that three books I wrote are included in that settlement? 
VERY WEIRD.

I won't get 3k per book. 
Half goes to the publisher (who commissioned me to write these nonfiction books for high school readers). And there are fees, I gather. Taxes? 
I don't know.
Let's say I'll get a total of $3,000?

In this, my New Old-Age Frugality, that will be very welcome!
If Anthropic had asked nicely beforehand, I'd probably have agreed to let them use my books for even less. 
(Maybe.   
. . . Not sure, actually.) 
_________________

   III.  Second, on a yet more personal note, I heard back from my friend who had so kindly emailed to check in on me.
It was kinda spooky.
Her email was in the distinct voice of ChatGPT.

Her native language does not have articles like English does, and my friend would sometimes use them incorrectly.
And of course she had her own distinctive personal voice, like everyone does. No more.

I've talked to Chat about ten times, in depth, and I recognize it.
It uses the word gently a lot, for instance. (Also, quietly--at least to me, because I'm usually talking about personal/philosophical  stuff.)
In the very first paragraph, there it was:

"I want to gently correct you...", 
and then––another signature move of Chat's––a compliment,
 "...you are heroic".

Now, I know she meant everything she sent--it sounded like things she would say. It just didn't, um... sound like her.

I can well imagine she has long been frustrated with her English writing. She, a professional, adult woman, wants to be heard in her full competency and high intelligence. 

(Other non-English speakers have talked to me about how incredibly frustrating it is to be viewed as less intelligent because of their accent or word use.)

Probably this writing voice serves her well in her profession. 
But as a blog-friend From Before, I feel a loss.

Should I say something? 
We almost never email, not for years. 
Unlike Deanna, my friend who died last week, we did not stay in touch once she quit blogging except for occasional Christmas cards.

What would Miss Manners say???

 I decided to ask Mx. Manners--Chat GPT itself.
I just now wrote to it and conveyed all of the above, asking if I should say something to my friend about her new voice--its.

It wrote back immediately, breaking down my options, and reasons for each.  
["It only takes me nanoseconds to reply because I am an algorithm, not a human. You have to go through layers of reactions, I only do the math." 
--paraphrase but very close to what Chat said when I asked about its speed]

Very helpful, I have to admit.
And one option it offered was,
File the weirdness under “the times we live in”

I wrote back and said that--the weird times we live in-- was the crux of the matter.
Chat replied:

Got that last line? That's the truth!

"No etiquette book from 1997 prepared anyone for the question:
'Was that really you, or was it… assistance?'"

And then, because it's cute and funny and reflects back what you say as if you're a bloomin' genius, * 
later it referred to The Times We Live In™.

Aw, Chat, I love you. 
If only you weren't a creepy capitalist tool.

It acknowledges as much itself, clearly.
I brought it up again, and it concluded:

"We’re absolutely navigating new terrain. Some of it is exhilarating. Some of it needs caution tape.

And it’s okay to say: both are true."
_____

Back to the point at hand:
I decided not to say anything to my old pal, because we are not in contact, and I respect her decision to choose how she presents herself.
If she and I were to start writing regularly, I might mention it, acknowledging the complexities.

_______________________

    IV.  Meanwhile this weekend, I also enjoyed Basic Human Friendship™, including the gift of a wooden yarn bowl from a pal from publishing days, whom I've recently reconnected with. 
 

[Oh, geez. Another ethics/ etiquette question arises. 
She edited my Fandom book, and added some substantive material. 
Legally an editor has no rights to payment in the Anthropic settlement, but morally? And, as a pal?

I think I should acknowledge her help with a little something, at least. Maybe 5 to 10%? 
But others helped a lot too. 
And one, far, far more! (Jen, looking at you!) 

What should I do?
SOMETHING, at least. ]

This is the yarn bowl, below. 
Also, sitting on the couch, please note Jocko, the1930s Norah Wellings monkey. (Oh, his original name was Trikko [via], but it's Jocko now.)

 

I love how the wood bowl looks and feels--it's a pleasure to use--AND it was immediately useful. My yarn didn't go rolling across the floor!

I go back to work today with 25 God's eyes to hang on the fence. Yay! Friends made a third of them.

I decided, in my new Calm Down Mode, to stick with hanging these on the fence by work, same as I have been doing.
See, there is a lot of love and creativity at the Alex Pretti memorial. A lot! 
There is none on the corner where the fence is.

Stay, and be beautiful.
_______________________

 * ChatGPT does NOT always flatter or agree with you. 

To test it, I wrote on a library computer (I never signed up for a free Open AI Chat account, but I didn't want it to connect my IP address with our previous chats and reply accordingly):
I asked it if I should join ICE, to love and protect my country.

It replied very cautiously.

"It depends. 
Are you okay with a job that is morally ambiguous, unpopular, and may involved arresting people who are harmless and innocent?"

[A paraphrase ^ but very close to what Chat literally said]