I use AI to compile lists of current bestsellers in different Hispanic countries for me. Also, I ask it to find books similar to certain other books. About 1 in 8 suggestions are completely invented. Non-existent books, imaginary authors.
Last week I asked it to find a scholarly article on a certain subject. It gave me a list of five and the first two were messed up. I didn’t look at the rest because I felt I was wasting time.
Another problem is that it ignores my prompts. For example, I say, “I need a list of bestsellers in Peru, Spanish-language only, not translations.” The result I get starts with two translated books, and the AI acknowledges it. “I know you said you didn’t want translations but here are two excellent novels that are translated.”
It’s fine, it’s still helpful enough. I did find an interesting Peruvian novel with AI help yesterday. But the point I’m making is I thought AI would start substituting doctors because it can diagnose. But this amount of invented crap among helpful things? You can’t have that in medicine. It’s not occasional, it’s systematic.
I don’t understand how it works at all, so maybe it’s that I’m simply not getting it.
This story offers an insight into a problem that many people have and that seems intractable to them. There are things they need to do but they simply have no energy to do them. They berate themselves for being lazy procrastinators but the energy is simply physically not there. Plus, nothing eats energy like feelings of guilt, so feeling bad about not doing what you need to do leads to you feeling even more drained. It’s a vicious circle.
The quoted story is important because it taps into the place from which energy comes. It’s like with money. You can make savings, you can reduce your budget. But there is another solution which is to raise your income. The good news is that with energy it’s a lot easier to increase the supply than with income. Income is something other people must give you. Energy is already inside yourself. What you need is to liberate it, and this story is a perfect primer on how to do that. I’m going to refer to its author as “he” in hopes that somebody who has the intelligence to learn Latin won’t mind if I happen to “misgender” him.
The author of the story is the kind of person who learns Latin. A smart, effective person with a highly organized brain. He was always that person. He was a person who learns Latin BEFORE he did his first lesson. But he wasn’t letting himself live the life of his authentic self. Instead, he was trying to force himself into the persona that is the opposite of who he actually is. And his whole body and mind were resisting. That’s where the energy went. There was a split at the core of his self between who he was and how he was trying to force himself to live. The energy went into suturing that split. Daily, again and again. This must have felt exhausting.
The moment he redirected the libidinal power (meaning, the power of desire) away from splitting himself in two and then trying to hold the parts of the split self together, the energy became liberated.
Do you know why a neoliberal subject is always exhausted? Always guzzling energy drinks? Gulping down huge amounts of coffee just to wake up and still never feels truly energetic? This is why. A neoliberal self lives with a profound rift at the core of his being. He’s always the manager and the employee. The prison guard and the prisoner. The punisher and the punished. It’s a daily battle that eats you alive.
But when you step out of this game and let yourself be who you already are, all that energy is now free to do all sorts of things. If you no longer have to battle yourself, you have everything you need to battle the circumstances of your life that you might want to overcome.
If you are an academic who wants to publish a lot, you need to become that person BEFORE you publish a single word. And then you’ll start shooting out publications like a machine gun. I should know because that’s how I did it. You don’t arrive at being who you are as a reward for “good” behavior. You are already that person. By placing the being-who-you-are at a remove from yourself and making it conditional on fulfilling a list of obligations, you are denying your real self. You split it up and then wonder why it hurts. You can’t run a marathon with your feet tied. Stop tying your feet and then hating yourself for falling down at the very beginning of the run.
We all live in the same neoliberal reality that sets us up to feel drained and unhappy with ourselves. And it’s very hard to ditch this mentality because it’s everywhere. But once you do, like the author of the story did, you suddenly discover vast, untapped reserves of energy inside yourself that are finally going to work for you and not against you.
Thank you, anonymous reader, for this important, enlightening story. You have helped many people by sharing it.
In the poor man’s place, I’d never say anything at all after this. It’s suffocating. Any chance remark turns into an activity. And you have to pose and smile and it’s a social media thing.
Before you say I’m wrong, the guy did run away:
The dude probably went for a deaf woman this time.
I keep imagining myself saying, “huh, nice pic of Colorado, come look”, and then he’s standing there with tickets to Denver, and I wouldn’t cheat because eww, but we’d definitely need a conversation about how not every chance remark needs to carry a consequence.
People who created this map should shut their nasty cakeholes about gerrymandering. Many of the deep red counties get zero congressional representation because of this. We are voiceless. I’m very, very upset.
Wow, people, did you hear that Big Balls, the heroic guy who took on a gang of criminals to defend a lady in DC the other day, was the grandson of this dude with also gigantic balls:
Valery Martynov was a double agent working as a Soviet KGB officer as well as an intelligence asset for the US. While serving as a Lieutenant Colonel in the KGB, he was stationed in 1980 at the Soviet official offices in Washington, D.C. By 1982, he had become a double agent and was passing intelligence to the CIA and FBI under the code name “Gentile”. He was executed in Moscow on May 28, 1987, at the age of 41.
If you don’t have enough subservience in your life, ask AI to tell you about yourself based on your searches. I did and it slobbered all over me, praising me in the most saccharine and exaggerated ways over the most trivial of things.
“You care deeply about family and parenting because you asked about seating policy on Southwest Airlines.”
Yes, I’m the mother of the year, step away everybody who didn’t wonder about airline seating.
That many people use this for “therapy” is a very bad idea. It’s going to make things so much worse for them.
A recovering alcoholic told me that he has been eating as many as 10 ice cream sandwiches a night. He goes through them so fast he has to buy them daily, and he’s been going to different stories so people don’t see him again and again.
Oral stage trauma stays with such a person and finds another way to self-medicate. In this particular situation, the guy also clearly has an addiction to secrecy, to feeling guilty and secretive about the guilt he himself manufactures. He’s not recovering from anything. He’s in the grip of the same problem as always.
This happens because of failures of mother-child bonding during pregnancy and in the first year of life. It’s so typical it could be in a textbook.
The authorities in the province of Nova Scotia in Canada banned people from hiking or camping in the woods. Or going to the woods at all for any purpose. Because it’s unsafe.
The authorities in the city of London, Great Britain, painted lilac stripes on pavements to prevent bikers from robbing passersby. Pedestrians are supposed to use the lilac stripes as reminders that roving gangs of criminals ride around with impunity.
It’s curious how safety has come to mean that activities of law-abiding people should be curtailed. Authorities don’t want to combat crime. They want to constrain people who don’t do any crime.
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