Truth and Deepfakes

 In Robert Stone's 1974 novel Dog Soldiers, the cynical failed writer John Converse describes how he has come to make a dishonest living by practicing the dark arts of his authorial trade. His boss, a former Trotskyist-turned-tabloid tycoon, he tells us, operates a press that prints knock-off versions of mainstream magazines. Inside the covers, these publications are full of lurid tales of crime, sex, and violence that are invented out of whole cloth. Converse's task as a "reporter" for these pseudo-magazines is to find photos and make up the bogus stories to go with them. For this purpose, he relies entirely on pictures of the deceased, cropped from other sources, because of a loophole in copyright law that ensures the dead have no right to protect their likenesses from misrepresentation. 

This example from an old novel suggests, perhaps, that visual "deepfakes" are not unique to the digital age. But the capacity of AI to generate plausible visages and scenery for episodes that never actually took place, and for people who never existed, has undoubtedly accelerated the problem. In recent weeks, news stories have warned of the speculative dangers of politicians using AI to generate photographic disinformation about their rivals. They featured a few early real-world examples: there were the invented photos of Trump's arrest, for instance, which were created as a means to underline the dangers of AI disinformation, but which were subsequently disseminated on social media without any disclaimer. There were bogus photos of Pope Francis in a puffy designer jacket. And so forth. 

The Fall of Roy

 Sometime in 2005 or thereabouts, when I was 15, my sister told me I should watch a new comedy on TV that had recently come out. I was instantly resistant. "Whatever it is," I thought, "it must be terrible." 

To understand my distrust, you have to realize what sort of fare we were used to on TV in those days. On most TV comedies geared toward a younger audience up to that point, the prevailing male archetype was what Douglas Rushkoff—in a 2001 documentary called The Merchants of Cool—dubbed in entertainment-industry jargon "the Mook." This was typically a loud, brash, sexist male buffoon whose primary goals in life were drinking and getting laid. 

Cattle Mutilation Mystery?

 America's newspaper of record has gotten strangely credulous, in recent years, when it comes to the realm of the quasi-paranormal. There was the Times's long series of articles for instance—starting a few years back—about the UFO phenomenon, which ended up being sourced largely to a single eccentric with tenuous ties to the defense community. (There could perhaps be neutral and objective journalistic coverage of reports of unidentified objects on radar scanners, etc., that did not try to push a New Age agenda, but the Times coverage was not it—the pieces were littered with subtle giveaways that we were in the hands of true believers, as I discussed in an earlier post.)

Now, the Times is back on a similar beat with breathless coverage of an alleged rash of cattle mutilations. While the paper cannot be accused of misrepresenting anything, it does its best to artificially heighten a sense of mystery and alarm about these events. There was "no evidence of a struggle, footprints or tire tracks" around the animals' corpses. The reporter quotes officials who make much of the seemingly "precise," surgical way in which parts of the animals appear to have been removed, as if by the blade of a knife. Then there's the macabre details of the specific parts that were mutilated: the animals were found with their hides intact, but their tongues, jaws, anus, and genitals all seemingly carved away. 

The Physicists

 In Friedrich Dürrenmatt's 1961 play, The Physicists, a gifted scientific researcher stumbles upon a secret to the universe so profound and transformative that it threatens to destroy the world. "New and inconceivable forces would be unleashed, making possible a technological advance that would transcend the wildest flights of fantasy if my findings were to fall into the hands of mankind," he observes. (Kirkup translation throughout.) Elsewhere he reflects that, if he had published his researches, "the consequences would have been [...] the breakdown of the economic structure of our society." 

In order to prevent this fate, the scientist takes an extreme measure to ensure his results will never be taken seriously. He tells everyone that his findings were dictated to him by the disembodied spirit of King Solomon, returned from the grave, who also fills his head with morbid sci-fi poetry that constitutes a new set of "Psalms" for the space age. In short, he enacts the role of mental patient, even pretending to suffer from the delusion that his true identity is Möbius (thereby joining the ranks of the other "patients" in the play—each with secrets of his own—who pretend to be Einstein and Sir Isaac Newton.)

A Pettiness

 I was pulling back into the parking garage this afternoon, after running a few errands, when I confronted a jarring incongruity. There, in the parking spot I paid for each month as part of my rent, was an unfamiliar vehicle blocking the way. I had to drive back and forth a few times to make sure there was no mistake. There was none. Some stranger was occupying my space. 

Gladly would I have shared it; but here we were faced with a zero-sum proposition. This space was quite literally not big enough for the two of us. 

Living Arrangements

 It's time I acknowledge to myself the horrifying truth: I live in a glorified college dorm. To be sure, the place is not technically listed among the university's residence halls. I am a tenant with a lease—not a mere licensee—with all the theoretical property rights pertaining thereto. The place was marketed to me, moreover, as graduate student housing. I imagined it would be full of diligent medical and law students with perhaps a sprinkling of undergrads. 

It turns out I had the proportions backward. There may be a few other graduate students hidden away somewhere (I have yet to meet them), but the typical resident is a third- or fourth-year undergrad: the sort whose parents are willing to spring for campus-adjacent private housing. There is thus an irredeemable whiff of entitlement—emblematized by the uncollected animal droppings littering the surrounding sidewalks that these twenty-year-olds simply decline to clean up, after taking their pets out for a walk. 

Striving

 In a post I wrote for this blog last month, I engaged at length with a riveting column by Ezra Klein that—better than any other piece of writing I've seen on the topic—crystallized our current moment's dread about the AI revolution. In one of the most striking images in the piece, Klein compares the human creation of an artificial mind to an act of spirit-conjuration. "I’ve come to believe the apt metaphors [for AI] lurk in fantasy novels and occult texts," writes Klein. "As my colleague Ross Douthat wrote, this is an act of summoning. The coders casting these spells have no idea what will stumble through the portal." 

The archetype hovering over this passage—too obvious perhaps to be name-checked—is that of Faust. Through many technological vicissitudes, the Faust legend has served humanity as a metaphor for tampering with powers so great and terrible that they verge on the supernatural. Until recently, many modern minds would have gone to nuclear weapons as the most potent example of humanity's ability to unleash such satanic forces. Now, the contemporary breakthroughs in AI are provoking the same kinds of reflections. And so, hoping for insight, I turn to Goethe's famous rendition of the Faust story to make sense of the new AI era on which we are embarking. 

Errata and Marginalia 023: Croly

Herbert Croly, The Promise of American Life (Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press: 2014); originally published 1909.

 I think we can all agree Herbert Croly hasn't aged super well, and he is not the intellectual forbear of modern American liberalism we would choose if we could invent one from scratch. This has made it easy to tar all of liberalism with Croly's brush. Back before the MAGA takeover of the Republican Party made it clear that American conservatism is the unambiguous heartland of neo-fascism in the modern era, and before the Neoconservatives mostly bolted from the Republican fold and became Democrats or Never Trump independents for that very reason, it was briefly fashionable among Neoconservatives to cite Herbert Croly as exhibit A for the incendiary claim that the intellectual tradition in America claiming to be "liberal" is actually quasi-fascist. 

One doesn't come away from reading Croly's political classic, The Promise of American Life, any more convinced of this argument than before—but it has to be conceded that Croly provides some quotable fodder for this narrative. There are his casual racist asides (though Croly explicitly rejects, for what it's worth, the possibility that his notion of "Nationality" would have any basis in race, acknowledging that any claims to historical racial homogeneity are a fiction even in European nation-states, let alone in the United States). There is his insistence that Abolitionists overstated their case and that Southern enslavers were "for the most part, estimable if somewhat quick-tempered and irascible gentlemen [...] who were on the whole liked rather than disliked by their bondmen."[!] There is his overly sanguine attitude to U.S. imperialism and eugenics. ("I have not ventured more than to touch upon a possible institutional reformation, which, in so far as it was successful in its purpose, would improve human nature by the most effectual of all means—that is, by improving the methods whereby men and women are bred"!) And these are not even the book's worst lines. 

"Let's not drop our guard too quickly then"

 Ever since the first state primary defeats of Donald Trump back in 2016, commentators and journalists have been holding their breath to write one version or another of the same think piece: "Don't get too comfortable," they long to say—"Trump may have been defeated; but look at these other Republican frontrunners! Many of them are just as bad! Look at this Ted Cruz fellow! What an extremist! Would a Ted Cruz candidacy really be that much better than a Trump campaign?" 

In short, they long to utter the type of prophetic warning that concludes Bertolt Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (in the Tabori/Beaton translation): "So let's not drop our guard too quickly then:/ Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard/ The b—— that bore him is in heat again." That is to say: "Trump may have gone down in justified defeat; but the larger tendencies toward quasi-fascism and authoritarianism in the modern GOP are just getting started!"

In Trumpalinan

 When news broke Thursday that the long-foretold Trump indictment had come down, I suspect I’m far from the only American who had mixed feelings. This, surely, is what we had wanted for years, right?—except… not this way! This was not how we envisioned it. What’s the problem? Why are we disappointed? Mostly because the specific conduct being charged in this case is so far removed from the substance of Trump’s criminality and the reasons that make him dangerous to the public. If we could take our pick, we would have much preferred to see the Georgia indictment move forward first, or the federal investigation into Trump’s broader efforts to undermine the 2020 election. Even the classified documents investigation might have been stronger than resurrecting the old news about Stormy Daniels. 

Of course, we’ll see what Alvin Bragg’s office actually came up with, when the indictment is unsealed on Tuesday. Maybe the Manhattan DA ended up with something stronger than we know about. But based on the public reporting so far, the case seems manifestly weak—perhaps fatally so. The only crime under New York state law that Trump may have committed with regard to the Stormy Daniels hush money payment is a misdemeanor count of falsifying business records; and even that falls outside of the state’s statute of limitations (avoiding this time limit will require some tricky legal footwork regarding Trump’s dates of residence in the state). And the attempts to elevate these actions to a felony seem specious and unpromising.