I love me some Lyle Lewis and have for what, a decade or so?
That said, this comment of his, in reply to a comment on a piece of his about bats acting strangely, made me think more about the issue in the header, specifically because it's from Lewis.
First, the heart of Davy Kydd:
i have another kind of observation about the landscape of your words. more and more in the wildlife of writing, readers are noticing an eerie sameness, as if the habitat of possible sentence structures is shrinking. the robotic repetitiveness, the lifeless pose of predictable syntax . . . pretending to be alive.
like the world's beleaguered teachers inundated by ai essays, the substack habitat too is being infiltrated. we feel a bit cheated.
even though the planet’s hyper-populated human landscapes are creating pressures on artists to use ai to trick their audiences and generate $$$, i wonder if we might help substack to maintain its integrity by requiring authors to inform their audience each and every time ai is used in their writing or photography.
That's it. (He later removed the note. And, his take on environmentalism is basically kind of antropomorphic mushy, which is not my take or Lyle's. That said?)
Here's the nutgrafs of Lyle's response:
For my own work, I care much less about preserving some imagined purity of literary production than I do about understanding what is happening to the living world.
I am not particularly worried about whether the ecosystem of sentence structures on the Internet is sufficiently diverse.
I am worried about the actual ecosystems.
I am worried about bats and insects, forests and grasslands, rivers and oceans, predators and prey, ecological relationships disappearing before we understand them, and a human civilization transforming the planet faster than either science or society can comprehend the consequences.
If new tools allow me to examine those questions more deeply, connect information more rapidly, challenge my own assumptions more effectively, and communicate what I find to more people, I am going to use them.
And I am going to remain responsible for the result.
That seems to me the standard that matters.
Don’t ask whether a machine touched the prose.
I don't know how much extra electricity his AI use generates. It does of course generate some. I don't know if he's even tried to calculate that. I don't even know how easy it would be to guess, or to go meta and use AI to try to get an answer.
But I am going to guess he's not thought of that.
For me, it's a bridge too far.
Not primarily on AI words, where I am not at Lyle's level of environmental knowledge sets, but mainly on AI photos. I played around with one or two sites once the technology started taking off a couple of years ago, and used it once on one Substack piece with a bit of regret.
No more.
Beyond the truth-value reasons for its use, beyond worries about it being another addiction, I think this has to be asked all the time.
And, in pieces like this? He uses what certainly looks like an AI photo. I mean, it's a nice illustration for a great story, but I couldn't do that. I'd either find a way to Photoshop different stuff together, or not have an illustration. I would also have it labeled as being a Photoshop illustration, not an actual photo, and definitely labeled as AI-generated if I did.
Massimo Pigliucci is not an environmentalist or climate scientist, but he is a scientist as well as philosopher, and, as in this piece, regularly uses AI photos.
Besides, per physicist Angela Collier (long YouTube but the first 5 minutes or so will give you the basics) AI doesn't exist anyway. She goes into machine learning in her field, pivots from that to alleged AI, and then goes philosophy with black box references. In the sense that she's rejecting the "I" half of the shorthand, she's correct.
Five-minute mark: "These programs are great, they're interesting, they're useful, but they're not AI."
That then said, old Davy has himself "liked" and even restacked more than one post from other accounts that use AI images.
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That said, both to not look like I'm just picking on Lyle, or a lesser degree, Massimo as well, and because another pet peeve came up the same day, last Sunday?
It's time to call out Bird Item News for once again pushing the Merlin smartphone app.
From least to greatest, there's several problems.
First, the folks there don't tell you what I told them in a comment. That's that Merlin just ain't that accurate. Folks at the r/birding subreddit field semi-regular bitches about it.
Second, if you, like me, bird by sight first, sounds second, Merlin ain't that helpful. I doubt it has a draw and drag ID feature like Google Images and besides, I have a real camera; I don't shoot birds with a smartphone.
Third and the biggie, and roughly related to my plaint about Lyle, since that piece I link is about something like an Optimus Prime level of "wilderness"?
Don't know about Hap Ellis and Lisa Noschese of Bird News Items, but whether on a vacation, or a weekend hike at the nearby national wildlife refuge or a closer one at a city park or lake? I'm out there to detach from technology.
On local weekends, my smartphone is generally off.
On vacations, after Monday evening or Tuesday morning to check in with my pinch-hitting owner boss, it's off.
Ellis, per his "clean tech" (is there such a thing?) background, strikes me as a more modern, Shrub Bush rather than Poppy Bush backing, version of bird-watcher Dick Davenport from Doonesbury.
THIS, presumably from his half of the weekly contribution:
The world can be divided into two types of people — those who have already downloaded the free Merlin Bird ID app, and those whose lives have yet to be enriched by doing so. Dubbed “Shazam for birds”, being able to hold your phone up and within seconds see names and photographs identifying all the birds singing around you has unlocked the secrets of the natural world for millions, revolutionizing birdwatching (or should I say bird listening?) as a hobby.
Not only ignores all of the above, but is an insult to people like me.
