The confident insanity of generative AI

 

A bit over 31 years ago, in October 1993, I was hiking the Appalachian Trail in the Great Smoky Mountain National Park. I came across an injured park ranger, and helped him get back to his truck. However, because it was so long ago, I couldn’t remember the exact trail head he was parked at. It could have been Newfound Gap, or it could have been the Clingmans Dome (now Kuwohi) parking lot. So I did what most people my age do when looking for information, and I Googled it.

As is its wont these days, the AI pushed to the top of the page, and confidently proclaimed this disaster epic:

On October 30, 1993, a search and Rescue operation took place in Great Smoky Mountains National Park after a Cessna 421 aircraft carrying five people went missing. The missing plane had transmitted an emergency locator ping, prompting the search. A helicopter assisting the search crashed about a quarter mile from the top of Clingmans Dome on the Tennessee side. The helicopter’s rotors were ripped off during the crash, according to one witness. The search effort also involved part maintenance personnel assisting with traffic and cleanup. Ultimately, the Cessna 421 was found, and a later investigation attributed the crash to a fuel system malfunction.

 

This is a confidently told, gripping tale of a day in my actual life. The only problem is that it has nothing to do with my actual lived experience in that place on that day. It is gaslighting in the purest form.

October 30, 1993 was a quiet, cloudy day on and around Clingmans Dome. There was ice early and late, and the main range was in the clouds the whole time. As a result, there were no aircraft of any description operating. There were a few hardy tourists on the lookout tower, and an injured ranger, but that’s all.

 Disaster-free Clingmans Dome on October 30, 1993

And this is why AI is so insidious. There were only a handful of people in that place on that day. The vast majority of humanity has no idea that the AI is spinning fantasies to replace ordinary life with exciting tales of death and adventure. My entire generation has grown up thinking of the Internet as a place to find information, and the speed at which is has transformed into a digital hookah dispensing hallucinated nightmare scenarios from the ordinary days of our lives.

Of course, this AI description is far more alluring than “It was cold and cloudy all day.” In the battle for attention and advertising, it makes complete sense for the search page to return the most exciting tale it could concoct. But those of us who are old-fashioned enough to actually want reality need to retrain ourselves to not trust the modern internet.

FYI, an actual list of reported incidents in the Great Smoky National Park can be found here.

Dream big, young scientists

Looking back through old journals for something entirely different, I found the following research proposal that I wrote in Oct-Nov of 1996, shortly before I got awarded my PhD scholarship. It was a pretty good scholarship I got, so I'm repeating this in case anyone else wants to aim high in the planetary science field: 

Knowing the chemical and isotopic composition of the whole Earth would help constrain the mechanics, timing, and efficiency of differentiation and core formation, as well as give valuable information on the partitioning of siderophile elements into the core. Unfortunately, directly sampling the core is impossible using current technology. Many substitutes of this have been explored, including the analysis of the undifferentiated chondrites and the study of iron-nickel meteorites thought to be pieces of a demolished differentiated planetary body. 

Sadly, oxygen and other isotopes show that these objects formed in a region of the solar nebula different to the Earth, and thus their compositions cannot be directly compared to that of the Earth-Moon system without extrapolation. Since the Moon dies not include a substantial iron core, any determination of the whole Earth, or whole Earth-Moon system composition must include the Earth. 

Our proposal is to use Whole Earth Laser Ablation (WELA) ICP-MS to determine the chemical and isotopic composition of the entire planet. Building the mass spectrometer for this will be an easy task, as the Earth is already located in an extremely good vacuum. We are merely asking for enough funding to purchase a laser powerful enough to ablate the planet, so that the resulting plasma can be sampled by our mass spectrometer. We believe that based on its excellent performance in the Alderaan System, the purchase of a Death Star would allow us to use its primary weapon as our Earth-ablating instrument. We ask that you fund the acquisition of this tool, as we believe it will fundamentally alter the way we view our planet.

Geosonnet 70

 

Geosonnet 70

Amusement parks of resurrected beasts
Traditionally lie on offshore isles.
But dinosaurs, volcanoes now extinct
Might be preserved in sediment’ry piles.
Eroding mountains shed their clastics west
Until they rest in Eromanga seas.
The sand where Muttaburrasauri rest
Has zircons from unknown localities.
Cretaceous rifting pushed the arc offshore.
This thinning crust by newborn ocean drowned.
The Norfolk Ridge and Lord Howe Rise may store
Jurassic arcs where source rocks may be found.
   The dinosaurs and arcs are gone today
   But just like life, the zircon finds a way.

Geology 49 1391 

 

Other geosonnets: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64  65 66  67 68 69

Geosonnet 69

An accidental drilling in the deeps
Reveals a sleeper agent- felsic melt
Invisible to seismic, magma sleeps
Until basaltic trigger card is dealt.
Diffraction limits fuzz the chamber’s sides
Viscosity impedes acoustic tests
A covert, dried out dacite simply hides
Above basaltic plumbing, long at rest.
Three hundred years, this hidden magma sleeps
Until it’s poked by hydrothermal drill.
Old pumice, cuttings from the drilled-out deeps
Show magma lurking, poised to blast and kill.
Basaltic dykes wake sleepers from their doze
Do not ignore the hazard this can pose!

 

Geology 49 521

 

Other geosonnets: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64  65 66  67 68 69

The Witch King’s Forest Reserve

Yvon Chouinard, the billionaire CEO of the Patagonia company, must be feeling his mortality. A few months back, he announced that he was transferring ownership of his three billion dollar company to a trust, so that the capital and profits can be used to preserve wild spaces and fight climate change. He is not the first person to do this. About a decade ago, Gilded Age heiress Cordelia Scaife May gave her estate to a trust, which attracted notoriety when New York Times reporters revealed that for every dollar the trust gave to bird sanctuaries, more than twice as much was given to white supremacist groups.

Mr Choulnard’s politics and beliefs appear to be very different to Ms May’s, and what criticism I’ve read of his decision seems to be fairly mild, so I’m going to look at this from more of a structural angle. But because finance bores the teeth out of me, I will use metaphor. And since Stranger Things has made D&D cool again*, I will use that terminology.

In D&D, there are all kinds of monsters. But one of the most feared types are ancient witch kings and sorcerers whose magic is so powerful that it has allowed them to continue to roam the earth long after their bodies have died. These liches (or demi-liches, if they are so ancient their bodies have crumbled into a cloud of bone dust and a skull preserved by hate and enchantments) continue to exist and trouble the world long after their time has past, haunting the people and society of the game with their malice and cunning. And that, essentially, is what a trust is.

With a trust, the money is invested, usually in some sort of growth fund, and part of the returns are spent by a board of directors, who basically channel the spirit of the deceased to augur their long dead wishes. It basically gives the dead the power to reach out of the past and use their money to impact the living. And while it is no surprise that monsters like Scaife May would transform themselves in this way, the idea of a “good lich,” of Yvon the friendly neighbourhood witch king, seems a little bit odd.

Ideally, the future should belong to future generations, and the dead should not be able to rise from their crypts with seed money and bribes. At the same time, there is a role for conservation. After all, if the future generations wish to inherit anything other than a wasteland, then some sort of rules will be needed to preserve some of the Earth’s natural wonder for them. But at the same time, with wealth inequality only growing, and with these trusts and institutes compounding investment returns faster than they can give the money away, it makes me wonder. Does their existence doom the future generations to be serfs in a necrocracy, paying rent to long dead landlords who preserve their planet not for their sake, but according to the whims of a long dead plutocrat?

·      *   For the first time since the Cryogenean ice melted.