Illuminated Manuscript II
A tale about language, natural and artificial
Welcome back to Glass Half Full, and thanks for reading! I’ve recovered from bronchitis and am feeling much better, thank you. Today I’m continuing this vignette about AI moving into the areas of writing and teaching, and one possible response. (Here’s the first part if you missed it.) There will probably be one more part after this one. I’m calling it a vignette because it’s not really a story — not much conflict or movement, just a depiction of how the world might be in the future.
Didn’t get any responses to my questions at the end of the previous installment, so here’s one answer: What punk band’s name is reminiscent of teachers using AI to grade papers written by AI? The Circle Jerks!
Amy set out her calligraphy pens next to the sheets of guide paper stacked neatly on the table. She was working today at the little coffee shop down the street from her apartment in Detroit. It was an expense, but sometimes she just needed to work somewhere other than her tiny kitchen table, in a place with noise and people and life.
She took a sip of her peppermint tea and began carefully inking the lines from her notepad. She’d worked hard to get the phrasing just right.
I still remember how scared I was
for my best friend Chris
on the day they told me
they no longer wanted to live
as a woman named Tina.
That day was six years ago now, and things had turned out surprisingly okay for her friend. But back then, all Amy could see ahead for Chris was a lifetime of struggle against the vibes of oppression sweeping the country.
The day had started with a drive to Detroit, then-Tina’s red Ford Focus racing down the highway, passing cars on left and right. The trees on either side, just coming into leaf, blurred with the motion, while the occasional gaps provided relief — lakes or shopping malls, it didn’t matter, anything far enough away that it didn’t seem to zip by at breakneck speed.
“Are you worried we’re going to be late?” Amy had asked. “They don’t close for hours, you know.”
“What?” Tina said, all innocence. “Am I driving faster than usual?”
“You don’t need another ticket, is all I’m saying.”
“All right, Miss By-the-Rules. I’ll slow down. Didn’t mean to scare you.”
Amy felt her shoulders relax as the car slowed. It was true, this was how Tina always drove. Her friend was so butch in that way, and in almost every way, from their short-cropped hair to their jeans and black work boots. That they drove like a guy was just part of the package. But with one difference — in Amy’s experience, a guy probably wouldn’t have slowed down for her.
Their destination that day was John King Books, the occasion being Tina’s recently-celebrated 18th birthday. To keep up appearances, Amy had told her friends they were going clubbing with some of Tina’s queer friends. John King’s was a kind of mecca, but for book nerds, four floors of shelves packed to the rafters with over a million used volumes. Every time Amy visited, she felt like she’d found her people. This would be Tina’s first visit, and they hoped to find some Sappho, or Adrienne Rich, or Judith Butler, or maybe something from a more recent writer, like Akwaeke Emezi.
But something seemed off that day. They seemed distracted, nervous. Finally Amy asked what was wrong. “I… I have something to tell you.”
Tina/Chris hadn’t actually given her the news right there in the bookstore. Instead, they’d gone to a queer-friendly coffee house nearby. But Amy loved John King’s so much, she’d decided to set the whole scene there. If Thoreau could condense two years into one, she could condense these two locations. She’d already finished the illustration for the piece, a pen-and-ink drawing of shelves upon shelves of books, Chris sitting cross-legged on the floor in the LGBT section, Amy standing nearby. It was how she’d always remember that day.
Chris had waited until after their 18th birthday to reveal their identity, mainly to protect their parents. As an adult, they were free to make whatever medical choices they wanted. Gender-affirming care was still available in the US at that time, and Canada wasn’t far away.
These days, Chris mostly went by he/him, passing being important in the current environment — but he was also fine with they/them. Which was central to Amy’s purpose. Her market was readers — of which there were still a few, and ones willing to pay — who wanted not a whiff of AI in what they read. One might think that the hand-printed nature of calligraphy would meet that need, but these readers demanded more. Even with an accompanying video of the artist at work, who was to say that AI hadn’t produced the text?
The best way around that was to use a word or construction banned by the AI platforms — in this case, the singular use of third person plural pronouns. Even the apolitical uses couldn’t get past the algorithms. So now novels were filled with stiff dialogue few living people would actually use. Instead of saying, “Who left their dirty dishes in the sink?” characters now asked, “Who left his or her dirty dishes in the sink?” To which the response was, “I don’t know, but he or she is going to get a talking to.”
True, those writers who still produced their own work, rather than just giving the AI assistant a few keyword prompts, could always turn off grammar check in their word processors. But no publisher and none of the publishing platforms — at least none of the ones that paid — would accept works that violated the algorithmic rules.
Other banned words include Ukraine and Ukrainians, Palestine and Palestinians — places and peoples that never had existed, according to official histories — as well as oligarchy, junta, gender, Gulf of Mexico, and more. The banishment of the term “inclusion” played particular havoc in geology, as did the disappearance of “equity” from financial analysis. And the ban on rainbows made the whole field of spectroscopy difficult.
So including a banned word or phrase proved the work was your own.
Back at her apartment, Amy used a light table to meticulously translate the calligraphy onto the illustrated vellum sheet. This was always the most nerve-wracking part — one slip and the entire piece was ruined. But she got to the end and was satisfied with the results. She signed the work at the bottom, then let it dry while she adjusted the lamps to take a photo. It took a while to get the shot just right, then she prepared a post for Insta, with the hashtags #calligraphy #art #illustration #LGBT #trans #collectible #one-of-a-kind #frameable and #bannedwords.
How long before the AI censors scanned the JPG and spotted the offending text? Calligraphy was still a problem for the scanners, and she used a tan ink on off-white paper to make it even more difficult. She just hoped it would get enough traffic in the meantime so that she could make a sale. Rent was due next week.
She took a deep breath and hit Share.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed today’s offering, please click that little heart button or share it with your friends. You’ll find Part III here.
H/Ts to Scott Manley for the bit about rainbows and spectroscopy and
for the shots of his calligraphy he posts here on Substack (and which helped inspire this vignette). And I can’t remember if it was ’s or ’s feed where I first heard about writing teachers using AI to grade papers written by AI.This vignette is obviously all about free speech, which the Left has had its own problems with. This is one reason a lot of people like Substack, which doesn’t censor anyone except for a few outright Nazis.
But is Substack really the free-speech platform it purports to be? Not when it allows the type of financial attack that now appears to be happening to Zuri Stevens. She writes the We Need a Black Woman in Charge newsletter, which seems to be the target of an organized campaign of fraudulently challenged credit card charges.
The way this works is that a person subscribes for $5, then challenges the charge through their credit card company (instead of just managing their subscription on Substack and asking for a refund). Substack’s payment system, run by Stripe, turns around and hits the writer/publisher with a $15 charge, no matter whether the challenge is successful. This quickly becomes unsustainable, depending on how many paying subscribers a writer has. Many writers have been warning that this loophole could be used by bad actors to target writers whose opinions they disagree with, especially ones with smaller followings. And now that seems to be happening.
Stevens has a post about it, but it’s now behind a paywall, no doubt because it generated too much hate. But I hope some of you will check out her stack and consider a paying subscription. Or maybe even contact Substack officials
and to urge them to do something to fix this problem.
Nice story, and glad you’re feeling better. I didn’t know about the attacks using Stripe — that seems like an easy problem for the company to fix.
Very nicely done, Larry. More and more I feel that the answer regarding censorship, AI intrusion, attacks made by bad actors etc. is to treat digital technology like you might a carnie game-runner. By all means, show up at the carnival. There are other people there you can connect with, and there are some fun games to play, like "share your work online" and "watch the numbers go up." But always remember that the carnival sets the rules. You get the best out of the experience by meeting up in-person, outside of that environment. (They still can't censor the whole of physical space, after all.) And never, ever in your whole life believe any game-runner, no matter the colors of his booth, when he says he has your best interests at heart.