Artificial Intelligence and Human Sexuality

The news flitted by, as so much does in the torrent:  OpenAI, the parent entity of ChatGPT, announced that the guardrails put in place to restrict it from producing erotic and sexual content have now been removed.  We're "not the elected moral police of the world," or so OpenAI CEO Sam Altman put it.  So now, if you want and you spool up the correct prompts, ChatGPT will play the role of your idealized lover.

This is not a good thing.  Not just for kids, either.  It's bad for humans of every age.

An acceptance of porn as "natural" and "sex-positive" seems baked into American progressivism, which hasn't ever made a lick of sense to me.   Why in the name of the sweet Lord Jesus would anyone trust the forces of predatory capitalism with human sexuality?  How is turning physical intimacy into a commodity to be bought and sold a good thing?

Surely, surely we've learned by now that this ain't the case.

We know that corporate social media has supplanted our natural sociality with algorithms designed to addict us, hitting us with little burps of dopamine as we're pushed further and further from genuine human interaction.  Porn is and has always done that too.  Since human beings first learned to scratch a clumsy sexual image onto a cave wall, it's been sexuality as objectification, sexuality as seeing the other as a means to your own pleasure rather than a person, and it was that even before the internet arrived to bring it into our homes and offices and everywhere we go.

In the last three decades, algorithmically-amplified online sexual content has had a catastrophic impact on contemporary sexuality.  It's poisoned a generation of the young, warping their understanding of sex, driving them away from the complex reality of actual flesh-and-blood partners.   This isn't even faintly healthy.

A lover is a person, complex and alive, and requires us to adapt and grow.  If one is Christian, as I am, we also acknowledge that partner as worthy of love, another sentient being whose pleasure is as important as our own.  This is a great deal of fun, and is also organically complex and unpredictable.  It requires us to learn from one another, and to appreciate one another.

But an AI simulacrum does none of those things.  It demands nothing of us as persons, because it is not a person itself.  It has no desires.  It feels nothing.  It needs nothing.  It is...for now...truly and actually an object.

Now that pornography has integrated AI, it can offer up an infinite array of purchasable "partners" that only do and say exactly whatever we want, and look precisely like whatever we lust for in that moment.   AI will adapt to us and indulge us, an erotic sycophant that will shapeshift itself to our solipsistic onanism with the precision of a lab-designed virus overcoming the natural defenses of a cell.

It does not bode well for the future of human physical intimacy.

A Pandemonium of Parrots

It was a lovely afternoon, warmer than one would expect for the early Fall, and I was face to face with a pandemonium of parrots.

Earlier that week, I'd been invited to pay a visit to a Tibetan Buddhist temple by one of the congenial Buddhists who pray and meditate there.  They've been a vital partner in my congregation's efforts to feed the hungry in our little town.  One Sunday while helping unload a van-full of donated food for our Little Free Pantry, I remembered that I'd not been out to visit their community for nearly a decade.  So I got the invite, and puttered out to the temple on my scooter.

Kunzang Palyul Choling, which we just call KPC, is a rather more complicated and symbolically rich ritual space than our simple, soft sanctuary, and its bright flags and sacred iconography rest on acres and acres of land in the agricultural land around Poolesville.  In addition to a visually lush central worship space, they've got all manner of delightful gracenote accretions on their property.  Hiking and meditation trails.  Stupas and statues.  A large, productive garden.  Burbling ponds filled with slowly circling and brilliantly colored koi.  Pettable goats and pigs, all of whom are undoubtedly grateful for Buddhist vegetarianism.

In the thick of it all, there's also a parrot sanctuary.

Parrots are remarkable birds, justifiably known for their intelligence, sociability, and their capacity to mimic the human voice.  They also live for a very, very, very long time, with lifespans approaching that of human beings.  Meaning, they often outlive their owners, and family isn't there to offer a new home.  Or their jungle-born voices prove more voluble than apartment dwellers realize.  Those birds need somewhere to be, and so there they are.

As I approached their large outdoor enclosure with the monk who was kindly showing me around the temple grounds, I thought to myself: 

My gracious.  I don't think I've ever seen quite so many parrots.  

I stepped nearer to the space.  "Do they talk?"  I was assured that they did.  So after my host affirmed it'd be fine, I said hello.  How does one start parrots talking?  You start talking.

"Hi!" I said, in a squawky parrotish voice, which for some reason also came out sounding faintly Australian.

The parrots replied in a cacophanic chorus.  "Hi!"  "HI!"  "HI!"  The human words cascaded out of their beaks, along with squawks and shrieks that pierced the air.  

"Hello," I returned, and a few of them said "Hello" right back, while the remainder continued with their sharp, avian "HI!"  To my left, in the middle of the cage, a single older macaw sat hunched over itself, grumbling inaudibly, for all the world sounding like a disgruntled older man mumbling quietly to himself in eternal irritation.

They kept at it for a while, croaking out greetings and salutations and muttery grumblings, as my initial "Hi!" echoed from parrot to parrot, ricocheting from one psittacine voice to another.  

It felt paradoxically both like communication and not like communication, as their parrotish utterances reflected nothing of their true and inscrutable internal mindstate.  It was just an endless reflective imitation, as they screamed exactly what they heard around them back into their surroundings.

"This is a lot like Facebook," I thought.

Bad Apples

 

As the season for harvest arrived, the little apple tree in our front yard was finally yielding.  It's a dwarf Fuji, planted as a sapling half a decade ago, and it's really not done much up until this year.  

Last year, there were apples, but a historic drought meant they were half-sized, with flesh the flavor and consistency of balsa wood.

But this year?  After a spring in which the tree was spangled with blossoms, I carefully pruned away about half of the newly growing fruit, allowing the plant to pour its energies into what remained.  That, and a good season of rain?  They did the trick.  

It yielded several dozen nice plump apples, of the size one might expect to find at Harris Teeter or a farmer's market.  I'd expected, as the apples had matured, that they'd be devoured by the neighborhood squirrels, the same critters that take about seventy-five percent of my tomato crop each year.  But none of them were touched, and I never had to go charging out of the house to roust a brush-tailed bandit from the branches.

The why of that seemed obvious.  The apples looked terrible.  There were plenty of them, sure, but by the time they reached maturity, they were all covered in a mottled blackness.  It started slowly, but the further into the season we went, the worse they looked.

I wasn't quite sure the cause, but as I don't spray any chemicals on my plants, I thought it might possibly be some form of blight.  A mold, perhaps?  But they didn't seem to be rotting, at least not so that I could tell.  There was none of the softness of decay.  They were plump, full, and looked a bit like they'd just finished a shift in a West Virginia coal mine.

Which was another possibility that occurred to me, to be honest.  Wave after wave of smoke from Canadian wildfires have swept over the region again this year, and coupled with the ambient particulates already floating about in this urban region, these filthy fruit would have received coating after coating from months of airborne pollution.

A bit of Googling, though, brought me to the conclusion that it was not that.  Instead, it was likely sooty blotch, a fungal infection that spreads over the surface of many fruit, particularly in moist conditions.  

I was curious, though, as the apples reached their fatness.  Might they be edible?  Reddit said yes, totally. Just wash them.  

So I picked one, and brought it inside.  The skin was foul, but unbroken.  I put it under the kitchen tap, and with water running slowly over it, took a bristle brush to it.  Scrubadubdub, I went, for a couple of minutes, working my way over every square millimeter of the fruit.  

At the end of the process, that same apple looked like this:

It looked perfect.  And when I cut into it, it was tart and sweet, the flesh firm and crisp.  There was no taste of anything but apple.

It's easy to judge the worth of fruit from their surface, to look at a coating of schmutz and grime and let that first impression mislead us.  Ye shall know them by their fruit, said my Master.  Sometimes, you need to give that fruit the scrubbing of time, patience, and effort to get to the sweetness beneath.

Chuck Adams

The news came through as personal news often does, via social media.

Chuck Adams had passed, succumbing to pulmonary fibrosis after a remarkable life.  Chuck was an editor, or as my Texan Episcopal gentlewoman agent would put it, "a REAL editor."

I had the pleasure of getting to know Chuck during the process of his acquiring and editing my first novel, or...to be fair...the first novel I'd ever had agented.  She'd called him to bend his ear about a few things, among which was trying to figure out what to do with my manuscript.  Postapocalyptic Amish fiction isn't exactly the most well-trodden genre, and she wondered if he might point her in the right direction.

He volunteered to take a look at it, which was generous of him.  And then, to our great surprise, he said he liked it enough to potentially acquire it.  There were committees to go through, of course, because as a Presbyterian there always are, but the next thing I knew, WHEN THE ENGLISH FALL had a publisher.  And more importantly, "a real editor," which isn't always something utterly unknown writers have the privilege of experiencing.

When I tell folks about how the editing process went, I usually say that Chuck changed nothing but the beginning, the middle, and the end.  This gets a laugh, but it's entirely true.

Chuck's first suggestion was that my opening was too slow.  "It's a quiet, meditative novel, and that's its beauty," he told me.  "But you need to draw people in.  There needs to be a sense of tension, something to show the reader what's coming.  Give them a hook."  He didn't say what that was, but that direction meant that I shifted some sections around, and all of a sudden, the whole thing was better.  All the words were mine, but it was tighter, the plain and deliberate pace woven through with more tension.

The middle?  Well, there were things that needed to be refined and focused.  Errors of continuity and logic.  Those things.  He found them, and pointed them out, and helped steer me to fixing them.

The end? It was too short.  Barely longer than a novella, when he read the first version.  I'd loved the ambiguity of the original ending, but...well...that darling needed to be killed, so to speak.  I flailed about in a bog of anxious overwriting for a bit, but he kept gently pushing, redirecting and encouraging.  When I finally found something that worked, he told me so.

In every way, the final book was better for his guidance.  

It would have been lovely to work with him again, and while he brought a few of my manuscripts before the editorial committee, it was not to be.  There are only so many quirky sci-fi manuscripts you can sneak through a literary house, after all.

In life, there are souls who offer up their insights with grace and clarity, who challenge us to be more than we are, and who draw out the best in us.  Chuck was just such a person.

The Totoro Tax

I have beef with anyone who messes with my freedom.

And few things are more emblematic of freedom than the right to read what I want, and watch what I want.  Freedom of speech is kind of a nontrivial part of the First Amendment, and without it, our Constitutional liberties wouldn't exist.

I also love movies.  I love the depth and richness of visual storytelling, love sitting back with family and sharing in a movie night, or going out to see something in theater.

Only now, well, now that's being threatened.  A one hundred percent tariff has been decreed on all films made outside of the United States.  How's this going to work?  Who knows?   There are no plans.  More thought goes into the average bowel movement than goes into American policy statements these days, and at least bowel movements accomplish something.

If it ever became real, though?  It would be a terrible, terrible thing.

First, it attacks some really great storytelling.  The other day, I watched an astoundingly excellent sci flick.  MARS EXPRESS is a gorgeous, handcrafted tale of a robot uprising on Mars, smart and elegant and grim.  It's not the sort of preprocessed dullness that often comes out of corporate Hollywood, because it was freakin' French.  So. Very.  French.   Am I to be charged double for that?  

Or what about Studio Ghibli films, magical and charming and deeply traditional?  Are we really imposing a punitive tax on Totoro?  

And not every American story happens in America.  Are you going to penalize the making of SAVING PRIVATE RYAN if they don't film it in the swimming pool at Mar A Lago?  

That brings me to the next infringement on our freedom.

It penalizes Americans who want to hear the heritage and stories of their ancestors.  I have the right to take pride in and honor my history.  As someone with Irish blood, I loved loved loved THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN.  It's an IRISH FREAKIN' MOVIE.  Where else are they gonna make it besides Ireland?   If you want to watch a Korean film made in Korea because you're an American who came from there, or a Bollywood film because you have Indian heritage, are we all now having to pay a penalty?  

Why is this misbegotten brainfart diktat even a thing?  It seems to have come from one conversation Trump had with John Voight, who noted in passing that the film industry is really struggling in America right now.  There's a truth to that, one worth exploring.  Why are films being made elsewhere?

Because films here are too danged expensive to make.  MARS EXPRESS was brilliant, and it got made on a $9 million dollar budget.  GODZILLA MINUS ONE, a nearly-perfect recent Japanese monster flick?  That got made for under $15 million.  Movies here are often ten times more expensive.  Costs are just too danged high, because...why?  You know why.  Everything in America is more expensive than it needs to be.  Health care.  Groceries.  Cars.  Homes.  Everything.  Our bloated, inefficient, profit-maximizing corporations have created the least efficient, most parasitic economic system in human history.

That's the problem.  

Well, that and a president who hasn't got a single advisor who dares suggest that maybe he needs to occasionally think before speaking.