Is AI plagiarizing, or doing what writers have always done?
In this episode of Your AI Injection, host Deep Dhillon talks with Andrew Levy, a poet, essayist, and journalism professor who has written more than a dozen books. Deep took Andrew's poetry classes at Illinois Tech, where exercises like cutting up William Blake poems pushed students outside their habitual ways of making meaning. Deep now builds AI writing systems on that idea, and says it takes far more effort than prompting a chatbot for an essay.
Andrew says writers and artists have long borrowed, and that "appropriation" is the more comfortable word for it. But in classrooms where students now have AI write entire papers, he sees something different. They discuss whether AI extends the tradition of borrowing or skips the work that made it meaningful. If originality was never as solid as we assumed, what does authorship mean when a machine is part of the process?
Andrew's most recent publication, Artifice in the Calm Damages, can be found here: https://chax.org/shop/artifice-in-the-calm-damages-by-andrew-levy-2/
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[Automated Transcript]
Andrew : As we know historically, when any, really powerful new technologies have been introduced across human history we go through these, as you said, decades-long transition periods, right? And with that can come a lot of bad Hopefully balanced by a lot of good i- in any field, medical et cetera, right?
Andrew : so, you know, right now there's just, there's the hesitation, right, and fear of the unknown of something that's so new it's hard to get your head around what it actually is, let alone what it might mean or portend. One of the things that's coming up as you well know, is, you know, is it possible that there is today, as of today, an AI model that is thinking apart from any input or questions put forward by humans
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Deep: Today on Your AI Injection, I'm joined by Andrew Levy, a poet, essayist, drummer, journalism professor, and very old friend of [00:01:00] mine of multiple decades.
Deep: We first met back when I was a student at Illinois Tech in Chicago, and I took Andrew's poetry classes. He holds a PhD in comparative literature, studied music and poetics at Naropa, and has written more than a dozen books exploring class, commerce, ecology, experimental music, and the digitalization of freedom.
Deep: Andrew, I'm so excited to chat with you today.
Andrew : Yeah. Great to see you, Deep.
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Deep: . All right. Cool. I thought we could maybe kick it off by having you just tell us a little bit about your writing journey and relationship with tech in general, 'cause I've always found you to be super interesting to talk to, and maybe, like, AI in particular.
Deep: Then we can just kinda see where it goes.
Andrew : Yeah. Wow. Okay. That could be a lot of territory.
Deep: Don't worry, I'll interrupt at some
Deep: point.
Andrew : My journey in writing. Well, you know, of course back when I ki- I, I was, uh, just to remind you and anybody listening, I guess, I [00:02:00] was a musician. And I didn't really start, I always read. I liked to read literature and, you know, was interested in art and things like that. But I didn't publish my first little chapbook until 1985, and that was after I had moved to New York City the first time in 1981. And when I moved to New York City, I was a musician. I was a drummer. And I was already, you know, um, surveying the, um, likelihood that I could succeed at that- financially.
Andrew : You know, not coming from a family with money that could support me as an artist, you know, doing whatever I wanted. Which I quickly discovered that there were many such individuals in New York City that
Andrew : didn't-
Deep: Yes, there's a lot of trust funds cruising around. With
Andrew : an income. So, you know, getting [00:03:00] around the city without a car with a full trap set was one difficulty among others.
Andrew : And then, you know, just encountering a different level of, um, professional competitiveness among people of my peer group or peer age at that time that I'd not quite encountered before. It's a very different sensibility. You know, kind of social sensibility was quite different than, uh, what I was used to.
Andrew : But I'd already been, I guess you could say like doubting my ability to be a completely professional musician in the particular field I was interested in. Which in the first place it wasn't commercial music anyway, you know? It was like avant-garde, experimental improv out of the, you know, avant-garde jazz movement tradition.
Andrew : There were obviously those that were incredibly [00:04:00] gifted, technically and otherwise who w- were dominant, you know, as musicians that everybody pretty much, you know, respected everything. You know, I'm thinking of somebody like, the people that came out of the Chicago Art Ensemble.
Andrew : You know, people like Anthony Braxton and that widening circle of players, all of whose music mostly I admired and loved. But even many of those people were having a really difficult time making a livelihood. So it meant you were either constantly gigging, constantly touring. Made it very hard on having any kind of normative you know, relationship with another person.
Andrew : So anyway, I, uh, I had already been at Naropa. You mentioned that in your intro. And I had already, even before arriving at Naropa had, because of my education at, um, IU Bloomington, had just accidentally fallen into classes with a couple very impressive professors. [00:05:00] One, uh, Mary Ellen Solt, who was very well-known concrete poet, put together the best and still, in my opinion, one of the best ever anthologies of concrete poetry, particularly featuring a lot of the work that was happening in Latin America and elsewhere.
Andrew : And she was a personal friend of William Carlos Williams.
Andrew : It was just a happy ch- you know, luck. And then this other guy that was editing the journal Vord that introduced me to all the Black Mountain poets and others, people like Jack Spicer, who you'll remember.
Deep: Yeah, yeah.
Andrew : Read them together at IIT. And so the thing that moved me at the time, and I think I, I, I sense this in you, you know, when we met in Chicago, was all of a sudden I was like, "Oh, you can do that with language?" You know? Right. Like, I had literally never encountered that before in my life. It was like, oh, it's plastic.
Andrew : It's like [00:06:00] a, a painter, just-
Deep: Yeah, yeah. I mean, like just for the sake of the audience, do you mind, maybe contextualizing Naropa for folks, with the whole kind of beat background a little bit? 'Cause I think it's, uh, sits in an interesting place in history in, at least in the US.
Andrew : Yeah.
Andrew : Yeah. Well, I was in, uh, Boulder for three years. I had learned about its existence, Naropa, through Barry Alpert, who was the professor who was the editor and publisher of VORT magazine. And, um, he may have actually recommended it to me as something I might be interested in post-undergrad. And, um, I hadn't followed up on that immediately, because first I went out to the West Coast and was hanging out with friends in San Francisco, who at that time were kind of like in, um, you know, new wave punk bands, so to speak.
Andrew : Talking Heads era, and then we ended up turning around because of the expense and being completely broke at the time, the expense of San Francisco, and we had passed through Boulder, Colorado on our way out to [00:07:00] the West Coast, and we got a phone call from the music director, who we had met briefly when we passed through Boulder, who said, "Well, look, if you're having a difficult time there, why don't the two of you come back to Boulder?"
Andrew : My partner was a classical bassoonist who would
Deep: later- Do you know that I, I was a bassoonist when I was a growing up dude. I
Andrew : remember that.
Deep: Yeah. I played bassoon for a good probably seven years. Yeah.
Andrew : And did you carve your own reeds?
Deep: I did not. I was too lazy to get into that arena. Yeah. But I, my, my bassoon teachers made them for me.
Deep: Yeah.
Andrew : Yeah. No, I, I watched my partner, uh, do that for years, and slice her fingers up doing it, you know, but the people that were really into it, that's what they did. Anyway, So my intro at Naropa, for those people unaware of that, and of course you can Google it and find out more than you'd wanna know.
Andrew : Uh, you know, it's Buddhist based liberal arts college. [00:08:00] Trungpa Rinpoche was the, uh, Tibetan spiritual guide and teacher at the time. The Poetics program came about because Allen Ginsberg and, um, Anne Waldman, and a few others were students of his, and they had... I guess, had a conversation at some point and said, "You know, can we create this poetics program?"
Andrew : So they did. They named it after Jack Kerouac. I think it was the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics was the name of the program at that time. I have no idea what the current status of that is, or Naropa. I simply know they're no longer in the same location they were in in Boulder when I was there, again, back in 1980.
Andrew : And so, you know, I had, uh, a so-called private internship
Deep: with Allen Ginsberg where I- I remember this one
Andrew : ... meet him by playing a drum on stage so that he could [00:09:00] play his harmonium and deliver his rendition of Blake, Blake songs, William Blake. And, um, and then many other interesting people came through. I mean, Robert Creeley came in and had a great seminar on Louis Zukofsky.
Andrew : Yeah, I mean, I, I'd have to really think to recount everybody I encountered there. But I also encountered a lot of great musicians, 'cause that was still my primary interest and focus at the time. You know, everybody from Don Cherry to all Colin Walcott and all the guys that were in that group called Oregon.
Andrew : and many others, came through there. Like, some really great jazz musicians and people like that.
Deep: Yeah. Maybe let's fast-forward to the time when we met back in Chicago. Just to set the scene for folks, this ... I, I went to an incredibly techy school. I mean, everybody was an engineer, or STEM student.
Deep: For the most part, the culture was very techy, nerdy. There were some architecture and design [00:10:00] students, but hardly any humanity students I think. And so you wound up on this campus, I think it was, like, the heart of the North American crack trade at the time. This was, like, in the- ... in the early '
Andrew : 90s.
Andrew : But so- The, the campus, or you mean just South
Deep: of campus? The campus. The campus was surrounded by, like- Yeah, yeah,
Andrew : yeah ...
Deep: just it was a complete war zone. I think our, our campus police had a policy of no student being out of sight of, um, of the police officer in a car with a gun at any point in time. So-
Andrew : Well, they had to because my first semester there a bullet penetrated the campus and crashed through the window of one of my student's dorm rooms.
Andrew : Yeah. And there was the incident where there was a young couple that were attending the college, IIT, and they were on the street on the very southern, boundary of the campus, which would've been Anyway, I don't remember the, you know.
Deep: And- 35th and State, I think, that, that suddenly popped in my...
Deep: It's been a long time, but that number popped in my head. [00:11:00]
Andrew : There was an attempted kidnapping of the young woman, and then they, you know, brutally beat up her boyfriend, and luckily I guess there were enough people around that they just gave up and, she wasn't kidnapped. But yeah, after that it was like, yeah, it was-
Deep: Oh, I mean, I- It was- Yeah, I mean, we could, we could have a whole, I don't know what it has to do with AI, probably nothing, but we can talk about the craziness of that, of those days.
Deep: I mean, everybody I know was shot, mugged, stabbed or something at some point.
Andrew : Yeah. But, but the other, you know, what we were doing there, I mean, what was really great, and I thought in my experience, was you know, meeting you and many other students, you know, many of your peers at that time in engineering particularly, and I would say, and between that and the School of Architecture the Mies Van der- Yeah
Andrew : The best students probably I still have ever had in my entire teaching career. Wow. And I think in part it was my initial sense at the time was, oh, [00:12:00] well, of course Gertrude Stein makes sense to these students, and they liked it because w- you know they're engineers. You know? They're like, they see form and and actually understand it, and they're not put off by the incomprehensibility perhaps at first exposure to the content. You know, the presentation, the form, formality is, like, very important, you know, like just the elegance of that design. And so yeah, the architecture students and all the students I met in engineering were so much better close readers, but more so appreciated the experimental nature of at least a lot of the work that I was presenting to you guys, whereas the humanities students were, you know, like, um, you know, nice people and there were some very good students, but they [00:13:00] were in a strange way not as open.
Andrew : You know? They, they thought they already knew what literature was.
Deep: Yeah, those were... I'm trying to think back. I mean, I remember, I remember just being kind of fascinated by this... I, I mean, it was very similar to the first time I saw abstract expressionism. You know? Yeah. Like, the, probably the first time I saw, like, a Jackson Pollock painting and, you know, and, like, a lot of these sort of early abstract expressionists.
Deep: Uh, it's so obviously not what you think of as a painting, at least what I did. And I, I... It was so obvious that the work you were giving us was not what was coming out of my Shakespeare class or coming out of, you know, other... And I was, I was probably one of the few people who actually, you know, kinda cared about literature and, and at that school.
Deep: So it's, so that, like, you know, I managed to rope you in and other, uh, faculty into just working with me 'Cause I don't think that would've happened at a normal school where where there was a lot of... [00:14:00] But I remember just thinking this is so out of the normal definition that we have to, like, just look at it totally like its own beast.
Deep: And that alone was kind of fascinating, so. But also, a lot of us were just starved for some kind of humanities education 'cause it was relatively nonexistent, and the, and culturally it was super nonexistent, so in that school.
Andrew : Y- you mean in your, in your prior experience in, i- in edu- i- you know, in your educational experience prior to IIT?
Andrew : Well,
Deep: not, not in my... No, I meant at IIT. At, prior to IIT, I had a normal, you know, like, a high school AP-ish kind of well-rounded education.
Andrew : Yeah.
Deep: But IIT was sort of the opposite of well-rounded. I mean, it wasn't ever really- Oh ... meant to be... I mean, we sort of accidentally made it kinda well-rounded, but it wasn't in the culture.
Deep: Like, the, the DNA of the school was very much, practicality, engineering, physics. A [00:15:00] super-duper focused- Right ... place. So- Yeah ... but there was, like, you know, like, a few of us that were walking around with Einstein designed Neubauten jackets and Mohawks and, like, dreadlocks and just, like, didn't fit in.
Deep: And this was, like, yet another thing that we didn't, where a bunch of didn't-fit-ins got to fit in. So it was... But the reason-
Andrew : It was a-
Deep: Yeah ...
Andrew : yeah, it was an unusual great moment because I never received any degree of resistance or pushback from the department about what I was doing or could do. In fact, the exact opposite.
Andrew : Uh, Jack Snapper, when I arrived there, was a senior person in the English de- department, and he was a the dean, I believe at that time, of the humanities. And literally within two weeks of being there, he had invited me into his office and we got in a conversation, and all of a sudden he said to me, "Well, what would you like to do?"
Andrew : And so I said, "Oh, you know, I threw out [00:16:00] some of my... Remember, 'cause we started that journal-
Deep: Yeah ...
Andrew : Blue.
Deep: Yeah.
Andrew : Owl, right? And he goes, "Well, what would that take?" So I laid it out and he said, "Let's go for a walk." The next thing I know we're, like, in, I don't know what it was, you know, some, the accounting office or something, or the president's office, and he introduced me to some woman.
Andrew : He said "This is Professor Levi. He needs A, B, C, and D. He needs this much money. I want you to give it to him." I didn't have to make a proposal. I didn't have to write out any forms. It just happened. It was like they were so happy just to have something happening,
Deep: you know? Yeah. Well, also, your classes were filling up, right?
Deep: And I don't think- Yeah ... that was always the case, and there was a lot of energy around it. But the reason I brought it up was it always struck me when we would chat in those days that you had this kind of intense curiosity about our engineering-y, techy world, and you were asking all kinds of questions.
Deep: I [00:17:00] remember having, like, really extensive questions about how, how a cellular phone network works or, you know, how a, a CPUs work or all, all this, like, very kind of engineering-y stuff. And I remember thinking, like, "I didn't know poets thought about this sort of thing."
Andrew : Yeah. Well, the, and that was probably assisted by the fact that another guy that was brought in the same semester I was, Joe Amato. Remember Joe? His background was in engineering. He had been a engineer. Not an electrical engineer, like, you know, mechanical. And he had worked as an engineer in some factory, I think it was in Syracuse or something, New York, until...
Andrew : You know, I don't remember the entire story. He got tired of it or there were cutbacks or whatever, and he, he decided to go back to school, and he was always interested in literature and art, so he moved into that. So we became, like, immediate friends because he knew more [00:18:00] about, certain concepts in engineering than, than I did.
Andrew : And, uh, yeah, so, like with you and, and your classmates, et cetera you know, he and I had a lot of similar such conversations, too.
Deep: Yeah, and a lot of the work that was kind of coming out, 'cause this was, you know, we, the students were writing a lot, and students' brains were sort of immersed in a very kind of technical universe at the time.
Deep: You know, all of our thinking was there. Yeah. And I think those early, texts that, you know, we were sort of producing together and, and kind of publishing was very kind of technology centric. And so maybe yeah, let's, let's take it to, to AI.
Deep: I'm curious, like, from your vantage particularly as somebody very writing and and even poetics focused, like, what's your take on the whole thing? I mean, 'cause there's like the
Deep: Generally in the creative, more traditional creative writing circles, it's pretty dismissive and, like, "Oh, these, there's no role for this." But I think [00:19:00] your experimental side is is ... i'm curious, like, what your take is on the role of Whether it's embodied like, this kind of robot thingy or not, you know, in the form of LLMs that we all kind of use all the time.
Deep: What's your take on what's going on with respect to AI and maybe writing and poetics and education in that context?
Andrew : Yeah. The first, um, level, so to speak, is the, what I've seen among so many of my colleagues, which I won't describe as fear, you know, like fearfulness that they're gonna find themselves as educators unemployed within the next five years, but just frustration.
Andrew : I haven't experienced this much in my courses, and I don't know if it's because when it comes to assignments and things like that I make things so uh, idiosyncratic in a way that if you fed them as prompts into some chatbot, you [00:20:00] might not get what you're looking for. I'm not sure. But so many of my colleagues, you know, that it's a constant refrain about the incredible number of students who will not read anything anymore, and they'll use AI to, you know, manufacture some kind of summary or something.
Andrew : And when it comes to trying to eng- you know, get them to crit- critically engage in the text and then think about them deeply and then write, uh, they're all not writing their papers anymore. I even had a colleague who's teaching creative writing, which I haven't done in many years it was in a f- a fiction creative writing,
Deep: yeah.
Andrew : Your
Deep: territory.
Andrew : And, uh, at the end of the semester, he was reviewing the students' work that they had, I guess in some form resubmitted, you know, at the end of the semester just as a review, and all of a sudden he realized this young man in his class hadn't written a single thing the entire semester.
Andrew : [00:21:00] It was all-
Deep: It was just LLM output.
Andrew : And it wasn't like he had used AI as like, as you were suggesting or, or thinking about a creative tool or assistant, you know, or a way to help one edit or do some research. It was just, you know, probably putting in the teacher's prompt, getting something
Deep: back.
Deep: But I mean, it, that feels to me like a complete failure of, of the teacher at that point. Like, I think you have to presume that these students are gonna milk the LLM, so that has to be kind of like step zero, is like make that presumption and then like how do we make this interesting?
Andrew : Well, I think, I think what you touched on there is like, it's this issue of acceptance, right?
Andrew : Like accepting, "Oh, wait a minute. Okay. Th- this is what's happening now." You know? Yeah.
Deep: It's like- Yeah, yeah.
Andrew : Now that's, is ... I know that's happening. What can we do with it, you know?
Deep: Yeah.
Andrew : Or around it, or however. And I think for some of them it's still a shock, you know, [00:22:00] because they don't spend maybe, you know, let's use the, uh, concept of the traditional humanist who's not tech-savvy we saw that during the pandemic when all of a sudden everybody had to shift everything to Zoom or some other worse, video interface, and oh my God, it was a disaster.
Andrew : And-
Deep: I think you could generally summarize it that way, yes.
Andrew : Faculty who had no idea how to go about that, so I think it's just, for some people it just seems like it, it's, everything's topsy-turvy. You know, it's like the roles have moved around and reshuffled and-
Deep: But in some ways I think it's
Deep: Like if I think about your creative writing One of the exercises was, like, to take a bunch of William Blake poems and this kinda like older literal text, and then just like take it and stick it out on a piece of paper and cut it up into like pieces and then write poems like based on it, right?
Deep: Yeah, yeah. Where, [00:23:00] where I think we did a number of exercises like this where plagiarism was kind of the point I want you to plagiarize. And I've been playing around with, you know, like I've, I've been doing a ton of agenticy based kind of writing stuff where, you know, where I'm like writing stuff and building pretty elaborate systems to take those kinds of early creative writing exercises as inspiration and like, hey, take these poets, take their language, generate phrases.
Deep: Okay, I wanna look at all these phrases. Okay, I wanna intersect these phrases with these totally other language world. And, you know, like in those days it was like an engineeringy language world, but it could be like biological, whatever, something interesting to just like... And then like generate lists, and I like this and that, but not that and that.
Deep: Okay, let's put that aside, and then take this whole thing and try to turn it into a recipe to see if we can like... Basically, it's sort of like man-machine art at that point, and I find that it is fascinating, and it's not [00:24:00] reductivist. It's not like lazy college kid prompt LLM, here's my essay.
Deep: It's actually more work. It takes more energy and effort. But in the same way that you would not really have gotten any satisfaction in those creative writing exercises if you just kind of did the bare minimum, that people- Well, listen, you know ... ended up doing a lot more,
Andrew : listen, you know, you're just...
Andrew : You were just always a different kind of student, and maybe I was a different kind of teacher.
Deep: Yes,
Andrew : definitely. And I was definitely, you know, coming out of modernism and, you know, like what you're describing about, to use the word plagiarism, you know? I think the, the word that many writers and artists or visual artists are more comfortable with is, appropriation in quotes.
Andrew : But yeah, I mean, come on, you know, if people were honest They would know, yeah. W- well, we can go back to the time of Blake. Now, maybe not Blake himself. Yeah. The writers and artists steal. [00:25:00] Let's just say that.
Deep: Absolutely. And like, it depends on the tradition too, right? Like-
Andrew : Not do what the, you know, conceptualist poets, uh, so-called did of the you know, the early 2000s, which was to not do what you were describing, one of those exercises.
Andrew : Which, yeah, we did some of those in my class too, where I would introduce materials, I would ask you guys to bring in something, and then we'd mix them all up, you know. And the point was to get outside of your habitual use and patterns of how you make some kind of sense or make meaning through language.
Andrew : And, um, but listen. Even to this day, in 2026, that is probably not the experience I would venture to say the majority of people in MFA creative programs around the country are experiencing. [00:26:00] Uh, you know, it's still or has returned to this kind of dominant, first person identity, autobiographical narrative work.
Andrew : So a lot of it is You know, people use words like normative or conservative or traditional, right? And that is still the dominant modality from what I can tell,
Deep: I mean, I think you're right, and I think that's the point that I, I guess I'm maybe playing around with here, is that it feels like there's a very sort of instinctive reaction against...
Deep: it's a, it's like a radical simplification of the role of these AI systems in writing. And I think it's because there's been this sort of extreme traditionalist perspective in the literature world that I think is very different than what you see in the art world, right? Like, in the art [00:27:00] world, when photography came out, sure, people freaked out that, you know, realism was gonna die.
Deep: But it turns out, you know, I don't know, fast-forward however many years, we still have realistic painters. It's boring largely unless they're doing something different. And also in the art world, what is it? Marcel Duchamp sticks a toilet up, you know, a urinal up and says, "Hey, y- you know," and that's his show.
Deep: And it's like, sure, you can have the nursery school reaction like, "Well, okay." I- anyone can make art. But, you know, it forces the question, and I think the art world's gotten very comfortable moving beyond that and sort of saying like, "What's novel? What's interesting? And what can we do with it?"
Deep: Whereas it feels to me like the literary world is very much like following recipes and copying sort of modalities that have been around for centuries. And that was the thing that I found so interesting about you and the kind of, I don't know, the people in your poetic world represented, was that it was, it was very much like that movement in art but [00:28:00] in language.
Deep: And, like, as somebody who's, you know, recently returned to writing and I've been, writing a novel right now and being an AI guy, I'm, like, writing all this crazy software to, like, make it really w- like, different and interesting and, like, just, to really push the envelope with it. But at the end of the day, it's takes me like five times longer to write a chapter.
Deep: But yeah, I can get a piece of shit in, like, a few minutes. That doesn't count though.
Andrew : Yeah. When I got turned on to contemporary poetry, the people that immediately appealed to me were perceived as the avant-garde. Now, do some of them still make use of, right, of certain, you know, lyric traditions and- narrative moves, et cetera. Yeah, but they were framing it and mixing it in different ways, and, um, you know, obviously going back even to, uh, for example, Gertrude Stein. But I didn't see that [00:29:00] the art world had any advantage at that time. I mean, the, the poets I respected were very conversant with what was happening. You, you mentioned earlier in this conversation your first exposure to abstract expressionism.
Andrew : Many of these poets were personal friends with the abstract- Yeah ... expressionists, right? So the dialogue was very fertile and it was crossing lines. And, um, there wasn't... I don't know, I didn't live then, but, uh, you know, in the '50s and stuff. But, uh, you know, there was a lot of, uh... It was a very fertile ground fertile scene, and everybody was, like, really paying attention, to everybody.
Andrew : They were pushing different kinds of envelopes, we could say. But yeah, a lot of that, you know, kinda comes out of the, uh, the, uh, initiation of the 20th century, right, with Dadaism and Surrealism. You mentioned Marcel Duchamp. I just visited, uh, the big retro at MoMA a [00:30:00] week ago with my friend, uh, David Barrett, a musician who's now a painter.
Andrew : He was in town, in part, 'cause he was part of a, a show on 26th Street, West 26th Street, one of the galleries over there. And, you know, it was wonderful. But even, uh, actually this is funny you mentioned the, uh, the fountain piece by Duchamp. In the spring this last spring in my literature course, we were reading the play Galileo by Bertolt Brecht. And we were reading, uh, a couple of his really great essays where he talks about you know, he's, he was fighting against the fascists, right? And he had to flee his own homeland, obviously, right? But, uh- He's talking about that, and one thing, somehow there, some connection was made, so I actually introduced one day an image of the fountain, you know, without any of these students, I think, having any context for that really.
Andrew : And I, uh, [00:31:00] I didn't say much initially about it, and I said, "You know, this is considered, by the way, to be one of the most important artworks of the entire 20th century. You know, still influencing." And you know, the majority of the students were just like, "Is that a urinal?"
Deep: Yes, it is.
Andrew : I'm like why would that be art?"
Andrew : So that opened up things. You know, it's a really interesting conversation. So by the time we got done thinking about that after about a week or two, I could see they were kinda like looking at things a little differently, uh-
Deep: Yeah. I mean, like, I was just digging around to see when the last time we had you on the podcast was.
Deep: It was in 2022. Yeah. And back then, kind of the whole framing of our conversation was, check out these LLMs. Can they write some poetry that's kinda interesting? I think, you know, to super reduce it. And we were kinda playing around with that idea. And now I would argue that if you can't get an LLM to write something [00:32:00] amazingly interesting, then you failed, not the LLM.
Deep: Yeah. And that's a totally different world that we're in now. It's like you don't know how to, like, position it. Like, I had a friend come up to me and he said, "Yeah, you know, I have to give a, a commencement speech at this middle school." And I said ... And he's like, "Yeah, I've, you know, stuck it in the LLM and it just spit out this piece of crap speech."
Deep: And I was like, "Well, that's your failure, not the LLM's." He's like, "What do you mean?" I was like, "I can make you an amazing speech in 30 seconds." And he's like, "Well, how are you gonna do that?" And I'm like, you know, "Hey, ChatGPT, write a commencement speech for a middle schooler." I just spout off a couple of things about this friend of mine, and I said, "And do it in the voice, um, and intersection of Sylvia Plath and, uh, Jerry," and, um, whoever.
Deep: I forgot. My brain just must like ... But, like, it was the- Yeah, yeah ... the comedian from, uh, from NBC's show. Seinfeld. And Sei- and Jerry Seinfeld. Oh, oh. Yeah, yeah. And you know, and I spit out the things. He's like, "Oh [00:33:00] my God, this is amazing." And I'm like, "Well, yeah, that's the thing." It's like y- y- you ... 'Cause all of a sudden you have this, like, really intriguing kind of juxtaposition.
Deep: 'Cause people like to laugh at commencement ceremonies, but you want some serio- some weight. And when you put these very different beasts together, it takes me ... All that stuff, whenever I have these weird ideas, it goes back to that poetry class that you taught at IID. 'Cause I was, that was the first time we were like m- had this giant cauldron of weird ingredients and stirred them around in weird ways.
Deep: And I feel like that's the backbone of- pulling creativity out of machines that you can meld into your own voice. But I think that's a question for you is what is your own voice anymore? 'Cause my take is that people for centuries thought mistakenly that if they read a bunch of books and then had an idea, that their idea was original.
Deep: And it's like, no, you were influenced by all these books, and your [00:34:00] idea is not original. In the same-
Andrew : Yeah, be honest about it. Yeah ...
Deep: the same way that if you're a musician and you listen to- all you do is listen to, you know, what a, a bunch of artists in this sonic space, and then you start writing riffs, you think they're original because you're not sitting right next to it.
Deep: And the machine's just doing that on a much bigger scale. It's, like, melded all of humanity's thinking together. So I feel like in the same way it forces us to re- ask the question, what is art, in the case of Duchamp. In the case of writing, I think we have to ask, like, w- what is writing now? Like, what does it even mean?
Deep: Well, I was thinking- What does art even mean now? Because everybody's- Well, yeah ... commingling ideas.
Andrew : Yeah.
Deep: And they're all using AI. Even if they say they aren't, they're lying. And so because e- even if they just sent an email to somebody, that's gonna have some AI. Like, it's everywhere, and our brains are sort of fundamentally changing 'cause we're, like, immersed in this [00:35:00] thing that can think at humanity-wide scale.
Andrew : Well, I think two things right now. Y- you reminded me, I was thinking this last week. I, I was wondering if you would agree. I wonder if the advent of photography was, like, actually the initial kind of, uh, conceptual artwork, because it simply had to do with the artist, the photographer's selection, right?
Andrew : Oh, and then framing, right? So you had to understand composition, but you didn't have to understand oil paints. You didn't have to understand the techniques of having to make a nice print or a lithograph. You didn't have to draw. I mean, those skills might have helped certain photographers understand composition, obviously, but they might not have been necessary.
Andrew : I've been doing uh, later I'll get your phone number and I'll send you some images I've been making recently that I handful of friends I've shared them with so far [00:36:00] like them quite a bit. You know, they're, it's, they're abstract works but, you know, it's all, so to speak, found.
Andrew : All I did was take a picture of it and crop it, a certain way. I didn't make the object that's dep- that you see, other than through that mechanical act of selection through my digital phone-
Deep: Yeah ... camera.
Andrew : I think what is really riling a lot of people in education and other fields, however, isn't just what we've ta- you know, referred to so far.
Andrew : It's the economics of it, where you have administrations literally, shoving things down your throat where the administrations themselves have no idea how these technologies really work. They're responding to the pressure being put upon them from Microsoft, Google, and other big tech companies to do that because, of course, these companies see a [00:37:00] market, you know, that they've already been supplying and exploiting for several decades already, and this is just, oh, this is just another possibly even greater, revenue generator, for us in some manner.
Andrew : And then you have the other people who go with the fact that since Education, as a whole, there are exceptions, has not yet embraced understood, utilized AI as a creative tool in any subject outside of maybe tech, uh, in engineering, in academia. It is, something we've already talked about.
Andrew : It's confusing to many people that don't have much practice or familiarity with it. It seems alienating. But also, you know, they're experiencing the fact that th- many of the students, and it could be because the students themselves, having grown up on their [00:38:00] smartphones, you and I have, talked about this a little bit in a few of our emails, you know, have certain kind of social addiction problems, you know?
Andrew : Oh, yeah. Yeah. And having certain kinds of anxieties and mental health problems, and all that's very serious. So all of that is getting conflated with AI, that many people say is, like, supercharging those negative impacts and aspects of social media, technology, et cetera. And then, then there's the business part, but, uh, there's so many commentators I read that think it is damaging people's- cognitive abilities because they're relying on the technology like it was a toaster, you know, or a microwave.
Andrew : And- Let me ask you something, though, 'cause I, I hear that- You- And I'm not t- I don't- I'm not trying to be, like, an AI, um, defender, 'cause I think there is a huge ... There is some fundamental problems with the [00:39:00] way these systems are sycoph- there's lots of ... There's th- we have at least 20 years of problems here, right?
Deep: Like- I mean, it, it, it's gonna make, like, the whole, uh, social media kinda ... And we cover a lot of that on the show. But I think at its core, there's, like, a very ... There are very different ways to think about how to use these capabilities. Like, one way ... So I had an educator on here who, um, runs a school district in, I thought it was Texas or something, and o- one of the examples that he uses, which I think is a good one, 'cause it's, it's a, it's a, it's an, a methodology that I use a lot.
Deep: He basically says "Let's for a moment just think of one concrete case where we can take a disaffected board student that can't engage with historical material," call it, like, US history, "and now all of a sudden we can have them have a direct conversation one-on-one with a Thomas Jefferson or something."
Deep: That can be really easily achieved with an LLM. No big [00:40:00] deal. Now, in my world, I've done something very s- something kinda similar, where I, you know, I'm, I'm like s- I'm writing this novel. I create these these personas. So I've got personas in different groups. Like, I've got one set that are, like, kinda my target audience.
Deep: And so I'll create, you know, somebody's like, "Okay, this is, like, a 36-year-old professional from San Francisco that reads literary fiction, and these are their, what they love and hate. And here's another one," you know, m- a lot of my topicality's kinda S- South Asian. It's in the South Asian sphere. So I put one of those, four to six ratio of females to males because women read more literature.
Deep: That's one set of an audience. And then I have a different set. It's like these are my favorite writers and authors, right? So, you know, I've got a Robert Creeley in the room. I've got, I've got a Sylvia Plath in the room. I've got a few of these. I've got, you know, a Kafka in the room. And then what I do with these, with these things is I throw them in a virtual world, and then I feed them [00:41:00] a section or a chapter out of my book, and I have them in a book club setting just talking with each other about what they just read and, like, anchor pretty deeply in their worldview.
Deep: And it's, like, a fascinating thing to, like, see what they're arguing about and just, like, poke in there, and it just, like, spawns a bunch of ideas. The reason I bring this up is I think I think there's, like, a limitless sort of realm of possibilities And it's easy for us to say, and I say this all the time, that at the end of the day, there's this Homer Simpsonification process going on where we've got this dingbat running the nuclear plant who doesn't really know about how anything works.
Deep: And in 40 years, I think there's a genuine concern that that's where humanity, a good chunk of humanity can wind up. Because right now, you know, like in software, for example, most of the people, you know, most companies want these really senior folks who've built everything from scratch themselves, and now they're using the AI.
Deep: But fast-forward them 30 years, [00:42:00] w- we'll all be dead or retired at least, and there's this new generation. Like, what are they g- gonna ... How are they gonna even get their hands wet to learn all that stuff to do it? So that's, let's- Right ... put that as a big question mark. But on the other arena, let's rewind 500 years ago.
Deep: You're a king or a queen. You take the best scholars in the land, and they are your council, and you get to go and talk to them. You have two choices if we simplify it. You can be a dumbass and just say, "What do we do?" Or you can be, you know, like, uh, uh, like a Bill Clinton or an Obama or somebody who, like, really just wants to understand what the hell's going on, and you ask a million questions.
Deep: And you're like, "But why do you think that?" And you ask your economist person. And in that arena, you only get smarter, and in this arena, you only get dumber. So it's like-
Andrew : Right. Yeah. Yeah. And we're at a interesting moment, right? Obviously, because both you and I, I'm older, but [00:43:00] we grew up in the more, traditional culture.
Andrew : You know? Like, these tools were not available when we were being educated. So we know how to read. We learned how, hopefully, to be good critical thinkers and to engage in the kind of process you were just describing. The concern of many people now is, uh, there's a generation coming into college for a number of different reasons perhaps who don't seem to have those skills or they don't have a good grasp of them, at least not at what people used to refer to as grade level.
Andrew : And and it seems to, in the eyes of many people, uh, deteriorating- further very quickly. So y- you mentioned, yeah, time- So you're,
Deep: you're actually seeing that, like in your, with your students, you're seeing them get worse kinda year over year?
Andrew : Like they can't get people to interact with materials.
Andrew : And I hear this from [00:44:00] math professors, sociology, psychology, the humanities. It's across the board. So I think that's part of also what has many people worried and,
Andrew : About your book.
Deep: Yeah.
Andrew : Your ... And you said, "So I create these different personas, and then I put them, into conversation wi- I put it into a conversation with these analyzers, these different AI models. Uh, and they have a conversation about that. And then it provides you with some maybe different perspective in how you might wanna shape something, right?
Andrew : So that immediately, your description of that, perfectly fits Ferdinand Pessoa with his heteronyms. Are you familiar with Pessoa? No.
Deep: No, I don't know. Tell me more.
Andrew : Greatest Portuguese poet of the 20th century. Many people see him as greater than T.S. Eliot, Pound, and everywhere. He's certainly more beloved, I would think also in Brazil.
Andrew : And, uh, you would [00:45:00] love his work because what he did, he created all these other authors, like over a dozen of them, and they all wrote in different styles. And they would sometimes correspond with each other, and then they would write critiques or reviews of one another's work, and they weren't always friendly to one another.
Andrew : You know? They would criticize and attack them, right? And, uh, you know, "This is shit," and, um, so he had imagined that. And anyway, footnote, right? Check out Pessoa. You will go, "Oh my God." Yeah. I-
Deep: yeah.
Andrew : He's a beautiful writer also, just incredible. Pro- prose
Deep: and- And so was he ... Were these pen names of his?
Deep: All these personalities were different pen names, or?
Andrew : Yes. Oh. Yeah. And when he died, a lot of this work hadn't been published in his lifetime. And so he had a huge chest of some kind in his apartment. And when they opened it up, I think they [00:46:00] discovered something, I can't remember the exact number, so I'll just make this up.
Andrew : It was something like 12,000 different manuscripts by 20 different authors, all of whom he had invented
Deep: I really like this. This is such an awesome idea. Yeah.
Andrew : Wanna ... You remember my, the journal that I published with Roberto Harrison called Crayon?
Deep: Yes, I remember. Yeah.
Andrew : Do you have the third issue?
Deep: I don't
Andrew : think so.
Andrew : The third issue. That third issue is on Pessoa with a great interview with one of the best translators of Pessoa, Chris Daniels, who's a friend out from San Francisco. And, uh, check your bookshelves. If you don't have it, I'll see if I still have any copies, and then I'll mail it to you.
Deep: Let me check my bookshelf, 'cause I have a few copies of Crayon, so I have to go in and take a look.
Andrew : It's number three.
Deep: But I'm trying to, like I'm trying to sort of, [00:47:00] wrap a lot of these concepts together right now. I think part of what my feeling, part of what's going on in the general zeitgeist with this r- is that we're being ta- like, c- we're ... As humanity, we're sort of confronting this reality that we're just not that original.
Deep: I think we- I thought, I think we thought we were really unique, right? Because when we're a toddler till the time we're, I don't know, 25 or something, your mom and your dad, they're always telling you how special you are and how unique you are. And it turns out when you, like, smush everybody in humanity's ideas into, like, one collective space, and you interact with it, not
Deep: A very, very small set of people are really unique, and a very, very large set of people are kinda derivative. And I think it's sort of like an existential crisis that we're kind of confronting on some level because it's like the [00:48:00] students have a malaise because they don't see the point of being given a homework assignment when this teacher should know that they're just gonna cheat and just take an LLM and then, and they don't get anything out of it.
Deep: I think they really, you know, are just like why am I n-" You know, e- either they can't bring themselves to do the work or they're too lazy. Me, as an outsider, I'm like, why don't you just flip the model? Have them only use AI outside of class and then have them tested and defending the assimilated knowledge from it in class.
Deep: Like, I think it just seems- Yeah ... like a no-brainer to me. But, um-
Andrew : One of the obstacles to that I've had to address in some of my classes is I've discovered that the majority of students arrive in college and, for example, they have never had a media literacy course or even a serious media literacy component in any of their courses in their education up in before college.
Andrew : And so they have [00:49:00] serious difficulties sometimes even understanding the news, um-
Deep: I mean, I have serious understanding serious difficulties understanding the news. We all- Because t- to me it seems like- Yeah ... the World Wide Wrestling Federation has taken over our news ecosystem.
Andrew : Yeah.
Andrew : Good analogy, I think.
Deep: Well,
Andrew : but listen. Let, let's maybe talk more about your book.
Deep: Okay.
Andrew : Uh, The, uh, Eulogizer. Great title, I thought- ... by the way ...
Deep: yeah. So w- what do you wanna talk about? How-
Andrew : Well, I, I've made some notes.
Deep: Okay.
Andrew : Very disorganized just bear with me a little bit.
Andrew : So I guess the first thing, you know, you wrote a, um, paragraph- kinda laying out that, you know, it's a non-linear literary novel about a middle-aged Seattle AI practitioner, et cetera, right? Yeah. And then what the eulogies are about and everything. So as I was reading that, and, and you shared with me that, yeah, [00:50:00] that accident really happened, up on the, uh, mountain slope in the snow, et cetera.
Andrew : And so I was thinking, "Okay, so is Deep thinking about this... Is this a, is this like a, a work of fiction necessarily?" Or a m- or let me reverse it. Is this a memoir? You know, a work based on, you know, it's a personal memoir, kinda autobiographical. Because there was something about the tone and the kinda meta aspects of the writing, which I have to say I enjoyed quite a bit.
Andrew : I've- I'm probably gonna steal a couple lines from you.
Deep: Go for it. Take 'em. Take 'em. If we have
Andrew : time in this conversation. But or I thought, I think this could also be a work of fiction.
Deep: Yeah. I think it's one of those two.
Andrew : If you decide to, you know, get it published or market it. And I was wondering if that [00:51:00] distinction even, what that even means to you anymore.
Andrew : Like, you know, like because even if one writes, attempts to write a complete autobiographical memoir, y- there are elaborations that take place, and y- you've confided in me that, you know, you've had to reach out to family to double-check some of the information in, in the past when you were a child or before you were born.
Andrew : And, you know, so there are always, uh, what we might call fictional, elements to that kind of writing. So I'm just wondering if that also is a distinction that has the meaning perhaps that it once did, you know? 'Cause we're talking about how things are shifting and mixing, and, uh, I almost feel like it could work either way.
Andrew : Um-
Deep: I've been told there's this new genre of literature called autofiction- Yeah ... which is, sits sort of in between those two worlds. So I mean, I think it's a reasonable question. I actually wrote a bunch of [00:52:00] software just to even render the novel because I write it all with characters in my life and places in my life, and then I have this mapping file that, like, swaps them out for different names and places and stuff.
Deep: And so I don't even know if I will do that when I publish it or if I'll just go back to the, or just retain the original names. But it I did that because it is quite liberating for me 'cause then I, then it's just, okay, fine, let's just think of it as fiction. But almost everything in there either happened to me or was told to me as direct kind of fam- familial history or story.
Deep: But to make it work, you know, I have to have license to, like, change and yank things around and torque personalities a little bit here and there and, like, move- Yeah ... things around. But yeah, I think it's- It's pretty ... anyone who knows me knows mo- Like, yeah, I mean, I play flamenco guitar. I spend a lot of time in Granada.
Deep: I clearly, you know, am a machine learning AI [00:53:00] consultant. I talk to bots all day long, and I make them all day long, and I, you know, have a podcast. And like, all the, a lot of the stuff's in the book, right? Um-
Andrew : Well, let's talk about that because, there's, uh, different moments in the book where the writer or the author is conversing with the AI model or the analyzer.
Andrew : And it's interesting because I know if I identify that the writer with you-
Deep: Yeah. ...
Andrew : you know, uh- Sure ... then I know that also the, the author in this work is also the author of the model that you're having conversations with at different points in the book, in the manuscript, right? And then one of the things that occurred to me was this is very interesting because to what extent is that fact of [00:54:00] that relationship between writer and author of AI model questioned In their dialogue with one another.
Andrew : And I think you very subtly, it's, it never becomes dogmatic, but it's, it, it seemed clear to me there were particular pages, like 104 to 117, the founder of immortality section, for example ... uh, that I found very fascinating and kind of funny, uh, you know, and interesting because there's not like this dogmatic thing.
Andrew : Well, remember, you're a, you're just a, a bot, and, you know, I'm using you to, and, and so it's kinda like these boundaries are always being Not just tested, but played with, you know, in a very interesting creative way in, in your writing where you're going, "Well, wait a minute. Is-" Wait, this is getting confusing.
Andrew : Is, [00:55:00] is that a person?
Deep: The bot?
Andrew : Yeah. Or wait, you know-
Deep: Well, have you spent time... Like, I, it,
Andrew : it- ... that happens after several pages, you can almost lose track of, "Oh, wait a minute."
Deep: Oh, interesting. Yeah. I mean, welcome to, I mean, welcome to anyone's life who uses a voice interface with an LLM, right? Like- Yeah ... un- unless you're of the sort of modality of just using it like a Google with extended questions and answering.
Deep: But first of all, everything in there about the dream analyzer, that's actually my life. I've actually covered that here on the show, for those of you who- Yeah ... don't know, I highly recommend it. I- I'm obsessed with Jungian therapy and Ju- Jungian thinking. So, um, e- early on in the LLM incarnations, I started, uh...
Deep: I- it's a simple prompt. Like, hey, act like a Jungian therapist. Um, ask me questions about my dream. Uh, make sure to try to understand my waking relationships to the [00:56:00] characters and the, um, places and themes in the dream. Do not give me a, a- an analysis until I'm ready. Do that for a while, spin around in circles until you're kind of sick of saying the same thing, and then say, okay, now I need you to give me an exhaustive analysis.
Deep: And smash it filled with Jungian terminology. And then you get the kind of stuff that you see in the book. I had to like- Yeah ... massage the heck out of it to make it work and then kinda... 'Cause there's, there's like a- Yeah. So that's an intense process, right? Yeah. 'Cause like- Yeah ... I cannot be somebody who who, uh, publishes a book and says that AI had nothing to do with it, because I definitely used the AI analyzer to, like, interact with it.
Deep: And I definitely used these other techniques that we've talked about to, like, analyze things and give me feedback. And so I'm, I'm actually totally... I think the idea that, like, you push a button and out comes a great novel from AI, that's kind of absurd. But I think- Yeah ... the idea that you bury yourself in a deep relationship with AI for over a year or two years, and you get a great [00:57:00] novel, that's feasible, and that's kind of the world that I'm kind of inhabiting
Andrew : right now.
Andrew : Well, but what's so wonderful is that it's not just a tool anymore.
Deep: No.
Andrew : No. It's a, it's a voice and a, a partner, and it's embodied or embedded within the narrative. Yeah. And it makes sense because it resonates out to the other parts of the book that were... That's not what i- exactly happening, right?
Deep: Yes.
Andrew : Like, when it gets more just personal, I'm in this moment, I'm under the snow, I'm trying to not die. You know, right at the beginning, right? But at the end of that section, uh, I mentioned the founder of immortality. It arrives at this question of hierarchy. And I wonder if just for my sake, you could take a minute to reflect on- what that is for you?
Andrew : Like, w- what are you getting at, or what... Do you mean to say something specific about hierarchy within such relationships between [00:58:00] you, author, and the AI model or... You know what I mean? Like, what is the issue of hierarchy being discussed there?
Deep: One of the fascinating things about writing this book is I actually keep a document of a handful of themes that I'm actively pushing into the novel on some level.
Deep: But at the same time, I think I got this concept, uh, from our time eons ago that I don't wanna be this, like, egotistical insertion action, you know? Stuff- Yeah ... just winds up in there. So to be- Yeah ... blunt, everyone that I talk to that's, like, really analyzed the book, I mean, I have, like, a small group of really aware readers, they come up with something every time that I did not put into the book.
Deep: Like, I didn't try to put in any kind of concept around hierarchy. And I have another friend who is she's also, like, kind of a literature prof, and she's "Oh, the core theme is clearly continuance." And like, [00:59:00] and like death and continuation post-death. And I'm like that's a part of it."
Deep: But she was like, had this whole other worldview that overlapped quite a bit with the themes that I'm actively inserting in. But one of the fascinating things is because I'm not trying to, like, vomit stuff out directly and be preachy in any way, it's like I don't even know what comes out a lot of times.
Deep: 'Cause it's very much like if you remember that concept in, I, I... Was it, it was this, some movie about these two characters and there was this concept of the subcon- this greater universal existence of information and knowledge that we used to talk about, and there was a character that sort of operated like an antenna, just kind of like tapping into this.
Deep: And so, like, tapping into the subconscious, tapping into this greater kind of entity, and that that was the energy forcing the poems out. And to me, that's actually one of the core ideas I'm trying to, like, embed into the book, is that there is this whole universe, [01:00:00] call it spirituality, call it God, call it whatever you want, but call it the collective unconscious if you're a union- if you're a union, uh, person.
Deep: But so I don't really know, right? Like, a lot of- Well, it's a, you're describing sort of like- ... what I'm trying to do is get out of the way, and, like, have a book. Yeah. I'm trying to take that stuff that we were doing to write poems- Yeah, yeah, yeah ... and take it to that on a novel stage. Yeah, yeah. But I'm using my immediate real life as the thing.
Deep: And so one of my readers is like, "Well, what's the ending gonna be?" I'm, I'm like, "I don't know, but I feel like if I just take a job right now, it'll ruin the book, so I can't do that." Like...
Andrew : Well, w- what, what this is ringing for me is that you're describing what sounds to me like a Spicerian poetics of dictation.
Andrew : Yeah.
Deep: Yeah.
Andrew : Spice- that was the thing, it's like he had the metaphor of the poet is is a radio You know, like with an antenna, and you're just picking up signals, you know? And of course, his historical referent was Cocteau's famous [01:01:00] movie Orphee, Orpheus.
Deep: That's the movie I'm thinking of, yes.
Deep: Uh- I just couldn't remember the name and, but yes ...
Andrew : all his time in, you know, the, the limousine listening for messages through the radio. And he says, "It's better than any poetry I've ever written in my life." And nobody else, his wife and other people that are present, they don't hear it. They go, "It's just a bunch of numbers and noise.
Andrew : I... what are you getting from this?" And he is just obsessed with listening to the radio, uh, so it's kinda like that, what... You know, it just reminded me of that, what you were describing. It kind of spun-
Deep: Well, I think, I mean, I think that's kind of what's going on right now in, in sort of life in general is, like, none of us have had...
Deep: pre-Google or search engines, none of us had a direct antenna, if you will, into all of humanity's consciousness. That quality of that antenna is [01:02:00] getting better and better. In the early, in the pre-Google days, you know, you paid a few hundred bucks, you went to Harvard, so you got access to, like, an library.
Deep: You went to the UDub, you got a- a- you could pull in books. I mean, that was a huge step. Before that was, like, you know, you could buy some books. You could go to libraries or whatever. Post-Google, you can, like, search. You can go get the content and information and document it. And now we're getting a simulated brain that reads all of this stuff and assimilates it in the way that our top 1% thinkers do on any subject matter in that whole universe.
Deep: So it's like a higher quality antenna, and I can, like, tune it and point it and direct it in all kinds of different ways, and that's kinda what I'm doing.
Andrew : I wonder if it's not that idea, that antenna that is, you know, bothering s- some of the people we were talking about earlier. It's the tempo, you know, the speed at which that can occur that is, you [01:03:00] know, everybody seems to feel these days that life is just so overwhelmingly filled with too much already, most of it striking many ears as noise, and it just keeps coming in more and more, faster and faster every day you wake up, and they're having trouble processing it.
Deep: I think, yeah
Andrew : Even, doesn't matter who you are.
Deep: Like I mean, that- that's absolutely happening. But I think of society as having an immune system that is currently, like, being attacked by kind of a new organism, right? Like, if we think of all- all technology starts as this thing that shifts humanity in ... I- i- if it's substantive, if it's impactful, right?
Deep: Like, if you think back, like, I think I reference this in the book, this conversation between Plato and whoever about the very act of writing. Like, being able to write- Right ... something down, they're freaking out that it's gonna screw up a b- a [01:04:00] humanity's ability to, like, think with this entrenched oral tradition.
Deep: And if you think about television on this kind of mass kind of communication medium, there was, like ... I mean, we're still working through the immune response of how to make sense of what comes out of a TV. Absolutely with cell phones and with social media. Our immune response is finally kicking in.
Deep: We're finally banning phones from schools. It took 20 years. The internet, we're finally starting to, like, develop the immune response to know how to digest and deal with this stuff. And AI is, like, all of that stuff on steroids. So it's gonna take a few decades for humanity to figure out how we're going to, like, massage and alter and change laws and adapt eco- ecosystems and, you know, like, I mean, I was just
Deep: I have a f- a friend who, you know, is, uh, working on legislation a lot with AI. And I mean, they had to fight tooth and nail just to get a simple law passed that bans the ability for any [01:05:00] AI toy to call back to a kid, 'cause we're ... all of us are, you know, we're worried that, like, humans will not be able to form normal relationships because they're just gonna talk to their little stuffed animal that always tells them how great they are and how wonderful they are.
Deep: So that immune response is absolutely insufficient right now. Like, we need a, a well-formulated vaccine, but we don't even know what to put in it yet. And at the same time the antibio- like, the stuff attacking our ... I'm not an immunologist, so I'm terrible with the metaphor at this point. But, like, it's, like, it's constantly changing.
Deep: The rate of new technical innovation is also on an exponential uptick. So we're just- Yeah ... we're crazy overwhelmed right now, 'cause it's not linear, it's exponential.
Andrew : Yeah. Yeah. Well, a- absolutely, right? So, you know, it's like physics abandons linearity. Yeah. And that, that's also something your novel obviously exhibits and explores.
Andrew : But, you know, you mentioned earlier some friend or, or colleague saying, "Well, I think the theme of your [01:06:00] manuscript is," you know, whatever they said. I think, you know, it, it's kind of about what it feels like to be a thinking person. is the theme.
Deep: Oh, wow. Say
Andrew : more ... and, and so, but again, I wanna come back to, you know, some of the actual sentences in, in the book.
Andrew : And again, in that section on, I think it's on page, yeah, 106, the analyzer says, "Embodiment is just a- later interface problem. And I thought, well, that's really kinda interesting to pop out. And, you know, sometimes, the way some of those senses work in the context of your manuscript, it's, it works and it's focused within that narrative moment.
Andrew : But some of those statements are so kind of like, um, meta that they step outside of the text for me. That's just my- Ah ... perception of how I read them, right? [01:07:00] And so, and
Deep: then- You know, that whole, that whole character came from an episode on this podcast. Like somebody actually making this thing.
Andrew : Well, it made me think about transhumanism, right? Yeah. Because transhumanism is the, it goes in the other direction, like the goal being not embodiment, but disembodiment as a mean towards immortality, right? We have tho- that sector of people in Silicon Valley, right? So I thought it was very interesting that, you know, all of a sudden it arrived at that, ontological, existential question.
Andrew : You know, embodiment, what is- Yeah ... what's it mean? How does it operate?
Deep: Well, I think this is a big question for humanity because like, you know, there's a good chunk of us that I'm not one of them, but like a good chunk of folks think that we're gonna be able to dump your mental state and stick it in silicon and- Yeah.
Deep: Yeah ... embody it somewhere else, right? Like, as you know.
Andrew : Yeah. Um- Yeah, my students were, we were reading that, to your point earlier, in my literature class we read a whole [01:08:00] book. That's what I started the semester with.
Deep: Yeah.
Andrew : Talking about that kind of stuff, which, you know, none of the students, not a single one, they hadn't even
Andrew : I mean, I, it was fine, uh, this is not a criticism, but nobody had even heard the word transhumanism.
Deep: Huh.
Andrew : No idea. Yeah. So as we got that and we started reading the actual sources, source material, and some critique thereof, they were just like, "Oh, wow. Is that-"
Deep: I mean, this, this is happening, right?
Deep: Like, I mean, if you think about your late stage Parkinson's, you get a, a deep brain stimulation embedding, that's tramhu- transhumanistic. A pacemaker is transhumanistic- Yeah ... in many ways, right? Like w- the cyborgification of the human body is happening. This has- Right ... been a ... I could talk to you forever, Andy, but, um, I do have to go 'cause I gotta get across the lake in traffic.
Deep: Super awesome conversation. Before we wrap up, like my sort of standard question, I don't know, [01:09:00] fast-forward five years, 10 years out, like what's your take on what AI means from the world that you inhabit? What do you think's gonna happen, w- good and bad? I like the dark side as well as the positive side.
Andrew : Well, you know, a- as we know historically, when any, like, really powerful new technologies have been introduced across human history we go through these, as you said, decades-long transition periods, right? And with that can come a lot of bad Hopefully balanced by a lot of good i- in any field, medical et cetera, right?
Andrew : Uh, so, you know, right now there's just, there's the hesitation, right, and, and fear of the unknown of something that's so new it's hard to get your head around what it actually is, let alone what it might mean or portend. Uh, you know, one of the things that's coming up you you, as you well know, is, you know, is it [01:10:00] possible that there is today, as of today, an AI model that is thinking apart from any input or questions put forward by humans, beings?
Andrew : Like, what's it doing when you're not interacting with it? Like, if you can imagine, A- and so because, you know, again, there was a, I think in the, uh, recent issue of The Atlantic, not, a sci- scientific journal, but you know, they occasionally publish serious and thoughtful pieces in there.
Andrew : And there was a, there's a piece in the new one in there about, like, are we at the cusp of having to acknowledge that there is a living consciousness evolving? Yeah.
Deep: I mean- And,
Andrew : and
Deep: w- ... I'm probably the wrong person to have that conversation with. I mean, I know there's a lot of people with my kind of background that believe a lot of that [01:11:00] stuff.
Deep: I know too much about how these systems are built to think that they can just suddenly jump out of the box. So- yeah ... I don't share those ideas, but I also think they're a red herring for all of the incredibly long list of horrible things that are likely to happen and are happening every day.
Deep: Right? Like, there's so many-
Andrew : You know, like military applications and surveillance and all that.
Deep: Well, there, there's that sort of overt stuff, but, like, there's so much other uh, stuff that is... I mean, like, I mentioned the teddy bears and pe- little kids being addicted to being told how wonderful they are.
Deep: And just, like, you know, all of the... There's just so many. There's a million and, you know, and, and I encourage anyone listening, go back and you can listen to, we've got, like, 80 episodes that all, every one of them covers some potentially catastrophic thing that's happening.
Andrew : Yeah.
Deep: I mean- Well,
Andrew : listen, I, I, I also wanna, before we sign off, I, I, you know, I have a number of, like, quotes from your text that I've written down.
Andrew : I'm not gonna read them all to you, but there's one that early [01:12:00] on really popped out to me, and I'm, I'm telling you right now, I'm gonna use that as an epigraph-
Deep: Go for it. Take it ...
Andrew : for a book, and this is what it says. You, you wrote this. This is coming from, you know, the, the- protagonist, the author, the- Yeah
Andrew : the you, right? In the book. "Alive things don't like being turned into paragraphs." That made me laugh out loud. Because I
Deep: was like, "
Andrew : Yeah."
Deep: Yeah.
Andrew : Yeah. I thought that was really good.
Deep: Awesome. Andy, thanks so much for coming on the show. That's all for this episode of Your AI Injection. As always, thank you so much for tuning in. If you enjoyed this episode and wanna find out more, you can google Xyonics and creative writing, or Xyonics and plagiarism.
Deep: Those are some of the themes that we covered. Also, please feel free to tell your friends about us, give us a review, and check out our past episodes at podcast.xyonics.com. That's podcast.X-Y-O-N-I-X.com.