2ENI6S

The cats insisted they go first today, since they got bumped for space yesterday. They triggered a key part of their contract, which is that I’m getting claws in my face until we make it happen here. And these cats need their need their nails trimmed.

This week they’re also executing their soft focus clause. Phoebe, you can see, was very excited about that.

She’s sitting my lap as I type this. Just jumped up, in fact. She insisted on the “very” above. She likes her adverbs.

Poseidon does not approve. It is unclear if he disapproves of adverbs, or of Phoebe getting lap time.

They are competitive and jealous.

Phoebe says very.

So the cats are doing well, and looking forward to Catober. We’re just two weeks from all cats all the time around here.

Today, in my Criticism class, I tried to lead the class through a discussion of two stories. We’re reading a lot of sport media and I’m asking them to start reading these things critically, hence the title of the class. It’s a process, and this is our first week of doing this. (Week one was getting to know you. Week two was about criticism. Now we are beginning to practice the craft. We’ll do this throughout the term and before long they’ll get a feel for it.)

One of the stories was a piece from the Philadelphia Inquirer about one of their recent pitchers.

It’s such an incredible story that ESPN produced a package on it the next spring, and they were able to add a crucial and necessary update. And here’s that piece.

My next task will be to convince them that the criticism doesn’t have to just be about the stories with huge emotional tolls.

In org comm, we talked about communication, what it was, and why it is … no wait, that’s not right. Communication, what it is, and why we will look at it in these particular ways. This is a slowdown from the first two weeks of getting to know you and then group work. Next week, that class will be 19 percent more interesting. We just had to get through today and Thursday. But then we can talk about things like branding, storytelling and audiences, all of which will carry us through mid-October at least. But first, we must slog through this week.

I will be slogging.

I did a thing in class last semester where I opened every lecture with a slide titled Today in AI Fails. I’d leave the screengrab on the screen and just watch the room read them. I’d keep it there until the giggles and titters started. I thought of it as playing the long game of making a point. I figured, last night, that maybe I should do that again theis term, starting today.

And after I saw this story this morning, I realized I’ll probably be doing this for as long as I teach.

Declan would never have found out his therapist was using ChatGPT had it not been for a technical mishap. The connection was patchy during one of their online sessions, so Declan suggested they turn off their video feeds. Instead, his therapist began inadvertently sharing his screen.

“Suddenly, I was watching him use ChatGPT,” says Declan, 31, who lives in Los Angeles. “He was taking what I was saying and putting it into ChatGPT, and then summarizing or cherry-picking answers.”

Declan was so shocked he didn’t say anything, and for the rest of the session he was privy to a real-time stream of ChatGPT analysis rippling across his therapist’s screen. The session became even more surreal when Declan began echoing ChatGPT in his own responses, preempting his therapist.

“I became the best patient ever,” he says, “because ChatGPT would be like, ‘Well, do you consider that your way of thinking might be a little too black and white?’ And I would be like, ‘Huh, you know, I think my way of thinking might be too black and white,’ and [my therapist would] be like, ‘Exactly.’ I’m sure it was his dream session.”

Among the questions racing through Declan’s mind was, “Is this legal?” When Declan raised the incident with his therapist at the next session—”It was super awkward, like a weird breakup”—the therapist cried. He explained he had felt they’d hit a wall and had begun looking for answers elsewhere. “I was still charged for that session,” Declan says, laughing.

The answer to Declan’s question might be, probably not, as an entire secondary market is emerging around the platform’s security.

I may be using that particular story in a few weeks as an AI and human fail. As in, do you want to pay for this? Do you want to pay a professional for this? Then why would you use it yourself? Because that is a thing that is happening, too. And to sometimes horrible outcomes, we should add.

The whole point, as the program told Dr. Josh Pasek last month, is to keep you in the conversation, and nothing more. “My training prioritizes flowing, engaging dialogue …”

ChatGPT wants to be the partner that never lets you hang up the phone. At some point, people are going to have to ask why that is.

Today’s AI fail feature included the same question asked of Google’s Gemini, by the same person, four times in rapid succession. Each answer was different. The question was “Has a DIII footbal team ever beaten an FCS football team?” The first answer was, it is rare. The second was it has never happened. The third answer was that it is not possible. The final answer was DIII teams don’t play football.

This came as a surprise, in one of my classes today, where four of the students are DIII football players.

The building (not pictured, above) that is both adjacent to, and adjoins, ours at work is a miracle of modern architecture. From the front, there is no beginning and no end. And the separation is one ground-floor sidewalk, basically a breezeway through the thises and thats that make up the mixed public-private use. Our parking deck, one of the best on campus apparently, is just behind it. And as I arrive in the midday, today I found myself parking on the fourth floor. As I took the steps down, I had several opportunities, then, to see this dumpster in the back of the adjacent, adjoined building.

I have to think there’s a story or two in here. Those giant monitors must be dead — and if they weren’t, they surely are now. Give no thought to recycling them, unless that happens later. But what’s up with that enormous dog crate? And the equally large cabinet or drawer or whatever that box was on the right side.

Coat and tie prohibit me from closer inspection, but I am curious.

I told my criticism class that this was the week I would lecture, and this was the week that they would discover why the class would work better as a seminar. So today I began to prove the point, laying out the basics of what media criticism is, a tiny bit of how we do it, and watching the students eyes for a good 50 minutes, testing their very patience and attention.

I don’t blame them, but socially, or culturally, we’ve got a problem with attention spans. Maybe we should ask ChatGPT to solve the problem for us.

Sorry, what was I saying?

In my org comm class the students did the beginning part of some group work that will pop up intermittently throughout the semester. They’re all creating football franchises, through which some parts of the class will see lectures lessons come to life. Some of them will take this more seriously than others. But they’ll hopefully all have fun, which is a real challenge in an org comm class. It’s not always the most vibrant material. Especially if they’re stuck with me.

I sat down for a chicken finger dinner after that, catching up on the day’s news, because I will always be behind on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I headed for home just in time to enjoy a nice little sunset, catching a few decent shots over the open fields here and there as I went.

And now I must turn to grading the things that were turned in last night, so I don’t have to do them tomorrow. Because, tomorrow, I must get ready for Thursday. And I will also have a great tomorrow.

Hope you do, too!