NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
Lark Bunlush is walking ahead of me past the Rundstedt’s mansion on Wicket Street. I catch up with her, paused, leaning against pignut hickory. She looks across the river standing in front of the Macadamia estate which affords a good view.
“Hi Lark, not often I find you out early, walking around the neighborhood.”
“No, you never have!”
“Ah, can’t remember seeing you come to think of it.
“I was going to meet Diddlie up here.”
“Why not go by her place, just down the hill?
“She texted; Mr. Liddell is sick.”
“That sounds very bad!”
“It is.”
“Has she taken him to a vet?”
“Dr. Higgs is there now.”
“As early as this?”
“That’s what she said.”
“What’s wrong with him?”
“She didn’t say. She was pretty wound up about it.”
”I can imagine.”
“Diddlie, doesn’t keep regular hours.”
“True, I remember her calling me at 3:25 in the morning to confirm a lunch date.”
“Anyway, she told me to drop by later.”
“Poor Mr. Liddell, an extraordinary rabbit.”
“He is Liddell II, you know.”
“I had forgotten. I was thinking of Rabbit I.”
We walk on, into the shade of a sweet gum, where crows have gathered to exchanges call.
“I haven’t done this since Augie went back to Sacramento.”
“Walking around Fauxmont, you mean?”
“Yeah, just walking around without any other purpose.”
We step off the road among trees along the verge. Keeping the river in view between the trunks.
The ground drops off steeply toward the river’s leisurely flow at high tide.
Her jeans have caught on some thorns, by the trunk of an ironwood tree. Wisteria twists with a thick and snake-like reach into the upper branches.
“This tree doesn’t want to let me go!”
“It is not the tree. It’s the greenbrier.”
Ouch! That stuff is sharp.”
She tramples the periwinkle spreading towards the road.
Mind those blackberry shoots, they’ll scratch you too.”
Lark slowly pulls away from the vine.
“We are messy animals.”
Lark is free of the vine, and we walk on.
“How is Boyd?”
“He is back with those women in DC, I think.”
“Oh yes, Maynard Keyes’s friends?”
“Yeah, the tall guy with that grotesque pink car.”
“He did help Boyd, though.”
“Seduced him, more like.”
“By the way, have you been keeping up with OAnon?”
“I don’t know it.”
“You know, Sofonisba’s blog or website, or whatever it is. She moved in next door to Lou Waymarsh.”
“Okay, she is friends with Osiris Tarantula.”
“They are an odd pair, too.”
“I remember now. She started OAnon.”
“Yeah, some kind of feline thing.”
“Well, I thought it was a movement. Haven’t looked at it for months.”
“Sophie’s latest post is difficult, you might say.”
I hand her my phone with the relevant site.
“Strange grape for the ape with flees in its sneeze was fruit for thought and ought to be consumed and presumed with digestion and not digression.”
“Could it be a cipher?”
“Maybe, she is casting a spell, Fred.”
“A curse?”
“Yes, she is messing with Chatgpt?”
“Maybe it will start generating nonsense.”
“It does that already!”
“True enough, ‘Chat’ references a ton of stuff online to generate plausible sentences.”
“Right, the Large Language Model.”
“Oh, so that is what LLM stands for.”
“Oh! I wonder if Chat is large enough to source, OAnon?”
“Maybed OAnon is a chatbot?”
“There’s a thought! Can chatbots talk to each other?”
“What would they have to say?”
“I can’t wait for digressions on digesting grapes with fruity flees!”
“That will be the day of itchy laughter!”
“And scratchy talk!”
“I am not so worried about the new generative technologies.”
“There is a lot of panic in the media.”
“They are groping for attention.”
“It is basically a plagiarism machine.”
“Plagiarism?”
“Right, just repeating other people’s words.”
“Yeah, somebody called it a, ‘Stochastic parrot’.”
“You might say it sorts words.”
“Yeah, statistics and probability and all that.”
“Well, I guess you could call that thinking.”
“Sure, but not creating.”
“That is what the word, ‘generative’ suggests though.”
“They say it is trained.”
“Perhaps, ‘conditioned’ would be more accurate.”
“Well, it is just a bunch of code.”
“Sure, let’s get away from Anthropomorphism.”
“But that makes for more sensational headlines!”
“Yeah, remember calculators, were going to wipe out our numeracy?”
“Yes, no one would know the multiplication tables.”
“People are still doing arithmetic.”
“They don’t have to make change though.”
“Anything a machine can do better than us relieves us of having to do it.”
“That’s the problem!”
“No, it’s an opportunity to use imagination and be less mechanistic!”
“How many people will be capable of that?”
“We are going to find out.”
“This could take generations!”
“We have adapted to calculators and PCs, and cell phones, in our lives, why not this?”
“Well, our adaptation has been incomplete.”
“Sure!”
Wicket Street descends away from the river as it turns gradually around the Macadamia estate.
A fox crosses the road ahead and sits down to watch us as casually as a pet dog.
“This is where I wish I had a dog.”
“Yes, they generally run away from dogs.”
“Just one loud bark!”
The fox strolls towards us and goes into Mac’s grounds through a dark gap in the yew hedge. Shrieks of a blue jay are followed by noisy sparrows all emerging from the yew at once. They settle in the scented Japanese honeysuckle smothering some privet.
“That fox got a lot of attention!”
“And we are poisoning the planet, which also needs more attention.”
“It needs more action!”
“And, fewer promises, or ‘undertakings’ as they are reported.”
“I still think disaster could accompany generative tech.”
“Oh, it will spread misinformation and provocations.”
“Right and people will believe that stuff.”
“After a while, we’ll learn to tell the transformer’s stuff from a person’s.”
“What transformer?”
”Fred, you need to talk to Diddlie.”
”I do, quite often.”
”Well she told me that gtp stands for; ‘generative pre-trained transformer’.”
”I can only make a vague guess about the meaning of that!”
“Well, Did. can tell you more.”
“Whatever it is, it can produce gifts to Macadamia’s campaign!”
“Something else to wind people up.”
“Don’t you find that dangerous?”
“Sure, so is climate change.”
“You know, I was talking to bel and Steve about this, and she said, ‘Think of all the stale repetitious vocabulary we tend to use.’”
“As in online comments?”
“I guess…”
“Seems like ‘Chat’ might just spread cliches.”
“Bel asked, what is going on when we speak?”
“We voice words!”
“Right but how does a thought get into words?”
“How? We just do it!”
“Exactly, it is hard to say what is going on there.”
“It seems like magic.”
“Yes, something as ineffable as a thought becomes a sound loaded with intention.”
”With meaning.”
”Yeah, and what can a computer mean?”
“Algorithms, that’s all it has.”
“Well, they are intended to do something.”
“Yeah, by a programmer.”
“Right, and they end up reflecting the programmer’s biases.”
“I think we are broaching a huge question.”
A thick fallen branch blocks the road. It broke on impact, crumbling in several places. Lichen covers the bark on the lee side and the wood looks wet and rotten.
“Let’s go around here.”
Lark leads us back on to the verge. Stepping carefully through thick ivy and back onto the curving road.
“There she is!”
Lark waves her arms above her head as if signaling to an approaching rescue mission.
Diddlie is striding up the hill with her head down and hands in her peacoat pockets. She veers across the road toward us.
“How’s Mr.?”
“Higgs says he has dysentery, or something.”
“He is going to be fine, Did.”
”Well, I disagree. Mr. Liddell has other symptoms he seems to be ignoring.”
“He will be fine Did.”
“He better, be!”
They have been talking past each other in an embrace, right ear to left ear. Diddlie moves back.
“Dr. Higgs is doing tests.”
“That will lend weight to his argument!”
“Well, he is expert in his field.”
“Is he the one from the Hadron Animal Hospital?”
“That’s right, at the shopping center Fred. That is where he cures critters.”
A five lined skink flashed blue in the sun as it got out of our shadows and under a piece of broken concrete disturbing a dead oakleaf, to get in.
