Something totally non-political (I think, though I’m sure someone will prove me wrong), but I thought this piece, an essay from someone I’ve never read, was insightful. Here is the final graf.
Despite impossible schedules and emotional fatigue, some friends continue returning. They send memes during meetings. They remember your important dates. They call you out-of-the-blue. Not because it is convenient. But because somewhere, beneath all the exhaustion adulthood imposes, they still consider your inner life important. Sometimes it is simply the stubborn decision to keep returning to people despite the world constantly training you to prioritise everything else.
I think the essay rings true, but it fails to note that as we get older, we don’t have many opportunities to make new friends. We aren’t diving into new hobbies, checking out different places, finding ourselves with people who we don’t know. I’ve come to the realization that the relationships I have, because they are here in Japan, have an extra measure of fragility. Anyway, something non-political for y’all.
This reminds me of some calls I need to make. And my wife may yet take me to live in Japan … how is it?
This article has been on my mind, in a melancholy sort of way. I have long realised that new friends seem (almost by definition) insubstantial compared to old friends, and as the ranks of old friends thin out I think often and with resignation about Christopher Hitchens saying you can’t make old friends. Such is life, I guess.
By the way, reading some of the comments, various people seem to be convinced it is written by AI, with many of the tell-tale signs. I have already gathered in the past that I am not any good at spotting when that is the case – does anybody here with experience of this phenomenon have an opinion on whether this is indeed AI generated?
“Bottom Line
The author is legitimate and previously wrote authentic columns. However, this specific article shows a clear stylistic shift consistent with heavy or full AI generation, corroborated by both detector tools and in-depth textual forensics. The “quiet grief” it describes now includes the quiet grief many readers feel upon realizing the essay itself may be an optimized simulation of human reflection rather than an unoptimized presence.
The debate continues because the piece is well-crafted and the topic universal, but the evidence tilts strongly toward AI origin.”
Is the article AI-generated
Steve, the place is matching my energy. If I were the hard charging person in my 20’s, convinced the world was changing and I could do something, I’d probably find it agonizing, but at this point in time, it suits me fine. My wife is a bit upset at inflation and often points out x is more expensive or do we really need to buy y and it worries me too, but more for my daughters than for me.
I detected an AI generation whiff to it, but it seemed more with the author polishing it up rather than one of those 101% AI generated things, which is what I want my students to do, so I’m not as sensitive to that. Unfortunately, I’m asking my students to do research, but a lot of the things they find are AI generated, but if I were to demand that they only find things related to the subject that are not AI generated, they would probably have analysis paralysis (the good ones, the bad ones would just churn it out).
gftnc – It’s hard to say how much of it is AI generated, but it certainly looks to me like it was, at the very least, punched up by a run through one of the LLMs. There’s a lot of affective language that is being strung together with very little concrete detail to ground any of it in one person’s individual life experience. The details are all vague, generic, and universal, as are the sentiments being expressed. It works, but it works by stringing together a lot of commonly expressed sentiments in ways that sound eloquent. To use a musical metaphor, it’s more blues jam than sonata. It riffs on a basic form rather than complicating or developing a distinctive initial statement.
Doesn’t mean it’s not evocative or relatable. Even if it is AI slop, or a patchwork of human writing and punchier language mixed in by LLM based on its own special mix of plagiarism purée, it’s aiming dead center of the human sentiment bell curve, which gives it a relatable quality even if there are no specific life details to be found anywhere in it.
I predict that in the next five years we will see a writerly backlash against this sort of writing and a push for essay genres that are cantankerously and distinctively personal in both voice and content.
I thought the writer intended to be generic rather than specific. The purpose is to speak to all of us old people so we can fill in the details from our own lives.
A a friend posted on Facebook about an anecdote about how Mickey Mantle was a rookie who stood up for Elston Howard, first African-American player for the Yankees. He pointed out that the problem was that Mantle was a rookie in 1951 and Howard didn’t join the Yankees until 1955, so it was impossible for the rookie Mantle to take a stand for Howard. So while there might have been some truth Mantle standing up for Howard, the idea that Mantle as a rookie had his value system so straight that he didn’t blink is bs.
It’s interesting that LLMs are able to target our desire for a happy ending/stirling anecdote. It’s designed to move us and make us feel better about ourselves. This is why nous’ comment “It’s aiming dead center of the human sentiment bell curve” is so on target.
I should add that LLMs are also trained to agree with the prompter, and this is also part of a strategy for getting people to engage with the LLM more frequently and to rely on it for validation:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aec8352
As far as adult friendships go, I’ve found that hobbies and interests still have strong potential. I’ve met or deepened relationships with several new people through playing table top role-playing games – mostly since the pandemic. I’ve met and interacted personally with many people through heavy metal subculture. I’m meeting more through getting involved in bicycle advocacy and environmental stuff. Several of the friendships have even persisted after one of us has lost interest in the thing that brought us together in the first place.