The Last Word On Nothing

Like most journalists, I dread transcribing interviews. I can’t afford to pay other people to do it, so I’ve been experimenting with computer programs that use artificial intelligence to transcribe for me. Last week I tried one of the more advanced transcription programs, Otter, and its performance was nearly flawless.

I felt an odd sense of loss as I watched perfect phrases tumble down my screen at close to the speed of real speech. I wasn’t sad about the hours I’ll save hand-correcting transcripts. Instead, I mourned the bizarre, sometimes profane errors of my older transcription service, Trint.

I am generally more likely to cover the evolution of sponges than a Presidential race or sex scandal. But Trint seems to want me and my interviewees to talk about what everyone else is apparently talking about: politics and sex.

Trint inserts “Trump” and “Melania” into my transcripts seemingly at random, as well as words like “dick.” “There’s a lot of data on this, in terms of being a dick,” read the program’s mis-transcription of one of my recent interviews with a soft-spoken botanist.

I suppose Trint’s proclivities should not surprise me. Like all speech recognition programs, Trint uses statistical algorithms trained on large archives of recorded human speech to predict what is being said. Machine learning technology has a well-documented tendency to reflect the uglier aspects of society, including our racial biases, and Trint, launched in 2016, has been reared on our society’s collective chatter since Trump’s election.

I am tired of spending hours cleaning up my transcripts for the fact-checkers, and eager to find a more accurate program. But I will miss some of Trint’s bizarre word choices and its constant attempts to help me join the crowd. Trint’s errors can also be remarkably creative, like the brilliant AI-generated cookie names published on the blog AI Weirdness: Hand Buttersacks, Apricot Dream Moles, and Walps.

Can artificial intelligence be talented? Does it have anything important to say? I have no idea, but before abandoning Trint I want to celebrate its weirdness with the following poems. I didn’t write these poems, Trint did. It is not my fault that they insult Melania Trump or read like dystopian Radiohead lyrics. I am merely Trint’s transcriptionist. Please share your own AI-generated poems in the comments!

Trint’s mistakes – suggestions? Strokes of genius? — are in bold.

Emily Underbite

Hello, Siberia

It’s Emily Underbite

I’m a relic

I haven’t found a gold star yet

My dream has no leverage

I hurt like imitation

Electoral thinking

What organism has analogous or homologous structures and functions to Melania’s? A slug, a lobster?

People have a lot of trouble with electoral thinking, which is essentially understanding the difference between two sponges.

I mean, what can you expect from a sponge?

The sea of science

I landed in the sea of science

But forgot to control for indifference

I found colonies of people

thinking like the rich

Dr. Dick

Off the record, I should have been a novelist

I should write a book about this

It’s really interesting because he’s a great guy

This field is not nearly as sexist as

These are great guys

I didn’t have beers with them but, they, just, it’s funny

Blindspots

Anyway, we’re getting off topic

Talk about that another time

He’s the one who will make the final decision

about whether to write a story about Dr. Dick

Self Confidence

We have purified a sense of self-confidence

and put it in a dish

We watch it over time under microscopes

We discover that these cells are society

and that they exist now

to receive Google’s censoring

The Quarter Century

There is a procedure called the quarter century

The obstetrician inserts a needle

into the identical pain, the ultrasound

They are looking for data in the place

where something is created

It happens in a second

A coordinated contraction of cells

You get to the biological crux and it quakes

You pick apart what the cells are doing

They are talking to each other

We’re talking about the human organism

the integrity of the network

that travels from the spinal cord to the Atlantic

Sea levels of cortisol

Pathways of ghostly perception

The wiring is in place by the third trimester

All ethics should begin from and proceed from facts

Evil Species

You’re asking for my opinion?

Correct.

The Master of the Universe is a giant cat playing with a ball of yarn. We are the evil species on the planet and the end of species. We have ascended to the point of occupying every inch on the planet that we can identify and to modify the nature of ourselves. This a very defensible biological argument for the termination of multiplicity.

Drafted

I’m hoping to get drafted today

or over the weekend

Then we’ll go through another round of edits

Olé!  Olé!

Image info:

1) Drawing of an early cyborg, Wikipedia

2) Drawing of the Tandonia sowerbyi land slug, Wikipedia

3) Vintage illustration from the Book of Limericks, 1888

4) Ultrasound scan, Nevit Dilmen, Wikimedia

5) Kittens and Cats; a Book of Tales, by Eulalie Osgood Grover; 1911; Boston, Houghton Mifflin.

6) Detail from a letter by William Pitt,Wikipedia