“I’m a huge fan of death. I’m a groupie for death. I think it’s the metronome of our existence. And without rhythm, there is no melody.”
-Guillermo del Toro, speaking to Terry Gross on “Fresh Air” about “the torment of eternal life” and his adaptation of Mary Shelley’s gothic classic, Frankenstein.
Not long into Guillermo del Toro’s excellent new adaption of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the titular character (played by Oscar Issac) finds himself in front of a disciplinary tribunal at the Royal College of Medicine. Addressing an audience full of be-wigged academics with elaborate facial hair, Victor Frankenstein rails against what he sees as a staid and ossified approach to teaching (and thinking about) science and medicine:
“Birth! Birth is not in our hands, is it? Conception, that spark, the animation of thought and soul—that is in God’s hands. God. But death. Ah, now there lies the challenge that should be our concern. Who are we to do so? We are not gods, are we? But if we are to behave as immodestly as gods, we must, at the very least, deliver miracles … ignite a divine spark in these young students’ minds. Teach them defiance rather than obedience. Show that man may pursue nature to her hiding places and stop death. Not slow it down, but stop it entirely.”
This Victorian-era TED Talk—delivered in a medical theater instead of an amphitheater—does not go well for Victor, especially after a gruesome anatomical demonstration freaks out the already skeptical panel of judges. But while the medical establishment wants nothing to do with Frankenstein’s hubris, fate has delivered a venture capitalist (of sorts) in the audience—a wealthy arms dealer who, for a highly personal and comical reason I will not ruin, is willing to take him both literally and seriously.
“This is the future,” declares Victor as he’s escorted out of the building. “This is possible. Why not study it? Why not quantify it?”
The International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago holds many delights — an iron lung, a collection of old forceps, an X-ray shoe fitter. But none of them stuck with me quite like the glass case that held two fishbowls brimming with stones removed from people’s bodies. gallstones, kidney stones, and bladder stones. According to the placard, these were a gift from one Dr. S. Robert Freedman.
The display begs many questions. But let’s start with the obvious one: why? Why did Dr. Freedman keep so very many stones?
One cold night a couple of weeks ago, my family and I bundled up to bike out to a park in one of Seattle’s northern suburbs. We have a routine for such trips after all these years. First we layer, and then we bedeck our bikes with lights: front lights, back lights, hub lights, even flashing holiday lights sometimes. High-vis is key; as my wife says, “Trust no car.”
We were headed to a Star Party. I had never heard of a Star Party until my wife told me about it. “It’s basically a bunch of people set up big telescopes in a field and you go look at stars,” she said. She’s good at finding out about these sorts of things—gatherings you had to be In The Know about, but quirky ones.
To try anything that depends on clear nights in the dead of the western Washington winter is to tempt fate, but the weather gods were feeling charitable. When we pedaled into the park, we could see the shadow of a man and a large telescope on the dark side of the public restrooms. He was drinking something steaming from a travel mug, and appeared to be alone.
It was a party, all right.
We ambled over. The telescope was pointed at some requisite bright dot just above the horizon that I could see through Seattle’s vague orange glow. I guessed the dot was a planet, but I wasn’t sure. Stars and their ilk are like plants for me, in that I find them benignly fascinating and even know a few of the more obvious ones. I don’t mean to sound dismissive. Every year, I pledge that this will be the year that I finally buckle down and learn more. But so far I have yet to.
“Wanna take a look?” the man asked us. “It’s on Jupiter.”
I sensed my daughter stiffen next to me. She is in the midst of a Greek Myths phase, and sometimes takes it as a personal affront whenever anyone refers to a member of the Greek Pantheon by their Roman name. But she didn’t hold this fellow’s indiscretions against him, duly clambering up on the milk crate he had set out as a step stool so she could look through the eyepiece.
“See Jupiter?” the man asked.
“Uh-huh,” my daughter said.
“And those dots around it?” the man said. “Those are the Galilean moons: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Callisto.”
“Io!” My daughter perked up, the skies coming alive for her. “She was the cow!” She started rattling off bits of story about Io and Zeus and Hera and Hermes, and then Europa, and Ganymede and Zeus, and other figures whose names I could sort of recall, both from her researches, and also my own Greek Myths phase from decades ago.
A small group approached with a couple of kids. They stood behind us to wait their turn. “That one’s moving!” one of the kids shouted. “Is it a shooting star?”
“That’s a plane,” the man said. He turned to the adults. “Jet City,” he said in a What can you do? kind of way. “And I work at Boeing,” he added, perhaps as an apology.
We left him and went to another part of the field, where two other telescopes were set up. Here there actually was a party. Maybe fifteen or twenty people were standing in the dark and enjoying light astronomical cocktail chatter while their kids scampered about. One fellow was gesturing into the sky with the most amazing laser pointer I had ever seen, using it to show the Pleiades, Sirius, Aldebaran in the constellation Taurus, other distant wonders. But most of the crowd had gathered around a big man who was holding forth in front of a commensurately big telescope.
“Are there any mothers here?” the man was saying when we sidled to the front. He was like a carnival barker. “Where are the mothers?”
For a couple of moments no one around us said a word. The man scanned the assembled before zeroing in on my wife and daughter and me, since we were, I realized, standing closest to him. He looked somewhat theatrically from my wife to the child at her side who was presumably hers, thus making her A Mother.
There seemed to be no point in denying it. My wife tentatively raised her hand.
“Excellent!” the man said. “C’mon over here.” My wife walked to his scope. “Know what you’re looking at?” he asked as she peered into the eyepiece.
My wife shook her head.
“I’ve got it just a little below Orion’s belt, on the sword,” the man said. “That’s the Orion Nebula. What you’re looking at is a star nursery. It’s where stars are born! Those are all baby stars!”
“Wow,” my wife said. “There are so many.”
After my daughter had a look and was suitably impressed, I took my turn. There was the immediate paradox of the eyepiece’s diameter against the breadth of the view it afforded: one inch, millions of miles. They were amazing, all the tiny points of light. I tried to do some rough conversions of scale as I stared: of how big those white dots actually are, how far the Earth is from them, how old they are becoming, how they’re expanding and gloriously hot and their light that I’m seeing now is already gone, and all the other perceptual gymnastics astronomy necessitates that in the end start to make my head hurt, but in a good way. I stepped away to give someone else a turn. I’ve known of Orion for how long? And all I ever saw were the biggest, brightest stars and Betelgeuse. How had I missed the rest of it all these years? There was so much scattered about, waiting to be noticed, blazing in silence, if only I could be bothered to look.
I found my wife and daughter and said something to this effect, full of feeling, with a certain amount of handwaving. “Mm-hm,” my wife said. “And yet, somehow, you still find a way to make it all about you.”
A fair point. But I am human. We are good at making it about us.
We thanked the man with the big telescope. By then it was getting late, so we went back to our bikes. We switched on all the lights and pedaled out of the parking lot, checked for cars, turned onto the street, headed for home. My wife and daughter took the lead on our tandem bike, while I rode behind. I watched my daughter gesturing, could hear her enthusing about something to my wife, the two of them talking, and all the while the hub lights pulsed and twinkled like little stars, saying, Here we are, here we are, here we are.
I never knew it needed explaining until someone asked me — why is singletrack so much more fun than wider trails like double track or dirt roads? We’re talking here about mountain biking and the allure of the singletrack trail — a narrow path, usually 18 to 24 inches wide, that meanders through a given terrain.
The most obvious answer is that a singletrack is more aesthetically pleasing than a wider road.
But the sheer joy of navigating well-designed singletrack on a mountain bike goes beyond aesthetics. I’ve also done a lot of hiking in my life, but rarely have I felt compelled to let out an audible whoop while traversing a trail on foot.
Last weekend, while biking Crested Butte’s world-renowned singletrack, I hollered joyful cries more than once. I couldn’t help myself. I was that euphoric. The epic views of the West Elk Mountains surely contributed to my jubilation, but the beauty felt like icing on a cake. The joy I’d experienced was as much physical as cerebral.
I used to work at the Science news office in the American Association for the Advancement of Science office in DC. As anyone who’s been there will tell you, there’s something special about the AAAS building — the dark polished rock exterior, the spiral staircase that, as you climb from floor to floor, takes you past framed Science covers illustrating more than a century of scientific achievements.
What AAAS does carries weight. Which is why I was intrigued — very intrigued — to hear last year that the Science Press Package team had decided to run an experiment testing how well ChatGPT Plus could write its press releases.
I would probably have been alarmed by the news if I didn’t know the Science journals’ communications director, Meagan Phelan. I admire Meagan — we’ve been good friends since I worked in the DC office — and you will not find a more thoughtful, intellectually rigorous and caring person. If Meagan signed off on this experiment, I thought, it wasn’t just a reckless bid for efficiency, but a genuine attempt to understand LLMs better.
The year-long experiment began in 2023 and was published in September 2025. Curious how it went, I sent Meagan a message and she suggested I talk to Abigail Eisenstadt, one of the Science Press Package (SciPak) senior writers. Abigail led the study and wrote this white paper to describe its findings. (She also just did an interview about it on the Grammar Girl podcast.) Abigail let me ask her a bunch of questions and listened to my own rambling thoughts and fears about AI-powered science writing, and I came away feeling much better.
There’s lot to be worried about these days — including that generative AI is busily burying us alive in crap. But I am grateful to patient souls like Abigail, who set out to explore in a measured and deliberate way what these tools can and cannot do when we ask them to perform nuanced human tasks. We need thoughtful folks doing these experiments, if only to keep delineating and articulating the precious — and still distinct — boundaries between AI algorithms and our own remarkable human minds.
Here’s what Abigail told me about Science’s ChatGPT Plus experiment, and why it left her feeling more secure in her job, not less.
Note:This conversation was edited for clarity and brevity at 11:45pm, by my sleepy human brain and typo-prone fingers.Cases in point: 1) Mortifyingly, an earlier draft of this misspelled Meagan’s name with an h. 2) An earlier draft of this also failed to distinguish between all of AAAS communications and the Science journals press team. This interview pertains specifically to the Science press team, not the whole organization.
Emily: I know you’ve described this in detail elsewhere, but let’s start with the basics. What were the nuts and bolts of this experiment?
Abigail: Understanding the gist of what we did relies on understanding how we operate our press packages. Every Monday, we start drafting press briefs — three to six of them, depending on the week and our workloads. We write up summaries from our journals, and different writers represent different journals. I do the open access journal, Science Advances, but we also have specialty writers on Science Immunology, Science Robotics and other sibling journals.
What we wanted to do for this study — and this was back in 2023, before a lot of common knowledge about prompt engineering was around — was to see if Chat GPT Plus could use our outline structure, the template we rely on to write our summaries, to write research summaries too.
It wasn’t necessarily a yes or no question. It was — how much can it do it? If it can’t, are there ways it could evolve in the future so that it could?
What we did — because we’re already creating content every week — is take something that had already been published, so the embargo was already past, and run it through Chat GPT Plus, using three different prompts for summaries. We used the privacy mode option, so it wasn’t training anything.
One prompt was for a very general summary: Just tell me what the study is about. The other was more abstract, but in a way that you would hope would be accessible to journalists. The third was inspired by our own very specific press release template.
The LLM would produce these summaries, and I would send them back to the author who had written the human content and ask them to compare it to theirs. And it was very clear from the start of this project that there was no danger of us being supplanted.
I used to think AI was a hyped-up distraction. I thought it would do a clumsy job of things, and be annoying, but mostly harmless. I’ve changed my mind.
What initiated my change of mind was playing around with some AI tools. After trying out chatGPT and Google’s AI tool, I’ve now come to the conclusion that these things are dangerous. We are living in a time when we’re bombarded with an abundance of misinformation and disinformation, and it looks like AI is about to make the problem exponentially worse by polluting our information environment with garbage. It will become increasingly difficult to determine what is true.
Let me show you what I mean. I tried using the Google Docs AI tool to help me write this piece. Here’s what it said:
This is just weird. I’ve never changed my mind about the idea of “everything in moderation” and I’m not sure I’ve even ever said anything about “everything in moderation” publicly, much less declared that I’d changed my mind about it. Nor have I said that I believe it’s better to avoid processed foods and sugary drinks. Sure, that’s probably a good idea, but this is not something I’ve ever framed that way. It feels like it’s inventing thoughts for me. It also uses the real title of my book, but a fabricated subtitle that’s totally off the mark. Huh?
I tried again.
More complete nonsense! Nothing in this article is true. The article it references does not exist. This is just a pile of crap. And yet — I can imagine that this information might be plausible to someone who didn’t know me well. I mean, I’ve written quite a lot about sports and statistics, and I’ve done a lot of debunking stories, so the framing of the fake stories (pointing out flaws in popular ideas) isn’t unreasonable.
I did note that Google’s AI bot comes with a disclaimer: “This is a creative writing aid, and is not intended to be factual.” Ok sure.
I had similar experiences with ChatGPT, though I’ve noticed that the newer versions are less prone to obvious errors than the earlier ones I tried last spring. It’s still easy to trip up though. Consider this silly question I just asked it about my old boss.
This one made me laugh so hard I had beer coming out my nose.
Some people call these errors “hallucinations,” but Carl T. Bergstrom and C. Brandon Ogbunu don’t buy it and neither do I. Chat GPT is not hallucinating, it’s bullshitting, Bergstrom and Ogbunu write at Undark:
ChatGPT is not behaving pathologically when it claims that the population of Mars is 2.5 billion people — it’s behaving exactly as it was designed to. By design, it makes up plausible responses to dialogue based on a set of training data, without having any real underlying knowledge of things it’s responding to. And by design, it guesses whenever that dataset runs out of advice.
What makes these large language models effective also makes them terrifying. As Arvind Narayanan told Julia Angwin at the Markup, what ChatGPT is doing “is trying to be persuasive, and it has no way to know for sure whether the statements it makes are true or not.” Ask it to create misinformation, and it will — persuasively.
Which gets me to the latest disturbing example of how AI is going to make it much, much more difficult to parse truth from bullshit and science from marketing.
In the latest issue of JAMA Ophthalmology, a group of Italian researchers describe an experiment to evaluate the ability of GPT-4 ADA to create a fake data set that could be used for scientific research.* This version has the capacity to perform statistical analysis as well as data visualization.
The researchers showed that GTP-4 ADA “created a seemingly authentic database,” that supported the conclusion that one eye treatment was superior to another. In other words, it had created a fake dataset to support a preordained conclusion. This experiment raises the threat that large language models like GTP-4 ADA could be used to “fabricate data sets specifically designed to quickly produce false scientific evidence.” Which means that AI could be used to produce fake data to support whatever conclusion or product you want to promote.
The takeaway is that AI has the potential to make the fake science problem even worse. As the authors of the JAMA Ophthalmology paper explain, there are methods, such as encrypted data backups, that could be used to counteract fake data, but they will take a lot of effort and foresight.
The fundamental problem with AI is that it’s difficult to determine what’s authentic, and as AI cranks out a firehose of generated content and floods the zone with shit, it could become more and more difficult to parse real information amid an outpouring of AI-generated bullshit. If you thought the internet was bad before, just wait.
Note: This post first ran on Nov 11, 2023. Unfortunately, it’s still relevant.
*The version of Chat GPT-4 they used was expanded with Advanced Data Analysis (ADA), a model that runs Python.
Because I’m traveling today, to the annual science writers’ conference, I’ve taken the unusual step of running a guest post without clearing it with the rest of the LWON team. My sweet baby Chihuahua mix T.S. Eliot Nestor (pictured above) asked to respond to Our Jenny’s post this week (Little Dog Big Heart), in which she called small dogs “perpetual barkers of the piercing sort” and said they have “atrocious” breath, as well as strongly implying that they are not real dogs. I took dictation and have added rough translations.
Woof woof woof woof woof woof. You are wrong about me and my fellow smalldogkind. [Ed. note: I should clarify that he doesn’t actually know any other small dogs, or any dogs, because his idea of how to greet a dog is to lunge and bark wildly, and they don’t like it.]
Woof woof woof woof woooooffffff whine BARK BARK BARK. About the “atrocious” breath: I agree, and I bet my breath would smell more interesting if my mom would let me eat all the treasures I find on our walks. [Ed.: Dogs are gross. And despite his dislike of the toothbrush, his breath somehow smells great.]
Woof woof woof whiiiine whine whine. Bark! Whiiinnne. Am I “loyal to one and hateful to the rest of us”? No. I love my two humans equally, although Daddy is my current favorite, and I love everyone else too until they stop petting me and try to walk away, and then I hate them. This is not “hateful,” it is rational, because they are bad.
Woof woof woof woof woof bark bark bark bark. If you came over, I would probably bark at you, but “piercing” is unfair.
Whiiiiiine yip yip yip. You should come over some time and let me bark at I mean charm you.
Woof woof woof. Woof woof. Woof! Woof woof woof. In conclusion, I am definitely a real dog, because I love walks and bully sticks. [Ed.: The bully sticks are very small and he will do anything for a Churu cat treat]
Whiiiine Love, Eliot
Woof woof wooof woof woof woof. P.S. Thank you for Blue Dog.
Photos: Eliot’s official photographer, Helen Fields, obviously
I’ve never been a small-dog person. I get that they have a touch of cuteness to offer; they are, after all, tiny, furry things with big eyes, and some have silly faces, floppy ears, and goofy antics. But most that I’ve met are just perpetual barkers of the piercing sort, or teeth-bearing growlers, trying to be something they’re not. They’re loyal to one and hateful to the rest of us. And their breath is atrocious.
Me, I’ve had a Golden, a Weimaraner, and two Jindos, among others. Big dogs just seem more like real dogs to me.
A good friend of mine is a little-dog person through and through; I forgive her this misstep and I applaud her willingness to take needy ones, misfit toys if I ever saw them, into her home. I do have limits. Chihuahuas are a nope. One of hers, especially, hated me up until she could no longer see or hear, and even then I got a mean vibe from her; another was tolerant, barely, despite my gentle overtures. Neither struck me as adorable, despite the ears. They only made stronger my big-dog bias.
But recently my friend came home with a wee muppet, genetic tale unknown (but no Chihuahua DNA, methinks), who delights in the world and has been squirming into an empty pocket in my big-dog-packed heart.
She’s so small, only a cat harness will fit her—and she doesn’t need one anyway because when I walk her she trots gleefully by my side, looking up at me every few steps to make sure I’m still there. Her face is ridiculous, her neck recalls a meerkat, and her ear flops and foot taps—especially during her bestest Zoomies—are irresistible. Her fluffy face and naked body/rat tail are a hilarious combo. Most of all, the pup is never in a bad mood. She never stops smiling. Every greeting is a happy dance, tap tap tap, and an immediate request to be held. All she wants is to be in your arms. And mine. (Her breath is indeed a horror show, but we’ll let that go for now.)
Please know that for the most part, nothing has changed. I still gravitate toward the bigger, wolfier canines. Lately I’ve also come to fancy sighthounds, especially those lanky, huge-eared Podencos from Spain. Great Danes, too, have made my wish list.
But now, when I visit my friend, my first act after kicking off my shoes is scooping up that tiny animal, who is already at my feet doing circles and leaps, and cuddling her furry sweetness to my chest. If I stand, she give me a kiss and then rests her head against my shoulder. If I sit, she becomes a warm puddle in my lap. She doesn’t wiggle to get away, and rarely is there a reason to put her down. We’re both happy where she is.
