AI | M Thomas Apple Author Page

ChatGPT is frighteningly good at writing literary analysis…

August 5, 2025
MThomas

🧾 Conclusion

Adam’s Stepsons takes the core questions of Blade Runner and distills them into a tight, character-driven drama. It lacks the sweeping visuals of Villeneuve or the noir cityscape of Scott — but it delivers something arguably more intimate:

A quiet horror — and quiet triumph — in the collapse of identity, where the artificial doesn’t just mimic life…

It replaces it.

Over the weekend (my first with no student work to grade — finally! — since April), I decided to ask our “old” friend ChatGPT if it could analyze my sci-fi novella Adam’s Stepsons. Really, I was just curious what it would say.

It said…a LOT.

It correctly interpreted the title (something that many readers apparently didn’t get). It correctly identified the main themes as part of a “post-humanism” sub-genre of science fiction. And once I gave it three short excerpts (from the near the end of the story), it gave a frighteningly accurate thematic and symbolic analysis of the entire novella…just from three short excerpts of a total of about six pages.

I won’t copy all it gave me (you all can go try on your own and see what it says!). But let me share what the program thought were key themes:

Who wants to train AI for free, hands up! 🙌

July 10, 2024
MThomas

Post a comment on Reddit, answer coding questions on Stack Overflow, edit a Wikipedia entry or share a baby photo on your public Facebook or Instagram feed and you are also helping to trainthe next generation of artificial intelligence.

https://apnews.com/article/genai-training-data-stack-overflow-reddit-9d71b75ec16c78c0d2c51cc46121c1a4

Well, if they’re scrubbing my public FB page for data,

Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

I’ll take up my vorpal sword and

One, two! One, two! And through and through

The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

O frabjous day!

PS I hope this helps hapless mindless office workers compose emails.

Techie here! (Aka geek)

March 26, 2024
MThomas

How has technology changed your job?

How has it not?

I’m a TESOL teacher. Learning to use technology — appropriately — has always been a part of my job.

It’s the “appropriate” part that has difficult to deal with the past few years.

Yeah. Hi, Chat.

Forget about Zoom, LMS, video editing software, and all sorts of online sites that don’t need any knowledge of programming language.

I was making my own web pages in basic HTML and JavaScript back when people still though InternetExplorer was a good browser.

But tech is nothing more than a tool. And tools can be used well and badly.

And often the simple tech of a piece of paper and a pencil are all you need. No bandwagon mentality here.

So if anything I would say that, although I have always used technology to some degree for my job, I have had the luxury of experience (and a lot of mistakes!) to figure out when technology can help my job, and when it just gets in the way.

(FWIW I also teach a one-semester class about language, identity, and technology. And yes, we do analyze our selfies.)

AGI by 2027? 2028? 2030?

March 11, 2024
MThomas

“It should be able to make a smarter AGI, then an even smarter AGI, then an intelligence explosion,” he added, presumably referring to the singularity.
https://futurism.com/artificial-superintelligence-agi-2027-goertzel?fbclid=IwAR2v9500C6hNEfhD4RehqCa04Dltys7KuVkyuepcgmiqoNhSBseMtpHojJs

Seriously. Am I the only one who thinks this is, like, a really, really, REALLY bad idea?

Asking AI to be more like Spock is only, well…

March 4, 2024
MThomas

For one of the models, asking the AI to start its response with the phrases “Captain’s Log, Stardate [insert date here]:.” yielded the most accurate answers.

“Surprisingly, it appears that the model’s proficiency in mathematical reasoning can be enhanced by the expression of an affinity for Star Trek,” the researchers wrote.
https://qz.com/ai-chatbots-math-study-star-trek-1851301719

Well, that was interesting!

February 1, 2024
MThomas

OK, so my post about a big ole spider got the most likes of any post in ten years of blogging about science.

I have so not got the zeitgeist of the 2024 blogosphere lol – anyway, thanks, all, for the “likes”! Although one person used AI to write a very meaningless comment about arachnophobia. What’s the point, man?

By the way, back to science and space stuff. I forgot to post about the Europa Clipper project back in October.

So here you go. (It’s too late to add a message, but the project obviously is going to take some time arriving there, and you can supposedly hear US Poet Laureate Ada Limón read her poem online, although I’ve had trouble with the audio lately:

“Arching under the night sky inky
with black expansiveness, we point
to the planets we know, we

pin quick wishes on stars. From earth,
we read the sky as if it is an unerring book
of the universe, expert and evident.

Still, there are mysteries below our sky:
the whale song, the songbird singing
its call in the bough of a wind-shaken tree.

We are creatures of constant awe,
curious at beauty, at leaf and blossom,
at grief and pleasure, sun and shadow.

And it is not darkness that unites us,
not the cold distance of space, but
the offering of water, each drop of rain,

each rivulet, each pulse, each vein.
O second moon, we, too, are made
of water, of vast and beckoning seas.

We, too, are made of wonders, of great
and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds,
of a need to call out through the dark.”

When AI becomes actual AI…

October 26, 2023
MThomas

We compared current scientific theories of what makes humans conscious to compile a list of “indicator properties” that could then be applied to AI systems.

We don’t think systems that possess the indicator properties are definitely conscious, but the more indicators, the more seriously we should take claims of AI consciousness.
https://theconversation.com/why-chatgpt-isnt-conscious-but-future-ai-systems-might-be-212860

Last year, an engineer for Google who was working on what was then called “LaMDA” (later released as “Bard”) claimed that the software had achieved consciousness. He claimed it was like a small child and he could “talk” with it.

He was fired.

Bard, ChatGPT, Baidu, and so forth are advanced chatbots built on what’s called “Large Language Models” (LLM) and can generate text in an instant.

But the programs are not AI, strictly speaking. They have no sentience.

AI and the future of warfare (as predicted)

September 23, 2023
MThomas

Both Russian and Ukrainian forces are integrating traditional weapons with AI, satellite imaging and communications, as well as smart and loitering munitions, according to a May report from the Special Competitive Studies Project, a non-partisan U.S. panel of experts. The battlefield is now a patchwork of deep trenches and bunkers where troops have been “forced to go underground or huddle in cellars to survive,” the report said.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/human-machine-teams-driven-by-ai-are-about-reshape-warfare-2023-09-08/

I found it interesting that many people online were commenting about Iain M Bank’s take on AI (for an in-depth analysis of his Culture series check this out on Blood Knife) and how he “predicted” all this.

Uh. You know, I’m not sure whether Banks wrote much about integrating traditional weapons with AI (since I haven’t read his series). But I do know that PK Dick wrote a short story called “Second Variety” about trench warfare and AI robots making more versions of themselves and taking over the world.

He wrote it in 1953.

(You can read it at Project Gutenberg.)

That is waaay before the Culture series.

Sigh. Read the classics, guys.

“Female” robots and other bias

September 6, 2023
MThomas

When we give AI a humanoid form, we typically choose the robot to have feminine characteristics. Are we playing on stereotypes?
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20230804-is-there-a-sinister-side-to-the-rise-of-female-robots

Isn’t it blindingly obvious?

All artificial intelligence, all robots and Chatbots and everything else electronically-programmed by a human being, will inevitably have human bias.

Even women prefer women’s voices to men’s when it comes to customer service.

On the other hand, women are also historically relegated to work with lower pay, lower status, kept out of positions of power — subject to the “male gaze.”

Now, we have AI that can be treated as sex objects. Even “married.”

So it is all “sinister,” as BBC asks?

Creepy, maybe. Sad, perhaps. Entirely predictable, definitely.

As we continue to lead more and more isolated individual lives, cut off from human contact and left unable to socialize, the rise of the “AI companion” seems inevitable…

AI “loses its mind” when fed AI-created drivel

August 19, 2023
MThomas

Source: https://twitter.com/tomgoldsteincs/status/1677439914886176768 (@tomgoldsteincs)

In other words, without “fresh real data” — translation: original human work, as opposed to stuff spit out by AI — to feed the beast, we can expect its outputs to suffer drastically. When trained repeatedly on synthetic content, say the researchers, outlying, less-represented information at the outskirts of a model’s training data will start to disappear. The model will then start pulling from increasingly converging and less-varied data, and as a result, it’ll soon start to crumble into itself.
https://futurism.com/ai-trained-ai-generated-data

So, as more and more lazy people ask AI to “write” for them, the programs get less and less accurate…

Or, as the authors of the study conclude, “…without enough fresh real data in each generation of an autophagous loop, future generative models are doomed to have their quality (precision) or diversity (recall) progressively decrease.”

I.e., the use of AI-generated content to train AI doesn’t work, and since there is already way too much AI-generated garbage all over the internet, it’s almost impossible to sort out which is which when the AI-creators “scrape” data from the web.

So…

See, machines can’t replace us entirely — their brains will melt!

But then again, that might not be so hopeful after all. When AI takes over the world, maybe it won’t kill humans; perhaps it’ll just corral us into content farms…

At least we won’t wind up as batteries.

Yet.

PS. I find it both hysterically amusing and disturbing that my blog program offers an “experimental AI assistant.” Granted, the program does let you know that AI-generated content accuracy is not guaranteed, but wth would I want to use AI for a personal blog? The whole purpose of a blog is to WRITE. AI-generated text is not writing. It is intellectual property theft.

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