Skip to main content

"Robots do not possess and will never possess sensory memory"

This quote is from another intriguing piece entitled "On the Need to Touch Grass" in the City Journal on 3 March by Lee Siegel. He says:

Robots do not possess and will never possess sensory memory. Welcome to the age of robots.

And in this assertion, he provides me with one more piece of ammo, notwithstanding the current GPSchat tsunami, with which to press my claim that AI can't actually cut it in poetry. 

One of the essences of poetry is the cut through of association from the abstractions of mere word jumbles in the moment when the poem touches chords of sensory meaning in a reader or listener. Sure a code can auto-write a passable word salad poem by borrowing from existing creations in its data set, given a few parameters, but to hit a common or contrasting sensory nerve in a human audience mostly requires actual experience of that feeling. I don't completely dismiss the possibility that such a nerve can still be touched by accident or by random generation, but when a poetic work is the product of the trial of high volume variations someone still has to determine which variant is the one that touches the soul. That choice is not the computer's. It is a human's. But then what about the algorithm's ability to detect of the repeating pattern of such associations in its data set? Yeah. Maybe. But can it create new ones?

Agh!! But that's not the main reason why I was attracted to Lee Siegel's peice. It was these concluding words, as quoted above in the heading:

...Instead of continually expanding our sympathies by helping us to follow the thread of truth through dissimilarity, the moral imagination will shrink to nothing. And then any comparison, and any equivalence, is possible.

Yet again Lee Siegel seems to have briefly captured in these words the ephemeral and delicate flower of what some poetic souls are searching for in the turbulent and confusing jungle of human sensations, feelings, calculations and abstractions. He's also suggesting that this search is in peril for coming generations because of their disconnect from the world of the senses. On this point I'm inclined to argue that he may be underestimating the persistence of humanity's desire for the flesh, even in the face of its pursuit of the purity of abstractions. There is a fairly long tradition in human culture of this type of conflict.

I'm also informed Lee Siegel has written a book called Why Argument Matters. I'm now intending to read it, even though it seems destined to make me even more augmentative. You have been warned.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Michael Jackson, martyr ?

. Someone has to die for their beliefs to be a martyr . Drudge pointed to headlines last Friday saying that Jackson's was a " Death by Showbusines s". So in the sense that Jackson seems to have died for his belief in celebrity, yes, he might be called a martyr. I never got Michael Jackson. Thriller didn't thrill me at all ( Now Noel Coward, that's another story ). But I did get a bit of a kick from seeing others get him. He was boppy and catchy and slick, as well as monumentally fluffy and hugely impaired. What I struggle with is the apparently massive consequentiality of fluffiness and impairment like Jackson's. What is the fuss about the passing of a semi-talented song and dance weirdo from decades past? Boris Johnson, the London Mayor, has had a stab at explaining it to we mystified souls who struggle to get with the programme. He reckons it's just like Princess Di. And I agree, to the extent that I was almost as unprepared for and dumbfounded by th...
2 comments
Read more

Bullshit detection is our main AI protection

The volume of chatter in recent online musings about the hydra headed peril of AI dominance, is becoming ear piercing. These piercings will likely support even more garish burbles of thought to dangle decoratively in front of both the curious and accidental victims. A brief diversion - it seems one of the more remarked upon "tells" of the presence of AI in a piece of writing at the moment, is what I now know to call the " Em Dash " (_). Thank you NYT of 18 Sept 2025.  I'll keep an eye out for them. And I'll need to, if I'm to live up to the pleas of the balance of this post. The main subject of this post has been prompted by yet another article that Arts & Letters Daily has pointed me to recently. It's entitled " Large Language Muddle "  and is an editors article from an online magazine called "n+1" published in the Fall of 2025. The central proposition of this muddle piece seems to be that we human authors need to fight back...
Post a Comment
Read more

The list of "tell"words for LLM speak grows, but these Bots are now teaching us to speak like them ..

According to an article in the Washington Post on 20 August 2025 by Adam Aleksic " people are starting to talk like ChatGTP ".  The previous post here on the Realm pointed to some words that have been nominated as indicators that a Large Language Model (LLM) is the likely author of the piece. According to Mr Aleksic's article we can now add to our list of" delve ", " adept ", " realm " and " meticulous ", the words " intricate " and " commendable ".  As he says elsewhere, it is becoming hard to keep up. But his more telling point is that as LLMs become more and more prevalent contributors in our discourse, it's not just the bots that are using these words, we've all started using them more too; in our own speech.  It seems that the feedback loop from the LLMs gulping up so much of their own outputs when scraping content from the web, is intensifying this linguistic shift.   Aleksic says:  ...  In the two...
Post a Comment
Read more