My Interview With Former Employees
Megan McArdle started a recent Washington Post column by quoting a comic:
On the Internet,” says the famous New Yorker cartoon, “nobody knows you’re a dog.” In hindsight, the artist should have added “yet.”
Here’s the joke she’s talking about:
Peter Steiner drew the famous cartoon for The New Yorker way back in 1993, when the internet was barely starting to toddle. McArdle went on to write that she fed some old, unpublished work into artificial intelligence programs to see if they could correctly identify the author—in this case, her—based strictly on written words.
Spoiler alert—they did.
She explored the potential for good—vicious internet trolls might not be so free to sling slop if they could be identified—and for bad—people could be unmasked for innocently asking for advice, sharing their opinions, or being quoted by law enforcement or journalists when they believed they would remain anonymous.
I thought about this in relation to a recent interview I did with two journalists, Richard Ray and Bryan Lochhead for their highly entertaining This Just In podcast.
I worked with Rich and Bryan at FOX4 (KDFW-TV) in Dallas-Fort Worth. It was a fun interview, talking about my going from TV news director to mystery writer. They went easy on me, though we did get into a few topics I didn’t expect. Among them: hiring an anchor who later married Clint Eastwood, and the day I thought I was about to get fired.
And my first thought was about what I was wearing.
AI looks for patterns and distinctive use of words. I think it would have a hard time modeling my use of language. Listening to myself answer their prompts I had to laugh. I say uh and um far too often. If you’ve ever diagrammed sentences—a classroom exercise I once loved—you would have a hell of a time trying to diagram my meandering remarks. I bopped all over the place, from one digression to the next, not always returning to the point I was aiming for.
Just for grins, I had ChatGPT diagram that sentence for those who did not learn sentence structure this way. When I write I can still almost hear the voice of my fourth-grade teacher, but I abandon the rules when I talk, especially if I’m animated by interesting topics like those brought up by Rich and Bryan.
I can’t blame it all on taking cold medicine before the interview. I mentioned this observation to my husband, and he responded with his barely suppressed eyeroll that said, “You do that all the time.”
It’s true. I know I do. Sometimes it’s hard to believe I ever worked in TV news where time was measured in seconds and every word counted* (as Vicky Robeson thought in Parallel Secrets, my first book.)
I enjoy talking. It’s so much faster than writing. My mind is much less disciplined than it had to be when I was working or has to be when I’m writing. I like it this way. I will never write two thousand words before lunch, but I’ll easily speak that if I can find someone to listen. I’m fine with that. I enjoy letting my mind wander around exploring the random thoughts that pop into my head.
I just hope and pray that we don’t come to the day when an AI program can read our thoughts, though I assume that is the end goal of too many.
I take some comfort in knowing AI will have trouble tracking the bouncing ball that is my thought process. And I never, ever plan to put a few of those thoughts into writing. How about you?
*Just for grins, I put that phrase into ChatGPT to see if it appeared anywhere (I didn’t use the programs McArdle mentioned—this was just an exercise in mild curiosity.) ChatGPT didn’t find it, which in a way was slightly depressing. On the other hand, in its typical suck-up fashion it said: It reads as original. If anything, it feels like a clean, familiar idea expressed in a fresh way—not something lifted or overused.
That’s not so bad.