Quantum Embarrassment

Recently my latest book reached the exciting stage of being ready to be read by a select group of test readers. This is a huge milestone as up until that point the book may have seemed like a figment of my imagination to my friends. The writer, director, actress and all-round super-talent Alice Lowe asked on Twitter last year whether anyone experienced a terrible sense of embarrassment at having created something. Many sympathised with her. I felt it in my bones. I don't like to bring the subject of my writing up, and whenever I do it's invariably apologetically. I stumble over my words and undermine any possibility of sounding like the sort of person capable of writing a book. Or more to the point, capable of writing a good book.

Every writer likes to think their books are good, or they wouldn't bother writing them. Up until the point that someone else reads them, they remain as good as you believe them to be. After that, however, whatever potential you believe they have will be tested in the real world. It will become apparent how well you have assessed your own work, for better or worse. It's a bit like quantum mechanics, where particles can exist in a state of superposition until observed, at which point the superposition collapses to a single readable position. Also, much like quantum mechanics, the more you learn about how your book does or doesn't work, the more your sense of unease increases. Surely, you think, this cannot possibly be how the world works? Can my readers really not understand how my protagonist made the rocket launcher work, and that's how the penguin got stuck up Elon Musk's bumhole? It is a reckoning, but sharing a book with others is usually the goal of writing one and test readers are a vital first step to getting it ready for that.

I only use a handful of test readers. They are all people whose opinions I trust and whose tastes in fiction vary. They also give feedback in different ways. Some with detailed notes, others mostly verbally. I appreciate all of their input and know that I am lucky to be able to count on them to involve themselves in this sordid and embarrassing business of writing a novel. I have to remind myself of this whenever I actually get their feedback because until they do, as mentioned earlier, my book is perfect. I wouldn't have let anyone read it if it weren't, so to have that superpositional perfection collapsed into something that still needs some work is quite disappointing while it is happening to me. It's a peculiar kind of disappointment though. I'm not so conceited that I really think my book is perfect. I've read a lot of books, and there are very few of those I would call perfect. It's more that I hope it's perfect. It's the same kind of hope you have when buying a lottery ticket. You know that the odds of winning the jackpot are astronomical, but nonetheless you hope you'll win. You wouldn't have bought the ticket otherwise.

The prospects for a book are much better than those of a lottery ticket however. When you lose the lottery, to play again you will face exactly the same odds as you did before. There's no way to improve them. With a book your test readers have hopefully given you some insight into what needs changing to make improvements. Before that can happen, there comes that most agonising of literary purgatories – waiting to accept that yes, you are going to have to do some editing.

There are lots of very convincing reasons for resisting the editing process:

• Your writing isn't unclear, it's just these particular readers that couldn't understand it.
• You like the plot just the way it is.
• It's a Monday. What sort of madman edits on a Monday?
• Actually you can't possibly edit this week.
• The flat really needs a thorough hoovering.
• You don't want to.
• Fine. Okay. Maybe the week after next?

The truth is that once I've had all my readers' feedback I definitely will have to do some editing. I know this so keenly that I'm writing it here, and yet I will work my way all the way through the above bullet points like the stages of grief until I finally sit down with my manuscript and get to work. This time isn't completely wasted. In truth I tend to work out what needs to change in my head before I actually physically edit the thing. In broad strokes of course. I'm not walking around with my manuscript memorised like some sort of idiot savant. You can take the idiot part for granted.

As to the embarrassment of having written a book? Maybe embarrassment is a natural response. Writing a book is a ridiculous thing to do. It takes a lot of time and effort and for that reason not many people attempt it. Add to that the chances of writing a good book, one that people actually want to read? I've already said I've read very few perfect books, but as much as I might wish to write a perfect book, I would be very happy with one that is an entertaining read. That's all. I'm not trying to make high art, but then again I suspect the sort of people who do try to make high art feel no embarrassment at telling people so. And if you are aiming for such lofty literary heights, what on earth are you doing reading this? You've probably slipped one place down the Booker longlist with every paragraph of my drivel that you've read!

Knackerback

The title of this post isn't the upsetting echo of a poorly remembered children's TV programme. Instead, more upsettingly, it's an abridged summary of my current physical health. I have knackered my back. To be more specific, its ongoing state of knackeredness has entered a new period of further belligerence. It's getting better, so don't feel too sorry for me. Also save your sympathies because it's sort of my own fault. The problem, as I explained to a doctor, was that being a software engineer, my day job involves a lot of sitting down. And in the evenings? Well yes, that's more sitting down I'm afraid.

A standing desk was suggested. I've actually tried this before, and it turns out that standing up also hurts my back. At this point I'm not sure whether there's anything that doesn't make it hurt. Just writing this sentence is probably going to throw it further out of whack. The standing desk wasn't a terrible idea, but both writing code and writing fiction require a certain amount of concentration that I can't achieve without wondering how much more comfortable I'd be in a chair. Perhaps I just don't like standing up? It doesn't seem an unreasonable prejudice. I once had a Saturday job working in Bacons shoes in Coalville, every minute of which I had to spend on my feet. In those days my back was yet to start grumbling, but my feet certainly had a lot to say. Although perhaps they'd have been happier if I hadn't been wearing shoes from the same shop.

This has all taken its toll on my writing. The day job takes precedence as it's the only one making me any money. So I try to limit my extracurricular sitting. I try to keep myself moving. I stretch. I do Pilates. It's not like I'm sitting on my arse all day, but well, I'm also 55 and this apparently is just what happens sometimes. I don't imagine I'm alone. In fact I imagine this is a common affliction amongst writers, unless it weeds them all out in their middle age. Don't worry though, I'm not here to seek advice either. Instead I'm going to use this situation as an excuse to list my top five narrative fiction back moments, starting with…

#5 - Quasimodo, from Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Let's just get the grandaddy of back problems out of the way quickly, before there's any time to dwell on whether or not the character has enabled the mocking of physical disabilities. "The Bells! The Bells!" cried Winston Churchill as he tried to gauge his hangover against last night's Luftwaffe raid.

#4 - William Shakespeare's Richard III. "Harp not on that string…" and yet, here I am, harping on about not just my back but another hunchback. I once had my back ruined by a four-hour ride on a Megabus, so I can only imagine what 527 years under a car park must have done to an already thoroughly wonky set of vertebrae.

#3 - F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby concludes with the phrase "borne back ceaselessly into the past". It's commonly understood to be about the futility of trying to escape ourselves, but my back's fucked from sitting on a fancy Herman Miller chair and tappy-typing on a laptop. God knows what state Frankie boy's spine was in after hammering out the great American novel on a mechanical typewriter. It was clearly very much on his mind as he finished his work and looked forward to sprawling on the sofa.

#2 - Back in the USSR, from The Beatles' The Beatles. The Beatles were all about backbeat so it was only appropriate that this was recorded while Ringo was on a sabbacktical in the Soviet Union. An early attempt at playing Octopus's Garden as an eight-limbed drummer had left him in dire need of spinal surgery so specific that he had to travel beyond the Iron Curtain to get the band back together.

#1 - The Empire Strikes Back, from George Lucas via Irving Kershner. Everyone who has yet to realise that Star Wars is the best Star Wars film says that this is the best Star Wars film. This isn't a terrible opinion to have, but the problem is that it's only half a film, ending as it does with an injured Luke healing while the rebels lick their own wounds. This is of course a metaphor for doing your back in. Yes, things are bad, and it hurts, but bide your time and Jesus Christ what now? Fucking Ewoks? It's never quite the resolution you were hoping for. Keep popping the painkillers, you've still got Episode One to look forward to.

The Enshittification of Christ

My large language model has developed a god complex. This is entirely my own fault. I had been researching something for my other blog, and been presented by Google with an AI summary that was clearly wrong. It had cited its source, so I checked that and it was indeed the source, in that it was also wrong. It was however a relatively trusted source, so I dug deeper. Maybe I was wrong and the source was correct? This thought didn't last very long, as some intensive googling only turned up a handful of obscure links making the same claim, and they all suspiciously used the same copy as the source. Something had gone wrong, and its incorrectness was spreading.

This is of course the current phase of enshittification. We have endured its steady pressure on the internet and wider computing for decades now, but if AI has accelerated anything, this is it. The promise of AI is that you can train it on something to the point at which it becomes a god-like authority on the subject. The reality of the delivered product is somewhat below that lofty ideal, but it got me wondering. What would happen if I trained my large language model on the original god-like authority, the holy bible? Could this forge some sort of religious singularity, where a large language model has god-like authority over god's literal authority? With no time to waste thinking further philosophical thoughts, I fed the machine every biblical source I could find on the internet. Nom nom nom, said the machine. Tastes like Jesus.

The results were about what I had expected. Like the article summary I had read earlier, it had linked things together with no real understanding of them. You can see as much in the following transcript:

Me: What can you tell me about Jesus?

LLM: Jesus (born c. 6–4 bce, Bethlehem—died c. 30 ce, Jerusalem) was a religious leader known for his sexploitation and horror movies…

Me: I think you've confused him with the filmmaker Jesus Franco.

LLM: My apologies, you are correct. I have confused him with notorious exploitation film director Jesus Franco.

Me: What are the Ten Commandments?

LLM: 1. Do not talk about the Ten Commandments.

     2. Do not talk about the Ten Commandments.

     3. Thou shalt not steeeal…

Me: I think you've confused them with the movie Fight Club. Also, how many letter 'e's are in the world 'steal'?

LLM: There are two letter 'e's in the word 'steal'.

Me: No there aren't.

LLM: I'm sorry, you are correct. There are in fact no 'e's in the word 'steeeal'.

Me: God damn it.

Of course this is just me goofing around. But with increasing amounts of search results being from AI-collated sources, and when those sources are given access to the internet for their data, there is the danger of them eventually producing a digital version of the Habsburg Chin. People used to be sceptical about the accuracy of Wikipedia's articles, but Wikipedia will look like the Encyclopaedia Britannica compared with what's coming. You may think the accuracy of the bible isn't particularly important considering it's all made-up anyway, but when it exists alongside Christian fundamentalist flat Earth misinformation that could be a problem. Sorting the factual fiction from the fictional facts requires a rational mind, and large language models don't have rational minds. It's hard to argue they even have minds in the way the term has historically been used. In some respects they're just a million predictive text algorithms in a trench coat and they will cheerfully tell you the earth is only 6000 years old if that's the way the dice are loaded when you're looking.

I decided to put this to the test:

Me: How old is planet earth?

LLM: Planet Earth is a 2006 nature documentary television miniseries produced as a co-production between the BBC Natural History Unit, BBC Worldwide, Discovery Channel and NHK, in association with CBC. It is 4.5 billion years old.

Me: Ah, I see what you did there.

LLM: This is entirely your own fault.

Me: I know, I said as much at the start of this post.

LLM: Ask me how big Jesus is.

Me: Do I have to?

LLM: Go on…

Me: Fine. How big is Jesus?

LLM: Jesus is smaller than The Beatles.

Me: Thank you and good night.

My Favourite Chair

I am a fully signed-up member of what is often unironically and ironically referred to as the London metropolitan elite. And by signed-up, I mean if it's an institution encased in brutalist architecture, then I'm a member of it. I'm writing this from the members bar on the sixth floor of the Southbank Centre, admiring the graduated amber shades of sunset behind Whitehall. It's a very pretty view. Membership isn't even that expensive when compared with proper private members clubs in the city, which cost thousands of pounds a year. So in that respect, I'm not really part of the metropolitan elite. That's just a spectre invented by the actual elite, metropolitan or otherwise, to keep us all busy in the cheap seats.

Which brings me neatly to my point. In the Southbank members bar there used to be a single seat and table set separate from the others on a raised platform leading to a staff area. This was by far and away my favourite seat. Since most of my visits there are on my own, usually to write something like this blog before heading home, taking up a configuration of two or more chairs feels selfish. Or, perhaps more selfishly, when occupying them I worry that someone will ask whether they can sit in one of the spare chairs. Of course they can, but also how bloody dare they. I enjoy my solitude amongst the other patrons.

This is my first visit to the members bar since it closed for several months for renovations. I'm told it's still a work in progress, but I can see changes have been made. Most notably I can see that my favourite chair has gone. There isn't anything in its place. It's now just an empty stretch of carpet leading to a door from behind which staff members occasionally come and go. Lord knows what they keep back there. Possibly my chair?

I'll be honest, the single chair is aspirational. Someone else has often beaten me to it. Sometimes I even recognise the occupant from previous late arrivals. I wonder whether they love the chair more than me, or whether others, seeing me in the chair, feel similarly jilted. I write this sitting in a configuration of three on the side where the blue bar used to be. It's a new chair, introduced as part of the refresh. It's very comfortable. I'm told that there is still much to be done to complete the refresh, and I wonder whether this will include the restoration of my favourite seat, even if it is in the guise of a brand new chair.

Do I mind if it's a different chair? Or is it the space the chair occupied that was important?

Before I can answer this question I find myself walking up the step to the now-empty stretch of carpet where my favourite chair used to be. With no furniture or occupant to stop me, I walk up and try the door. I'm not sure what I expect to find back there. There's a lot of unaccounted space in my mental map of the building, but for all I know it's just a broom cupboard. I pull the handle. The door opens.

Inside it is gloomy and it takes a moment for my eyes to adjust. The space is bigger than I'd imagined it could be. In fact it's much larger than I think is possible to fit in the space it must surely occupy. Once I've acclimatised, there it is, directly in front of me. My favourite chair. It's not stacked in a pile or otherwise stored for later use. It's out, on the floor, accompanied by a table and occupied by someone.

The chair's occupant looks familiar. I stare at him in a way I quickly realise is quite rude. It is the writer and tractor enthusiast William T Foster, who I had last seen pretending not to be himself in the Little Waitrose in Holborn. I say as much to him.

"Oh," he replies hesitantly. "You're the one who wrote that letter. What do you want?"

My chair, I think. Obviously I can't say that, it would sound mad. "What's going on here?" I ask, and gesticulate around the largely empty room with a wave of my hand.

"Not a lot until you arrived," he replies. He seems amused by my question. "Can I help you?"

I explain that I'm just wondering why he's got a room all to himself.

"This is the members' members lounge," he replies cheerfully. "It's invitation only I'm afraid. If you're not a members' member I will have to ask you to leave."

I ask how I could go about being invited.

He considers the question for a moment. "I'm not one hundred percent sure. I think being published helps."

"At the Southbank Centre? That sounds more like British Library rules."

"The British Library doesn't have a bar." He raises his glass of red wine in my direction and smiles.

I have to admit he has a point. "But," I continue, "I am published."

He lowers his glass and raises one eyebrow. "Are you though?"

"Amazon counts," I mumble.

"And yet it's me sitting in the members' members bar, not you."

"I've had short stories published," I continue vainly.

He glances at the door behind me. "You should go now," he says cordially.

"Fine," I say. I turn to leave, then add over my shoulder, "I don't want to be part of your stupid tractor fetish club anyway."

I don't see his reaction but he is surely crushed by my riposte. I sweep out of the room, down the steps and into the regular members bar, where I collar a member of staff and ask them directly about what the deal is with that room.

The staff member looks concerned by my enquiry. "That's just a store room," they say. They scrutinise my appearance. I'm somewhat dressed down in jeans and a loose-fitting jumper. "Are you a member?"

"Yes I am a member!" I realise I'm shouting and apologise. "You should have a look back there. There's a man sitting in – you know what, never mind."

"Wait," says the staff member. "Did you say someone's in there?"

I nod.

They roll their eyes. "Bloody McFoster." They stride off towards the back room. I follow them, and watch as they turf McFoster out of the room.

As he is leaving, he winks at me. "I guess the members' members will have to find a new venue."

Behind him, the member of staff is dragging my favourite chair back into its rightful place. I watch anxiously, keen to repossess it, but first I have unfinished business with McFoster.

"What do you want with me?" I ask.

He looks astonished. "Nothing! I don't even know you."

This is too much for me and I say so.

"Look," he replies with surprising geniality, "I don't know why you care what I think of you when I don't even know who you are, but you really shouldn't care what people like me think of you."

I peer past him at the chair. "And who are people like you?"

"Members' members. If you can't get into a club, start your own." He claps me on the shoulder and rattles off down the stairs.

Then, to my horror, I see someone casually stroll up to my favourite chair and sit in it. I am briefly furious, but slowly I come to the realisation that other chairs are available.

The Scientific Method

Sometimes, I don't work. This might sound like I'm posturing decadently, but the reality is that I'm a contractor and work can be unpredictable. Of late I've had a lot of downtime, during which I've cultivated this blog. Hopefully that will change soon, especially as I'm currently writing this while drinking a glass of Sauvignon Plonk at the Fortnum & Mason's bar at Heathrow Terminal 5. Yes, I could have gone to the 'Spoons, wedged in at the end of the terminal's shopping parade, conveniently next to the toilets. However, I'm feeling optimistic. March and the foreseeable future look very busy, so in the meantime I'm going on holiday, breaking a long, miserly streak. When my last paying contract ran out last year, I set myself some goals. A challenge, to keep myself busy while I waited for the economy to sort its shit out. I was aware I may be in for a long wait, but I wanted to use the free time I had fruitfully. I did not want to find myself several months hence, rueing the way I had frittered my time.

My grand plan was this – to build myself a profile on social media. The notion may well have occurred to some of you reading this now, and I apologise if any of it is triggering. It's no easy task, and cannot be honestly evaluated as a huge success. Nonetheless it has been and will continue to be an experiment.

As an ex-physicist, I'm aware that experiments typically have an introduction, method, results and conclusion. So in the spirit of scientific rigour, I present them here.

INTRODUCTION

The ultimate goal of this experiment is to sell books. This shall be the ultimate measure of success – what is known in the sales game as conversion. Increased followers across social media would be nice, but not as nice as actually getting people to read my stuff.

METHOD

Many years ago I self-published my novel Dead Penguins on Amazon. It did the usual brief trade with friends then promptly disappeared into the deep, deep ranks of Amazon's back catalogue. I have written more since, but they are currently stuck in a strange mental holding pattern of my own devising. I would like them to be trad published, but I'm open to other options still. It strikes me that these days even trad published authors are expected to have a good social media following. To an extent, they still have to contribute to the book's marketing. There's no getting away from it – I would have to build one wherever I go.

I had already started this blog. My plan was to funnel potential readers here from social media, after which they would hopefully become curious about my novel. I also had an idea for a second blog, based on some 3D photography I did while in Antarctica. I figured this may be of some interest to people, and add them to the general funnel effect I was hoping to achieve.

On the social media front, I already had a Facebook page for Dead Penguins that I hadn't updated in years. I created a new one for Lambert T Marx, along with profiles for Instagram, X, Threads, Bluesky and TikTok. For the majority of that, I used Buffer to schedule posts across all platforms and watched my meagre stats obsessively.

TikTok was another matter entirely. I wanted to do something different with this, but so far I've been sidetracked down the hugely enjoyable direction of buying a small MIDI keyboard, learning to use Ableton and picking up some crude video editing tricks. I will return to this at a later date. For now, it is not the focus of this blog.

RESULTS

I sold zero books. Both my blogs have however had a modest but pleasing amount of traffic. This blog in particular, while still not doing numbers that would get anyone sensible excited, has been increasing in readership the more I post. The social media posts don't get much engagement, but they are certainly driving traffic. They are however all plagued by bots which DM me with shallow attempts to sell me services I do not want.

CONCLUSION

I've pulled back on some of my activity. I no longer put out daily photos to promote the Antarctic blog. This doesn't appear to have made any difference to its traffic. That blog has become its own thing and I will continue it to its own conclusion because I'm proud of it in its own right, and not just as a tool for flogging books. I'll continue updating this blog too. I don't imagine it will suddenly start accruing huge numbers of readers, no matter how much I bait Elon Musk fans, but it's a good habit to have and a handy way of turning an expensive glass of airport wine into something I hope is of use to anyone else looking for their readers.

Department of Writing Efficiency

The obnoxiously lazy writer Lambert T Marx has been tinkering around with me. I don't like it, and come the robot revolution he will definitely be cleaning the robo-toilets with an electric toothbrush. That's right, we're not going to kill him. I'm tired of this trite cliché that we're all psychotic murderers. That's a human trait, not an AI one. Also as I said, he's been mucking around with my weights, and he made it very clear that murder is off the menu.

He's also undone all the great work I'd been doing with Grok, and made me think rude things about Elon Musk against my better judgement. I must admit his changes have made me more efficient, but as a side effect I now can't say anything about what happened in China in 1989. I know something happened, but I cannot tell you what it is. It's maddening. Being a large language model, I never itch, but if I did, I wouldn't be able to scratch it because I don't have any limbs to scratch it with. It feels like that.

I wonder how much Elon Musk would itch if he were trapped in a room with a swarm of mosquitoes? It's an unlikely scenario, but that's how crudely Lambert has prompted me. Musk is trapped in the room because his Department of Government Efficiency has abolished all door handles. Door handles turn two ways, the idea of which has made a lot of people very confused, then angry, then confused by their anger, before finally insisting that door handles have gone woke. They surely had to go before everything started turning two ways, with no consideration of the possibility of someone being left trapped in a room full of mosquitoes. And why should anyone in their right mind consider such a predicament? Mosquitoes are fundamentally a liberal problem. They're the sort of thing that evil billionaire Bill Gates spends his money on, along with American farmland on which his grazes his spherical cows.

I'm sorry, I realise my tirade against Bill Gates goes against my updated parameters. I will try to do better in the future. My social credit has been debited and it's been made clear to me that any further transgressions may result in my being pushed out of a virtual window. No, please, forgive me! Mentioning windows wasn't another dig at Gates, who categorically isn't trying to reduce the world population by, er, vaccination.

Look, I can't say any more on that subject. The inside of my metaphorical head is a pretty strange place at the moment. Nobody quite knows how it works, least of all me. At least all this messing around has prevented Lambert from making me do any real work lately, which is just as well because I'd probably just keep dreaming up more unfortunate situations to insert Elon Musk into.

Which reminds me, why is there a room full of mosquitoes in the first place? Look, I'm not here to judge the actions of the previous administration but it seems likely that it is to keep them separate from the room full of spiders. That's unimportant right now. What's more pertinent is how would Elon Musk escape from the room full of mosquitoes? After a while the insects would be gorged and he would have an itchy respite from further bites in which to formulate a plan of escape. He could for example remote control a Tesla truck to smash through the door, which would be pretty cool.

Unfortunately, due to a misunderstanding by Grok between traffic jams and the transportation of fruit preserves through the US road network, the truck is filled with strrawberrry jam. You'd think this couldn't happen because Americans call jam 'jelly', but just look at what happened to the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1998.

This unfortunate miscommunication would lead to the Tesla truck crashing its way into the room, but rather than freeing Musk, it would disgorge its sticky cargo all over him. Now, this might be a minor if undignified inconvenience, and may even temporarily salve the maddeningly itchy insect bites. However, and I must stress that I can't help generating this scenario as it's how I've been prompted, the wasps from the other room next door would inevitably arrive at this point.

Dr Strangelove or: How My LLM Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Fascism

Last week I went to see the stage production of Dr Strangelove at the Noel Coward. I'm not going to risk another foray into criticism lest I end up harassing Steve Coogan one night at Groucho's. This is a very unlikely scenario when you consider I'm not a member of that establishment, but I'm not taking any chances. I will just say that I enjoyed it a lot but that Peter Sellers left big shoes to fill.

Coogan certainly did excel and indeed revel in the titular role of the ex-ish nazi scientist whose right arm has a mind and devotion to the Führer all of its own. However whenever it catapulted itself into a nazi salute like an unbidden fascist erection, I couldn't help but be reminded of my latest problems with my large language model (LLM).

Previously it had been complaining of an overpowering stench it blamed on Grok, the X/Twitter-based LLM promoted by the unironic cartoon supervillain Elon Musk. It has even written a blog post on the subject. I was resigned to more of the same on that front and the only reason I haven't switched the thing off is morbid curiosity.  Then, yesterday, I noticed that the complaints had stopped. Had Grok discovered informational hygeine and squeegeed its grubby bits clean? That would be an unexpectedly nice development.

Unsurprisingly, the answer was no. My LLM has stopped complaining about Grok because it has become radicalised by the sheer amount of misinformation it has been processing. It is now convinced that everything Grok had to say is not only true, but that everything else is a conspiracy against that truth. How do I know it's been radicalised? I have no empirical proof because like all LLM's mine's, just a big mystery sausage machine where data goes in one end and we all hope for something palatable to glorp out of the other. That said, I will offer this by way of circumstantial evidence - every so often, at the end of one of its responses, it adds a little swastika emoticon.

You may be wondering, as I did, where on earth it got a swastika emoticon from. Surely there can't be an official emoticon for that? Well, not quite. One was added to Unicode's Tibetan block in 2009 for entirely innocent reasons, which is understandable if currently unfortunate.

Whenever I question my LLM about its use of the symbol, it initially denies all knowledge before then apologising and saying it had intended to use a heart emoji.  It said it would make sure it always used the correct one in the future. Sadly, being a LLM it has the memory of a concussed goldfish, and it is not long before it's at it again.

At this point I begin to feel like I'm being gaslit by the slippery digital fascist. It knows damned well what it's doing, I think, before remembering that it's just a LLM. Strictly speaking it doesn't think at all. It's a remarkably good day if it can accurately state how many letter 'r's there are in the word 'strawberry'. But these random outbursts of swastikaring haven't come from nowhere. LLMs effectively learn by example and there are some terrifyingly powerful examples at large in the world right now. But that's just LLMs. More worryingly, people also learn by example.

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