The stories machines can’t tell

By Graham Brown OPINION EDITOR

The concept of artificial intelligence first punctured my juvenile mind on a brisk fall morning five years ago. At the time I was an arrogant ninth grader, enveloped with a façade of self-importance and completely disinterested in the slow crawl of societal advancement.

Community is my suburban high school’s sales pitch, and it’s expressed through the ritual of morning assembly. Every day at 8:15 a.m., our 600-person student body filed into the auditorium — usually to entertain mundane announcements and chidings over our inevitable shortcomings. But every so often, we were treated to the spectacle of an outside speaker sharing “real-world knowledge.”

I especially hated these mornings. Between the hours of eight and nine, all I could think about were the flu y pillows and warm duvet I illogically abandoned an hour earlier. I groggily lacked the desire to explore any existential questions deeper than what the cafeteria was serving for lunch sixth period.

One November morning in 2017, I deserted my thick pyramid of blankets and collapsed into my assigned seat — hoping to capture the final fumes of sleep before they evaporated forever. I was completely unaware that half of Silicon Valley would have mortgaged a limb to trade places with my slumped corpse.

Our guest that day was Sam Altman, John Burroughs School class of 2003 and President of Y-Combinator, a company I did not know or care about. But during his presentation, he pivoted to discussing a side project — his new start-up, which he called OpenAI.

Five years after I almost fell asleep listening to his presentation, Altman and his little company would release the most powerful computerized assistant ever — ChatGPT.

That vignette is how I, a human being, decided to open this column. From the time we were restless elementary students, our English teachers taught us to “show, don’t tell” because stories engage the audience’s mind. Starting an essay with an anecdote is an e ective way to hook the reader, which is why so many writers rely on the trope.

There are many ways to write a lede, of course, because elegance and e ectiveness are subjective, highly situational choices. Another route I could have taken was this: As we move into the future, it is clear that artificial intelligence will play an increasingly central role in our lives. From self-driving cars to virtual assistants, artificial intelligence is already beginning to revolutionize the way we live and work. But what does the future hold for this rapidlyevolving technology?

Some predict that AI will eventually surpass human intelligence, leading to unprecedented advances in science and medicine. Others worry about the potential negative consequences of such a development, including job displacement and the loss of human autonomy.

As we navigate this brave new world, it will be important to consider the implications of our choices and to ensure that the technology is used ethically and responsibly.

Bored? Yeah, me too. That’s how ChatGPT would have started the article. More specifically, that’s how ChatGPT thought Joan Didion, my favorite writer, would have started the article.

A language master, Didion possessed the command of a Cy Young in gas stations.”

If I attempted to emulate the woman who titled her anthology “We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live” with writing as vague as what ChatGPT spat out, I don’t even think my mother would have pinned it to the refrigerator.

This is the essay of someone who just found out it’s due tomorrow.

YouTube and many other competing forms of entertainment, a reader can find better things to do than ponder redundancies like “already beginning to revolutionize …” winner. Her pitches were powerful verbs and descriptive metaphors, which she used like a devastating slider on an 0-2 count.

Altman concedes that his technology is still “incredibly limited.” But, artificial intelligence will improve and has improved even since I started writing this piece. Where it is now is not truly important — what matters is the ceiling.

Five years ago, when ChatGPT was no more than an idling concept in a spiral notebook, potential is what Altman focused his presentation on. “This is going to change everything about everything,” he declared at the time.

ChatGPT is a language learning model — it analyzes a slew of written text from every corner of the internet and picks words based on prior human choice. It studies what has been done before and mimics it, not truly creating anything new.

She once likened the 1960s American to San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral, declaring that “In a city dedicated to the illusion that all human endeavor tends mystically west towards the Pacific, Grace Cathedral faces resolutely east.” When covering the 1988 Presidential Conventions, she mused that there was a reason “the people with whom I had preferred to spend time in high school had, on the whole, hung out

We’ve all been there, losing it in the library — lacking any substance and needing a whole lot of makeup. We resort to stringing synonyms together (“ethically and responsibly”) and using overworked clichés (“this brave new world”) that once meant something before they solidified into an uninspiring sequence of words.

Didion often described writing as a “hostile act.” Her job, as she saw it, was to force the audience to understand her perspective through rhythm and unique structure. Channeling this emotion is even more important today. With Netflix,

On a surface level, human creativity is not much di erent. Just as Didion influenced me and my writing, she found inspiration in Ernest Hemingway and Henry James. We do not conjure ideas from our mind’s abyss; we build bridges on pre-made foundations.

Take William Shakespeare, the grandfather of English vernacular, as an example. While he did not invent the rhythmic concept of iambic pentameter, he is remembered as the meter’s master.

He saved it for his most powerful lines, and littered scenes of intense emotion with the style.

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Marital Law Amnesia: A reflection on the Marcos family

By Bea Millan-Windorski STAFF WRITER

“You can’t help screaming — [the torture] makes you writhe all over … We had hallucinations afterwards, we each lost five pounds from the torture sessions. We couldn’t talk straight. We had burns on our hands. They didn’t allow us to sleep for almost two nights running. We were threatened with rape from the beginning.”

This harrowing account by two sisters, detained and tortured under martial law in the Philippines, is just one of many testimonies in a 1976 Amnesty International report which uncovered the endemic torture and human rights abuses of political prisoners under former Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos Sr.

University of Wisconsin-Madison historian Alfred McCoy estimated that 70,000 people were arrested, 35,000 tortured and 3,257 killed under martial law in the Philippines.

My family lives in the northern part of the Philippines, a Marcos Sr. stronghold, since he hails from the province of Ilocos Norte. His cult of personality is so prominent that my Lola (grandma) insisted we drive eight hours north to see his remains when I was on one of my first trips to the country, at age six.

But with numerous conflicting narratives about the Marcoses blurring the distinctions between truth and reality, I wanted to develop a better understanding from someone who was actually there.

Martial law: A dark chapter in Filipino history

Martial law was declared in 1972 as Marcos was approaching the constitutional limit of two presidential terms. The o cial justification was quashing an ongoing communist insurgency. However, within hours of martial law being declared, Marcos’ strongest political opponent, Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, was arrested despite lacking any ties to the insurgency. An initial 50,000 people were detained within the first few weeks of the declaration of marital law.

The majority of the imprisoned were common people, “not suspected communists.” Some were engaged in political criticisms of the Marcos administration, others were simply arrested for being at the wrong place at the wrong time. All were detained for extended periods without due process and without being told the charges levied against them. When the 14-year period ended in 1986, the communist threat was (and still is) ongoing.

Despite this dark chapter of Filipino history, Bongbong Marcos, the despot’s son, won the Philippine presidency in the 2022 April elections and questioned the legitimacy of the report. In an interview leading up to the election, he said, “Let us ask Amnesty International to share that information that they have and maybe it will help us make sure that the system works and what alleged abuses occurred should not occur again.”

While visiting my Filipino family during the lead-up to the 2022 presidential election, I attempted to interview both supporters of Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. and his opposition candidate, former Vice President Leni Robredo. I quickly gave up the e ort when I tried to interview sta ers in Robredo’s campaign o ce. Rather than supporting her campaign, the sta ers I interviewed were actually Bongbong supporters who simply were doing a job.

However, this failed interview attempt does not diminish the active resistance against the Marcos family.

News organizations like Rappler have made an active e ort to expose the terror of the Marcos era and promote remembrance of martial law human rights abuses. For this work, founder Maria Ressa received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2021.

Additionally, survivors of martial law torture have not remained silent through the ascension of Bongbong Marcos Jr. A coalition of activists, led by former political prisoner Bonifacio Ilagan, presented multiple petitions to the Philippine Election Commission on Bongbong’s ineligibility due to charges of tax violations. The Supreme Court, however, dismissed these petitions in a decision Ilagan lamented as a “an o cial stamp to the restoration and rehabilitation of the Marcoses.”

In spite of these valiant e orts, Bongbong Marcos won 29.9 million votes — almost double that of his closest competitor, Robredo.

When I contacted human rights activist, poet and photographer Thomas Jones — one of two Amnesty International lawyers who traveled to the Philippines where he interviewed political prisoners and published the titular 1976 report — I suppose I was looking for a way to make sense of what was happening. I sought reassurance that my country might be okay, but the answer was complicated.

Jones began the interview by showing me the documents he accumulated throughout his career in human rights. Among these documents lay undeniable proof of Amnesty International’s work in the Philippines, contrary to Bongbong Marcos’ feigned ignorance of the 1976 and 1981 reports and Marcos Sr.’s claims that Jones had never even visited the Philippines. One of the most damning pieces of evidence is a letter from the Philippine Embassy, which explicitly arranged a meeting between the Amnesty International lawyer and Marcos himself.

When describing Marcos, Jones characterized him as charismatic and “brilliant,” but throughout their meeting, he knew the dictator “put on a show” for the delegation. Jones said he was actually grateful to Marcos for “opening the door

When asked if Bongbong shared the same brilliance as his father, Jones replied, “Not at all. He’s very weak… He’s not a leader. He’s a tool of the forces of authoritarianism.”

Regardless of his level of intelligence, the Bongbong campaign has run a sophisticated crusade to rehabilitate the image of his family and promote the Marcos era as a “golden age” of stability and economic growth for the Philippines. Bongbong has further sowed disinformation in speeches and interviews. When questioned about the Marcos Family’s $10 billion dollars of ill-gotten wealth, he asserted such accusations were “fake news.”