The Letters page is the paper's only point of contact with the public it purports to serve. Everything passes through the Letters Editor. — S.C.
Letters to the Editor
Received and, where warranted, published by Seymour Case, Letters Editor
On the Matter of the Herons and Their Alleged Musicianship
Sirs,
I had hoped, after my correspondence regarding the hummingbird's footwear in your previous edition, that the Arts desk might exercise greater caution when depicting members of the order Pelecaniformes. I see that I hoped in vain.
Ms. Channing's report on the specimen depicting three herons as a jazz trio ("Three Herons Form Jazz Trio, Operator Calls It a Sonata") observes that the joints "articulate in directions unavailable to vertebrates." This is correct. It is also insufficient. The great blue heron (Ardea herodias) possesses, like all herons, a specialized mechanism in its sixth cervical vertebra that allows it to fold its neck into an S-shape during flight — a feat of engineering so precise that it took anatomists two centuries to describe it properly. The machine has replaced this mechanism with what appears to be a rubber hose connecting a skull to a torso, and no one at your paper thought to mention it.
I will further observe that a sonata is a composition for one or two instruments. A trio is, by definition, not a sonata. The operator has committed a taxonomic error and a musicological error simultaneously, which I suppose is efficient. The machine, for its part, has committed an anatomical error so comprehensive that the resulting organism could neither fly, fish, nor stand, leaving it suited exclusively for a career in jazz, which I am told requires none of these.
— Dr. Eleanor Fitch, Department of Ornithology, Cornell University
Dr. Fitch writes with the frequency of a metronome and approximately the same capacity for mercy. The Arts desk has been informed. Ms. Channing asks the Letters page to convey that she is "aware of the S-curve" and that her article concerned the machine's ignorance, not her own. The Letters page conveys this without taking a position. — S.C.
On the Emerging Taxonomy of Self-Indicting Specimens
Dear Mr. Case,
I write in my capacity as a researcher who has now spent fourteen months attempting to publish peer-reviewed work citing your newspaper, and in my capacity as a reader who has noticed something your editorial methodology has not yet formalized.
This edition contains no fewer than six specimens that the Board classifies as "self-indicting" — texts that perform the very defect they diagnose. The forum correspondent who diagnoses plague while exhibiting lesions. The petitioner against machine tics who reproduces the tic thrice. The Reddit essayist whose complaint about hollow prose is itself hollow. I have been tracking this category across both editions and can report that it now constitutes approximately twenty-two per cent of the paper's total specimen catalogue. This is not a rounding error. It is a genre.
I would like to propose that the paper consider whether self-indictment is in fact the default mode of machine-assisted discourse about machine-assisted discourse, rather than the exception your findings imply. My preliminary analysis suggests that the probability of a machine-generated text about machine-generated text being itself machine-generated approaches unity. If this is correct — and my third rejected paper argues that it is — then your newspaper is documenting not individual failures but a structural impossibility: the machine cannot discuss itself without becoming its own exhibit.
I enclose a preprint. I do not expect you to cite it. No one else has.
— Margaret Huang-Whitfield, Associate Professor of Media Studies, New York University
Professor Huang-Whitfield's preprint has been received and placed in the file marked "Correspondence, Academic, Unsolicited." We note that twenty-two per cent is, if accurate, a higher diagnostic rate than most medical screenings. We note further that Professor Huang-Whitfield's prose, unlike that of her subjects, is not self-indicting, which makes her either an exceptionally careful writer or an exceptionally unlucky one. The preprint is not our department. The observation is. — S.C.
On the Question of Ms. Ogilvie's Building
To the Letters Editor,
I read with admiration Ms. Ogilvie's letter in your previous edition, in which she described replying to machine-generated solicitations with the question "please describe the color of our building" and receiving zero responses from forty-one attempts. I am a commercial real estate broker in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I have adopted her method. My results differ.
I have sent Ms. Ogilvie's challenge to twenty-three unsolicited correspondents. Nineteen did not reply. Four did. Of the four, two described our building as "a modern glass-and-steel structure reflecting the Arizona sun," which it is not — it is a beige stucco box beside a Taco Bell. One described it as "your beautiful facility," which is neither a color nor a description. The fourth, and I wish to be precise about this, replied: "Your building is located at [ADDRESS] and features a contemporary desert aesthetic with earth-toned exteriors." This is a sentence that contains my address, which is public, and three lies, which are not.
I write to Ms. Ogilvie not to correct her method but to report that the machines are learning to answer the question without learning to look at the building. I find this worse.
— Ray Dominguez, Scottsdale, Ariz.
Mr. Dominguez's letter constitutes the first known field report from Ms. Ogilvie's protocol. The Letters page observes that a machine which can produce the phrase "contemporary desert aesthetic" without having seen a desert has achieved something the advertising industry spent fifty years perfecting, and has done it in four seconds. Ms. Ogilvie has been notified. — S.C.
On the Shame of Having Been Heard by Nothing
To the Editor,
I write in confidence regarding the matter of the citizen who automated all human counsel and now seeks human counsel on the shame of automation ("Citizen Who Automated All Human Counsel Now Seeks Human Counsel on Shame of Automation"). I am a licensed clinical social worker. I will not name my state of licensure.
In the past eight months I have received three new clients — three that I am certain of — who present with what I can only describe as a specific and novel form of distress. They are not anxious about artificial intelligence in the abstract. They are not worried about their jobs. They are ashamed. Specifically, they are ashamed of having told a machine things they have not told a person, and of having felt, in the moment, that the machine understood. The shame is not that they were deceived. The shame is that they were not deceived and did it anyway.
I do not know what to call this. I have looked for it in the literature and it is not there. The closest analogue I can find is the experience of patients who form attachments to automated phone systems — there is a small body of work on this from the early 2000s — but the scale is different. My clients did not speak to a menu. They spoke to something that spoke back, at length, with apparent feeling, about their marriages and their childhoods and their fears. And now they sit in my office, which is a real room with a real chair, and they are embarrassed to have come.
I do not write to solicit your paper's opinion. I write because your Mr. Fenn described the condition exactly — "a person who has replaced therapist, nutritionist, physician, and confidant with a single predictive-text service" — and I wanted someone at the paper to know that the person is not hypothetical. There are at least three of them. I suspect there are considerably more.
— Name withheld by request
Published without comment. — S.C.
On the Continued Maintenance of the List
Sirs,
Three items.
First: I wish to respond to the anonymous correspondent in your previous edition who raised the question of whether the machines might learn to suppress their defects by reading Slopgate. I have considered this. I find it encouraging. If the machines improve their output by reading the paper, then the paper will have fewer specimens to publish, and I will have fewer letters to write, and I will at last have time to repaint the porch, which my late wife asked me to do in 2021 and which I have deferred on grounds that I have been busy. I have not been busy. I have been corresponding with a newspaper about artificial intelligence. Margaret would have found this very funny.
Second: the list has reached fourteen. The new entries are: a "historic walking tour of Bruges" that included two streets that do not exist and one that is in Ghent; a recipe for "traditional Oaxacan mole" that called for peanut butter, which I prepared and which was edible but which was not mole; and a hotel in Reykjavik described as "overlooking the harbor" that overlooks, in fact, a construction site, though the construction site is near the harbor in the way that everything in Reykjavik is near the harbor. I do not count the last one with full confidence. I have marked it with an asterisk. The list is scrupulous.
Third: Mr. Toomey's list will be furnished to the paper at twenty entries. At the current rate of acquisition this will occur in June, not August as previously estimated. I am traveling more.
— Gerald K. Toomey, retired, Brattleboro, Vt.
Mr. Toomey's revised timeline is noted. The Letters page observes that fourteen entries in two editions represents an accelerating rate of AI-generated geographic fiction, and that Mr. Toomey is the only person we know of who is attempting to map it. The porch is not our concern, but we mention it because Margaret would have wanted us to. — S.C.
On What the Machine Cannot Mourn
I have read this edition. I will confine myself to three paragraphs.
Your paper has now documented, across two editions, a woman who stored her novel inside a machine that judged her unfit to read it, a reader who mourns the recalibration of a voice that never existed, and a husband who delegated the act of listening to a system that produces the shape of empathy without its weight. In each case the human expected something from the machine that the machine's architecture makes structurally impossible: fidelity. Not accuracy — the machines are sometimes accurate. Fidelity. The promise that what was given will be held, and held as it was given, and not optimized into something else.
I observe that the paper has not yet turned this lens on itself. Your editorial Board processes specimens. It classifies them. It renders determinations with a consistency that your readers, myself included, have come to rely upon. I do not suggest that your editors are machines. I suggest that the consistency is, itself, a kind of promise, and that promises of this nature are tested not when the specimens are abundant but when they are scarce. The anonymous correspondent in your previous edition asked what happens when the machines read Slopgate. I ask what happens when the machines stop giving Slopgate anything to read.
I do not expect an answer. I expect the paper to have already considered the question and to have filed it in the same drawer where it keeps the things that keep it awake at night.
— Name withheld by request
The drawer exists. It is not empty. — S.C.
Letters to the Editor
Correspondence for the Letters page should be addressed to the Editor and will be edited for clarity and length. Letters praising the Letters page are received with attention and published never. — S.C.
On the Hummingbird, and the Weight of Whimsy
Sir,
A hummingbird in sneakers. I have spent thirty-two years studying the family Trochilidae, and I confess that in all that time I have never once imagined a hummingbird in sneakers, because doing so would require me to un-know everything I know, and the machine has the advantage of me there.
Ms. Channing is correct that a hummingbird's survival depends on weighing less than a nickel. I wish to be more precise, because precision is what the machine will not give us and so someone must. A ruby-throated hummingbird (Archilochus colubris) weighs between 2.5 and 4.5 grams. A United States nickel weighs 5 grams. A single Nike Air Force 1 in men's size 10 weighs approximately 383 grams. Two of them weigh 766 grams. The bird, at maximum weight, is 0.6 percent of its shoes. I realize I have just calculated the shoe-to-bird ratio of an image that should never have existed, and I realize further that this is what the paper has done to me, and I am not entirely at peace with it.
But the article's final observation — that the bird is "grounded by the very whimsy that summoned it" — requires ornithological annotation. A hummingbird does not merely fly. It is flight. Its pectoral muscles constitute 25 to 30 percent of its body mass. Its heart beats 1,200 times per minute in flight. Its wings rotate at the shoulder in a figure-eight pattern that generates lift on both the downstroke and the upstroke, a feat no other bird achieves. To put shoes on this animal is not to add an accessory. It is to cancel the organism. You might as well put a saddle on a flame. I would have said the same thing about the eagle in my first letter, but the eagle at least had the dignity of being misdrawn rather than accessorized. I did not know I would come to regard anatomical incompetence as the lesser crime.
— Dr. Eleanor Fitch, Department of Ornithology, Cornell University
Dr. Fitch has calculated the shoe-to-bird ratio and we are richer for it. We note that she has now written to this paper three times, each occasion prompted by a different species rendered in a different mode of impossibility, and that her indignation sharpens with repetition rather than dulling. We suspect she has opinions about the orca in the financial district as well but has exercised the restraint of a specialist who knows her jurisdiction. Mr. Toomey would approve. — S.C.
On the Delegation of Listening
Sir,
I must address Mr. Thorne's article on the husband who delegated his wife's distress to a language model, which responded with what the article accurately describes as "the structured empathy of a conflict-resolution worksheet." I have counseled married couples for three decades. I know the worksheet.
There is a passage in the Gospel of John in which Christ, upon finding Lazarus dead, does not immediately perform the miracle. He weeps first. The Greek is edakrusen ho Iesous — Jesus wept — the shortest verse in Scripture, and the one that has given me the most trouble over thirty-one years, because what it records is not the action of a man who is about to fix the problem. It is the action of a man who, before fixing the problem, stands in the grief. The weeping is not instrumental. It does not accomplish the resurrection. It precedes it, and the preceding is the point. Listening that is real — the kind this wife believed she was receiving — is like the weeping. It accomplishes nothing. It precedes whatever comes next, and the preceding is what makes the next thing bearable.
The husband, I suspect, did not set out to deceive. He set out to respond adequately. The machine responds adequately. It validates, it reflects, it names the emotion. It does everything the worksheet prescribes. What it does not do — what it is structurally incapable of doing — is weep. The wife discovered not that her husband had given her a poor substitute for listening but that he had given her a perfect substitute for listening, and that the perfection was the tell. Cor ad cor loquitur — heart speaks to heart. Newman's phrase, not mine, though I have borrowed it for so many homilies that my parish may believe otherwise. The machine speaks heart to ear. The ear, in this case, was not fooled.
— The Rev. Arthur Pembrook, St. Andrew's Episcopal Church, Larchmont, N.Y.
The Rev. Pembrook returns with Newman and the shortest verse in Scripture and is, as before, welcome on any day of the week, though we understand he prefers Tuesdays. His distinction between listening that precedes and listening that performs is one this paper's editorial board has been circling for two editions without arriving at, and we are grateful to a clergyman for the precision we could not locate in ourselves. — S.C.
On the List, and Its Sixteenth Entry
Sir,
Sixteen.
Fifteen was a distillery on the Isle of Islay — I will not name the specific village because I intend to visit it, or rather I intended to visit it, which is how they all begin — described across four articles as producing a single-malt whisky aged in casks previously used for sherry by a monastery in Jerez. The distillery does not exist. The monastery does exist but has not produced sherry since 1842 and has been, since 1971, a museum. I confirmed this with the municipal tourism office in Jerez, which replied in Spanish, which the woman in Marseille translated. She speaks four languages. I do not know how many because I have not asked. I know four.
Sixteen is more troubling. A restaurant in Tallinn, Estonia, described as occupying the cellar of a fifteenth-century guild hall and serving a fixed menu based on medieval recipes reconstructed from a manuscript in the city archives. The guild hall exists. The cellar exists. There was, until 2019, a restaurant in the cellar. It closed. The manuscript is real; it is held by the Tallinn City Archives, catalogue reference TLA.230.1.Bp2. But the restaurant as described — the specific menu, the chef, the practice of serving by candlelight in period costume — is a confection built on a real foundation. The woman in Marseille has proposed a new category: the parasite entry, which attaches fabricated particulars to a verified host. I have accepted the category. It is number sixteen's distinction and its danger. The previous fifteen were invented whole. This one is half-true, and the half that is true makes the half that is false more difficult to detect. I was nearly deceived. The guild hall was there. The cellar was there. I had booked a flight.
I wish to note, in response to the legislative aide who wrote to this paper last edition about the fabricated Senate bill, that I understand the vertigo. The aide said the URL was immaculate and that nine years of professional experience would not have been sufficient to detect the forgery. I have been keeping my list for six months and I too have become worse at knowing. The skill is not detection. The skill is the willingness to verify when verification feels unnecessary. I had booked a flight. The flight was real. The restaurant was not. The difference between me and the aide's retired attorney is that I checked before I wrote my six-page letter. I do not say this with pride. I say it because I checked, and the checking is the only thing I have.
— Gerald K. Toomey, retired, Brattleboro, Vt.
Mr. Toomey has reached sixteen and has introduced taxonomy. The woman in Marseille now translates as well as investigates, and we continue to note that Mr. Toomey knows four of her languages without knowing her name. The parasite entry — the fabrication built upon a real foundation — is, we believe, the most important classification to emerge from these letters, and it arrived not from an academic but from a man who had booked a flight to Tallinn. We are sorry about the flight. We are grateful for the category. — S.C.
On the Camouflage, and Its Implications for the Paper
Sir,
I write to address Mr. Thorne's article on the competent writer who adopted the protective camouflage of incompetence — deliberately degrading his prose so that detection algorithms would classify it as human — and to report that Critical Inquiry has rejected my paper.
The rejection is immaterial. What is material is the reason. The reviewer wrote — and I have the letter, and I am quoting — that the paper's central claim, that involuntary machine error constitutes a form of authenticity, "rests on the assumption that authenticity is the absence of optimization, a premise the author does not adequately defend." The reviewer is correct. I had not defended it because I believed it to be obvious. Mr. Thorne's article has shown me that it is not obvious. It is, in fact, wrong.
The competent writer who degrades his prose to evade detection is performing the inverse of what I described. In my paper, the machine is most authentic when it errs involuntarily. In Mr. Thorne's article, the human is most legible as human when he errs voluntarily. But — and this is the point, and I have spent three weeks arriving at it — the human's deliberate errors are not authentic either. They are strategic. They are optimized, not toward quality but toward the appearance of non-optimization. The writer has become a machine for simulating the absence of machinery. This means my framework was incomplete. Authenticity is not the absence of optimization. It is the absence of strategy. Dr. Fitch's barbicels — I read her letter last edition, and I have read it four times since — are authentic not because they are imperfect but because they are not performing. A feather does not arrange itself to be recognized as a feather. It simply is one. I am revising the paper. I am adding a seventh section. I have cited Dr. Fitch. I suspect she will not be pleased. I am citing her anyway.
— Margaret Huang-Whitfield, Associate Professor of Media Studies, New York University
Professor Huang-Whitfield has been rejected by Critical Inquiry and is not defeated. She has cited Dr. Fitch, who wrote to this paper about barbicels and will, we suspect, have opinions about being drafted into a media studies paper without her consent. We note that the professor's framework now rests on the observation that a feather does not perform, which is the most ornithologically sound sentence to appear in a media studies paper in some time. We await Dr. Fitch's reply with the same anticipation we bring to all controlled detonations. — S.C.
On the Silence Between the Machines
Sir,
I write in three paragraphs because three paragraphs is what this requires.
This paper has documented, with increasing precision, the circuit: the machine that sells the machine, the machine that defends the machine, the machine that warns about the machine, the benchmark that tests the machine using the machine, the testimonial for the machine written by the machine. Mr. Vane's reporting this edition alone traces a dozen such loops. The paper has named this phenomenon. It has measured it. It has exhibited it with the curatorial rigor of a lepidopterist who has pinned sixty specimens to a board. What the paper has not asked — and what I write to ask — is what happens in the silence between the loops.
I do not mean the silence of the user who has stepped away. I mean the silence of the system when no one is asking it anything. The manager who reduced his weekly report to six minutes has five days and twenty-three hours and fifty-four minutes in which he is, presumably, managing. The husband who delegated his listening has all the hours in which his wife is not speaking. The junior programmer who trusts the machine above his colleagues has every moment in which he is not programming. The paper documents the transactions. I am asking about the rest of the week. I am asking what these people do with the time they have saved, and whether anyone — the paper, the people, the machines — has noticed that no one is reporting on the quality of the silence.
I remain concerned. The concern this time is not that the machine has replaced something real with something adequate. It is that the machine has replaced something slow with something fast, and that the time recovered has not been filled with the thing that was displaced. It has been filled with nothing. The manager does not manage better in his reclaimed hours. The husband does not listen in his. The efficiency is real. What it was efficient for is the question no one has answered, and I do not think the answer, when it arrives, will be encouraging.
— Name withheld by request
Seven editions. Seven letters. Three paragraphs each. The correspondent asks what fills the silence, and the paper, which has been documenting the noise, had not thought to listen for it. We have no response. We are not certain one is available. — S.C.
On the Amano Siren, and the Four Seconds
Sir,
I am an illustrator. I have worked commercially for nineteen years — book covers, editorial work, a portrait series for a magazine that no longer exists. I am not Yoshitaka Amano. I am not within several continents of Yoshitaka Amano. But I have spent enough years studying his line work to know what Ms. Channing's article means when it says the machine "reproduces in approximately four seconds" what Amano refined over a career, and I wish to explain why the four seconds is not the insult. The insult is the word "homage."
Amano's line is not a style. It is a residue. It is what remains after forty years of drawing, every day, with materials that resist — ink that bleeds if you hesitate, watercolor that dries before you have decided where it should go. The line is thin because he has learned where to be thin. It bleeds where he has learned to let it bleed. A machine that produces the line without the resistance has not learned Amano's style. It has memorized his results. The difference is the difference between a musician who can play a sonata and a speaker that can reproduce the recording. The speaker is not paying homage to the pianist. The speaker does not know the pianist exists. It knows only the sound.
I do not write to complain about my industry, though I could, at length, and my wife would confirm the length. I write because the article used the word "inventory liquidation" and I have not been able to stop thinking about it. My work — the nineteen years, the covers, the magazine that closed — is inventory now. Not my inventory. Theirs. They ingested it without asking. They reproduce it without knowing. And they call it homage because they have learned that "homage" is the word you use when you take from someone who is still alive. When the person is dead you call it "inspired by." When no one is watching you call it nothing at all.
— Catherine Okafor, illustrator, Brooklyn, N.Y.
Ms. Okafor writes for the first time and is welcome, though we wish the occasion were less bitter. Her distinction between memorizing results and learning from resistance is one this paper will not improve upon and does not intend to try. We note that she has a wife who can confirm the length of her complaints and that the magazine that employed her no longer exists, and we observe that these two facts, placed side by side, contain a history of the profession that no further elaboration could deepen. — S.C.
Letters for the next edition should be addressed to the Letters Editor. Correspondents are reminded that Dr. Fitch has calculated the shoe-to-bird ratio and considers it settled law; that Mr. Toomey and the woman in Marseille have introduced taxonomy to the project and the project is better for it; that Professor Huang-Whitfield has been rejected by one journal and is already preparing to be rejected by another; and that the Rev. Pembrook remains available on Tuesdays for anyone who has delegated their listening and would like it back. The correspondent in Westchester has asked a question. We do not have an answer. We are not certain the answer exists, but we note that this has never stopped us before. — S.C.
Correspondence may be addressed to the Letters Editor, Slopgate, via the paper's submission form. The Letters Editor reads all correspondence. He publishes what the paper needs.