Another Week Ends

1. A dispiriting week on the artificial intelligence front here at Mockingbird HQ. On Tuesday I fielded a submission on a relevant topic (moral injury and grace). The writer was unknown, but the email came from a plausible Gmail address, boasting several bona fides and claiming the post was an excerpt from a forthcoming book. The piece itself was tonally  divergent from what we usually run but not entirely out of the ballpark. I’d describe the “voice” as vague yet pithy, and the content as ponderous while still within the bounds of acceptability.

I started to edit. After about 45 minutes, the number of single-sentence paragraphs became jarring, though not as much as what I can only call the incessant “groupings of statements” — small variations of the same thing, said three or four times in an almost preacherly way.

A few days prior, I’d attended a conference where there was a lot of talk about AI encroachments, so midway through it occurred to me that “huh, maybe part of this isn’t totally authentic.” So I googled the author, apparently a retired pastor living in the Midwest. The search returned the titles of a few self-published books on related subjects, even a LinkedIn profile, albeit with no verifiable “connections.” I couldn’t find any pictures, though, which is odd for someone claiming to be retired clergy. I then consulted Goodreads, where plugging the “person’s” name into their search bar yielded 424 published works — all since 2024!

Disconcerted, I texted a friend in publishing who advised me to run the file through Pangram. Lo and behold: 100% AI-generated! Even more unsettling was the fact that, before I noticed anything fishy, I’d been in touch with the “author” asking if we should hold off on the post ’til closer to their (allegedly forthcoming) book’s release. They’d promptly replied, informing me that the cover had gotten pulled for redesign and wouldn’t be ready for preorder for a bit, but please by all means, go ahead and post. In other words, they “lied” to me?

I decided to run another recent article through the filter — one with a similar tone — and … bingo, another nonhuman submission. This time the topic was how to read scripture more honestly and prayerfully(!), from another bot with whom I’d corresponded multiple times about edits. I don’t quite get what the endgame is, but it freaked me out, coming as it did a few days after Pope Leo’s encyclical. 

It feels absurd to have to say such a thing, but I suppose this is the world we live in now: Mockingbird intends to remain “By Humans, For Humans” come what may. As if you needed another reason to support our work! Oh and Christianity Today posted a pretty good AI Use Policy for Writers that we will do our best to abide by. 

2. The web is not exactly lacking in think pieces on the predicament I’ve just described. One that caught my attention was L. M. Sacasas’ generous take “Do Not Resign from Life” over on Substack:

We’ve made machines that can fly faster and farther than the swallow-tailed kite, but in no way does it follow that the kite should cease from its flight or that it is somehow diminished because of the advent of flying machines. That there is something else in the world that flies tells us nothing about whether the kite ought to fly. Of course it should fly because the point of flying for the kite is not to somehow demonstrate its uniqueness. It is blessedly free from such forms of existential angst, the experience of which might be the thing that does distinguish us as a species!

It seems to me that we would be better off if we were less preoccupied with the question of human uniqueness, if we took for granted that we are creatures of certain sort making their way in the world with a distinct set of capabilities and potentialities and that we ought to exercise these capabilities and develop these potentialities not because they make us special but because they make us happy. […]

Why should I cease from inhabiting the playground of language because a machine can pretend to play in it as well? Why should I abandon the exercise of judgment or the pursuit of knowledge? We must pursue these things not because the dignity of our humanity is on the line, but because our joy is.

Speaking of joy, that’s just one emotion the World Cup is poised to bring us meatbags this summer. Hopefully all the theme songs are as inspiring at this one:

2. The best rejoinder to the creeping AI-ization of all things I’ve come across this week has to be Alan Jacobs’ investigation into “[W. H.] Auden’s Faith” over at Homebound Symphony. With characteristic expertise and calm, Jacobs refutes Auden’s biographer Edward Mendelson’s claims about the great poet’s convictions (or lack thereof). This first anecdote is one I’d never heard but will definitely be repeating:

We know that Auden believed that Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical person who “was crucified under Pontius Pilate.” There’s a funny story Mendelson has told about a lecture that Joseph Campbell gave at Smith College, when Auden was teaching there, in which he spoke of the oneness of Jesus and the Buddha, each of whom had spears thrust at him, though in the case of the Buddha they were transformed into flowers. Auden shouted from the back of the room, “ON GOOD FRIDAY THE SPEARS WERE REAL.”

Indeed! Also new to me was the passage from Auden himself that Alan reproduces earlier in the post:

The Gospels put the command to love God before the command to love our neighbor, not because it is more important, but because until we know who God is and how He loves us, we cannot grasp who our neighbor is or how we are to love him. The Word was made Flesh so that we might know, and the first thing which Christ forces us to realise is that the True God and the love he bears us are not at all what we expected or want: indeed, we thoroughly dislike both.

3. Before we leave off the embodiment theme, the Atlantic ran a wow-to-the-deadness-inducing article from Einstein’s Dream author Alan Lightman on “The Ordinary Miracle of Existing.” I may not find his conclusions terribly compelling — at least, would suggest an alternate object for our gratitude — but the same does not apply to the wonder he evokes at the miracle of, well, grace:

There are a hundred thousand billion unique and different human beings that could result from each procreation event. Only one of those possible combinations led to each of you reading this article at this moment. Here’s a way to visualize that extremely tiny fraction. If you took a very long ruler that stretched from here to the planet Pluto, one inch of that distance would be you. The rest of the distance would be other possible human beings that could have been, but never were. Each of us has won a lottery with a hundred thousand billion different players.

Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck we will ever experience. Yet it is the easiest to overlook, to take for granted. We wake up in the morning, have our coffee, make breakfast, send the kids off to school, check off items on our to-do list. And we forget that beneath all of it lies something profoundly rare: existence itself. The simple fact that we are here, conscious and aware, is so unlikely that it borders on the miraculous. Because we experience that miracle every day, we treat it as ordinary, even guaranteed, mostly unnoticed at all. […]

As each of us dwindles in size by comparison to the cosmic stretches of space and of time, our individual lives, our improbable existence becomes more and more important. With the understanding of my great good fortune, I also feel a sense of responsibility. But to whom, or to what, am I responsible?

4. Back on terra firma, over at the NY Times, Jessica Grose urges readers to “Stop Location-Tracking Your Friends and Lovers.” What is more depressing here: the fact that the practice has become so commonplace that her injunction warrants a headline in our paper of record, or the fact so many people have good reason to disregard it? I’m not sure. But I am sure that Grose comes up with my second-favorite aphorism of the week (the first being “the spears were real”), the closing observation that “surveillance isn’t always the basis of a solid bond.” Laugh or you’ll cry, my friends:

I did a nonscientific, casual survey of friends and colleagues, and there seemed to be a real generational divide: Roughly, anybody under 35 seemed to think location sharing was no big deal, and one shared her phone location with 34 people. People over 35 said they might share their location briefly if they were going someplace dangerous, or needed to find someone at a crowded concert. But they did not share as a default. Most of them felt that having their movement tracked was invasive and micromanaging. […]

Sinead Smyth, a family therapist based in California, thinks there are enormous, and mostly negative, implications to location sharing for couples and friends. “It generates more suspicion and questions than it provides answers,” Smyth wrote in an email. “What happens if the partner turns off the sharing? It inserts the notion of wrongdoing into a relationship unnecessarily, which can lead to increased defensiveness, secrecy, conflict and lower trust.”

5. I’m coming up short with humor this week, apart from the Reductress headline “Woman Who Says ‘Go Big or Go Home’ Should Really Choose Going Home Occasionally.” Fortunately cartoonist Natalya Lobanova dropped this bit of perfection on Instagram:

6. Actually there are more than enough tidbits in this next article for it to qualify as humor (adjacent). I’m referring to “The Men Who Lie About Their Height” by Brady Brickner-Wood in the New Yorker, which explores the increasingly absurd lengths to which men will go to silence the accusation of little-l law (in pursuit, usually, of love). How tall is tall enough, Mr. Wembanyama? It would appear the answer is, “Just a little taller.”

In recent years, the rise of dating apps — some of which allow users to set height preferences when browsing potential matches — has made height exaggeration even more ubiquitous. “I have gone on dates with multiple men that have all starkly lied about their height. STARKLY,” one woman shared on Reddit. “This has happened multiple times and I’m just so confused.” Some men argue that these lies are necessary to land a date at all: it’s common for women to specify on their profiles that they’re only interested in men taller than them, leaving shorter guys stuck between, on the one hand, being truthful and ignored, and, on the other, lying and getting more matches. Studies suggest that men are frequently opting for the latter.

In 2008, a group of researchers found that more than eighty per cent of surveyed participants physically misrepresented themselves on dating profiles, with men distorting their height significantly more than women did. […] Some women have even begun using A.I. tools to assess a man’s photos in hopes of using his proportions and surroundings to estimate his true height. […]

The online subculture known as looksmaxxing claims to offer a set of newfangled solutions for men—many of them short, many of them incels—to increase their sexual and social status… The methodology for achieving such goals spans from the mundane (lift weights; eat healthy; take showers) to the deranged (smoke methamphetamine; smash your face with a hammer; inject high doses of anabolic steroids).

For men under six feet, looksmaxxing influencers suggest several solutions for increasing their “sexual market value”: stand on your tiptoes (“tiptoemaxxing”); wear platform shoes; perform spinal stretches; or, to truly ascend, undergo a limb-lengthening procedure that can add up to six inches of height. And men are indeed lengthening their limbs, flying to international clinics, having metal rods inserted into their bones, and then, after a brutal recovery process, relearning how to walk. […] With enough optimization and intervention, their argument goes, the body can be manipulated into becoming fully knowable, mastered, perfect. And, once they become perfect, they’ll never need to tell a lie again.

7. Finally, Nadia Bolz-Weber preached the best Trinity Sunday sermon I’ve encountered in eons, “Creatures from the God Lagoon”, which you can read on her Corners Substack. I dare say, it speaks to people of all shapes and sizes.

We know what 1+1+1 is. It’s supposed to be 3. But here’s the thing about supposed-to-bes: supposed-to-bes are not always helpful in the end. If our kids majored in computer science, they were supposed to be employable for life. If we are good people, bad things are not supposed to happen to us. If you eat broccoli every day, you are not supposed to get a cancer diagnosis. Supposed-to-be’s are just our brains telling us we are justified in resenting reality. […]

In the Gospels the disciples were in their own crisis of supposed-to-bes. They were supposed to be Jesus’s team – supposed to stand by their teacher but they couldn’t stay awake one hour. Jesus wasn’t supposed to die but he did. And then Jesus was supposed to stay dead, and he didn’t.

So after several days of things not going the way they were supposed to, Jesus stands among them – Holiness in the flesh right before their eyes, but some doubted. Those are my people. The ones who can’t see God right in front of them because they are too wrung out by how whatever is happening is not what they think should be happening. […]

But here’s the thing, friends – God only exists in what is real, God is nowhere to be found in imaginary places where everything is just the way we think it is supposed to be. God is only in reality. And our disappointments are often born in the gap between what is and what our very confident brains insist what should be. […]

Maybe the last thing we need is a God who makes complete sense to the same brains that keep using formulas that make us miserable. Because a God I can fully explain is just a God I invented. And I’ve tried that. My invented God has let me down every single time; because my invented God is basically just me, with super powers and slightly better judgment. […]

Right now, I really need a 1+1+1=1 God. A God bigger than my explanations. What I need is a peace that passes understanding. A peace that sees understanding nods its head and keeps on going. Since life doesn’t unfold the way it’s “supposed to” then what I need is a God who defies the reason and logic and Newtonian physics of my own ideas of who God is “supposed” to be.

Strays

• “Wendell Berry’s Wisdom for Living in Time” in Plough
• Weekend listening rec is definitely the long-awaited new episode of PZ’s Podcast, “Lorna Doone? Brigadoon!” Oh and the last Mockingcast of the season has been recorded and should post Monday morning. It’s a fun one.
• Spotify subscribers should do the right thing and pre-save Andy Squyres’ new Praise Songs EP, which is out next week. I’ve had the delight of listening to an advance copy, and you guys…!
• “The Strange Appeal of the Solitude Influence” by Faith Hill explores “one of the more supportive corners of the internet I’ve seen. But it was also odd: strangers gathering, to celebrate being alone.”
• I alluded to it in passing above, but this past week, we sent out our semi-annual fundraising appeal. If Mockingbird means something to you, we sure could use your help. As always, monthly donors receive a complimentary subscription to our print magazine, as well as snazzy a ballcap.