Not My Type.

In the 45 years since I started getting paid to sit behind a typewriter, I've rarely taken time out of my almost invariably busy days and done something strictly for myself--more specifically for what passes for what's left of my mind.

Of course, I left early for a dentist, or for a parent-teacher conference, or for some other obligation that needed my attention. Once, when I was young, my art director and I snuck out of work--furtively of course--before a client meeting.

We bought some sandwiches and beer and went to the movies near our client's office. We saw the Tom Cruise celebration of macho testosterone "Top Gun." Accordingly, C. (my partner) started calling me "Querty." I called him "T-Square." Those were our test pilot nicknames. At one point in the meeting presenting work, C got heated. I said sotto voce to him, "Pull back T-Square." Forty years on, we still laugh about it.

Yesterday, I got an email inviting me to attend a Zoom lecture from Cooper Union, the great, munificent college in the center of Greenwich Village. Abraham Lincoln as a presidential candidate gave a campaign speech there affirming all the things today's candidates spend their speeches negating.

Yesterday's lecture was called "Type Tourist," and was by David Quay. 

Of course at the outset, I was doing two things at once and I read the description wrong. I thought I'd be seeing "found typography" from around New York City. I had hoped it would scratch my nostos algia itch. Instead, it helped me look at the beauty around us that, because we're so frantic so often we so frequently ignore.

Quay is a type-designer and Quay's extemporaneous talk was a chronicle of his travels around Europe and the type he sees along the way. You should watch the video. You can find it here.

Here are just a few of the images I grabbed from Quay's talk. My friend and ex-partner from O, S, is a typographer by training, and I captured 77-percent of the images to share with him. The things friends do for friends. Or lonely people do to be less lonely.

I can't help but be cynical about the world today and how trillionaire humanoids and their willing corporate executioners are bludgeoning us with propaganda about the pattern-matching mechanism they call artificial intelligence. 

I'm ok with their use of the word artificial. I take exception with intelligence. AI has no taste, judgment, discernment, randomness, entropic connectivity and serendipitic generative ability. 

AI typically contains around 50-60% intelligence and 40-50% other ingredients. Slop. Cliché. Bland. Vapid. Banality.

A "Processed cheese food product" is not cheese, though people call it cheese and eat it as cheese. In fact, for decades Cheez Whiz couldn't put the word cheese in its name. It didn't have enough real cheese. Like the Froot Loops people couldn't use the word fruit. I wonder if Artificial Intelligence should be mandated to call itself Artificial Insmelligence, or Artificial Untelligence, or Artificial Wetellonyou, so we don't mistake its fauxness for something real.

But fake is real today.

As Brandy Shillace writes in her Wall Street Journal review of Angus Fletcher's book, "Primal Intelligence: You Are Smarter than You Know":

That is, AI is fine for things mathematical or to determine the blast radius and killing power of explosives. Or to summarize other summaries. 

I don't want it "telling me a story," or trying to entertain or teach me. I don't want it surveilling me or my neighbors or people I share the planet with. I don't want it making decisions based on what it thinks I want to hear or, more pointedly, what it wants to sell me, tell me, fell me or smell me.

When I finally emerged from my office, and had a brief moment to talk to my wife, I tried playing her the video of Quay's lecture that I've linked to and pasted above.

All you need to do now is hold two opposing thoughts in your mind.

Every image Quay showed showed something individual, unique, quirky and human. Every bit of type had a bit of human corpuscle in it. Corpuscle not corporate-pus-all.

The AI-generated type that was appended onto the video of Quay's talk was about 70-percent accurate and 30-percent horrendous typos, mis-hearings and bad articulations. If your child handed in a school paper that was similarly slapdash, they'd get an A-. (The lowest grade you can get in our modern educational system.)

The subject-object chasm or abyss (it is so much more than a split) between the purported "intelligence" of AI and its actual performance of the day-to-day is absolutely staggering.

One is meant to be representative of Archimedes, Newton or Leonardo--"thousand-year minds." The reality is a sloppy adolescent with no particular skill. A "thousand-second mind."

Of course, talk to text is not the sole arbiter of the "intelligence" of AI. But we're 15 years into the technology. 15 years into the ostensible horizon of "super-intelligence" where human woes, and indeed human work will be conquered. Should it still be sucking so bad? I feel like it transcribes like I did in 9th-grade Spanish language-lab.

[It brings to my mind an un-findable Abbott and Costello-ism. Someone says to Costello, "Buenos noches." He replies, "Two old snowshoes to you, too."

Six months ago, I wrote this. 

My personal, nasty, growly, hard-to-work-with "i" says it's worth reprinting.