This post is a sort of elderly extended dither about reality.

See, I like to keep up with things. I may be old, and reality may constantly be transforming itself in unsettling ways, but unlike your peevish great-uncle who likes to shout from his lounger, I kind of enjoy the process.

This morning, for instance, as I was catching up on the news, the item that caught my eye in the paper was about bicycles and accidents.

The newspaper is technically, the same paper I always read. It’s The Philadelphia Inquirer, which was around when I was a kid; The Inquirer eventually acquired the other local papers, The Philadelphia Bulletin and The Daily News.

But I was reading it on my phone, and not on paper, so it’s not a paper, not really.

Parenthetically, the phone I was reading it on isn’t a phone, either. A phone is something for talking with people, using your voice (the etymology of “phone” is related to sound). Though I do (rarely) talk to people on it, what I was reading on is really a small high-powered computer. Of course it’s a phone. I’m nitpicking.

The article I was reading wasn’t exactly about bicycles, either, though foot-powered two-wheel vehicles did make an appearance. It was about e-bikes. E-bikes that are as fast as motorcycles cause a lot of accidents. People treat them like bikes, and buy them for their kids. They are real bikes. Of a sort. They have two wheels. I understand you can still pedal some of them, too, on a steep hill. Not all of them.

So the paper isn’t paper, the phone isn’t a phone, and bicycles aren’t bicycles. Got it.

That wasn’t so difficult, was it?

The next thing I read this morning was about a modern form of plagiarism. The author of the article claimed you can detect text that has been machine-generated by looking for em-dashes and parallel-structured in-sentence lists.

All right, so it wasn’t actually an article about plagiarism, it was a post on a federated social network about large language models, but you know what I mean.

LLMs do feed on the work of others, but what they spit out isn’t reproduced verbatim. It’s just a kind of wholesale and vague similarity, a statistical imitation that draws from a huge variety of sources.So LLMs aren’t technically plagiarizing, right? Or are they? And if they are, who are they plagiarizing from?

In part, they are plagiarizing from me. I use em-dashes. Love them. Also, I am compulsive about fixing in-sentence lists so that their structure is parallel. And as an author who had my published work skimmed by a large-language module, I’m waiting for the Anthropic settlement to give me a pittance.

If you decided I am an LLM because of em-dashes and parallelism, therefore, you would be getting the cart before the horse.

Anyway, talking about whether you can trust what you are reading, I went on Wikipedia just now, in a side-trip, because when I was writing about phones, I couldn’t remember the name for a neighborhood phone line, like the one we had in the 1950s in rural Illinois (it’s “party line”).

On Wikipedia, I came across the following disclaimer in an article (about switchboards, because I digressed even further):

This section may incorporate text from a large language model. It may include hallucinated information or fictitious references

.

So I can’t trust Wikipedia either. Well, I guess I can trust the volunteer editors of Wikipedia to post forthright disclaimers. Sometimes. At least this time they did.

Not to belabor the point, but to belabor the point: The paper isn’t a paper, the phone isn’t a phone, a bicycle isn’t a bicycle, an encyclopedia isn’t an encyclopedia, and you can’t trust that most of what you read is written by a human being.

At least the foregoing sentence contained a list that wasn’t entirely parallel in structure, because the last verbs weren’t transitive. Maybe I’m wrong about that. But maybe you can’t trust me, either. I’m not the person I was when I was eight, even though I have the same name, and I could very well be a form of large language module, now that I think of it.

Pardon me, I’m off to look up Heraclitus on Wikipedia on my phone. Wish me luck.