This topic was suggested by my mother-in-law, Janet Mueller!

I am not a therapist, counselor, or a psychologist, so I don’t know if I’m qualified to write this post with any authority. So I’ll write with without authority, and you can just accept that.

First, an observation. When I was doing an image search for the term “self acceptance” to use as the header of this blog post, I found a LOT of clip art featuring women, and only one or two featuring men. I don’t think that’s deliberate; I think that there’s still a lot of stigma surrounding the improvement of mental and emotional health, and that stigma hits men particularly hard. Real men don’t go to therapy. Real men don’t need to self-actualize. Real men don’t have to take anti-depressants or anti-anxiety meds. Real men work through it all; heck, I saw a Twitter X post from a “REAL MAN” (in his bio, along with the fact that he was a God-loving Christian) who proudly stated that when his father died, he didn’t even go to the funeral; he went to work. Is this healthy? I’m going to say no.

The point, though, is that I had to dig a bit to find a bit of clip art that I thought was gender-neutral enough to include at the top of this blog post.

Self acceptance is hard. We talk a lot about having to accept our limits when we consider our dreams and our fantasies about what we want to do and about the changes we want to make in the world, and this too is considered “self acceptance”.

I think it’s important to accept your limits, of course, but it’s also important to realize where your limits are. And they probably aren’t as nearby as you think. I probably won’t ever win the Nobel Peace Prize, but I may, if I try hard, be able to write a novel that features a post-scarcity, post-colonial civilization that is intent on making reparations to the peoples it has harmed. This is pretty ambitious. I’ve actually been thinking about this for several years as part of a Big Secret Writing Project that, unfortunately, never got off the ground. It still percolates in the back of my mind, but it probably won’t get written anytime soon.

So: accepting yourself means not just accepting your limitations, but also your possibilities. Acknowledge the things you can’t do, but also bear in mind those things you might do, if you wish.

As Marianne Williamson wrote, in a passage frequently misattributed to Nelson Mandela:

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate,. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world.

This, I argue, is what self acceptance really is: the acceptance of your possibilities, not just your limitations.

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Today’s recommendation is the movie Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead. I’m talking the live-action film on Netflix, not the anime or the manga. Jennifer and I saw this movie recently, and it delighted us both, and I loved its themes of self-acceptance, of friendship, and finding meaning in life, even in a zombie apocalypse. Plus, there’s no stupid love triangle or romantic subplot to distract from the zombie-squishing goodness! We saw the English dubbed version, but you can also watch it in Japanese with English subtitles. Highly recommended!

Please note, this post is based entirely on my own understanding of “AI” and the modern controversies surrounding these tools. It’s one of the topics I was given when I solicited topics for my daily blog posts.

AI in general

I am not a fan of what has been popularly called AI, as perpetrated on us by companies developing tools like ChatGPT or Midjourney or Dall-E or any of their equivalents. For one thing, the term “AI” — or “generative AI” — is a misnomer. There is nothing intelligent about these tools. They are not self-aware. They do not create anything. They do not feel anything. They are good at generating text or images based on large — I mean, HUGE — amounts of input. But intelligent? No. These tools are properly called “Large Language Models”, but that term is not precisely correct. It’s correct enough for my purposes, though.

One term that I have seen bandied about for such tools is “stochastic parrot”. ¹, a term which basically means what I have just said above: they take large amounts of data and churn out predictive text. Another term I’ve seen online (usually in Facebook memes) is “plagiarism machines”. That’s certainly an appropriate term, because these tools are trained on, basically, the entirety of the internet, which includes a great number of copyrighted texts, and while OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, may have restrained their own tools from using these copyrighted texts, other corporations or open-source creators may not. Indeed, the issue of copyright for these tools has opened up a number of lawsuits and legal troubles. How will these issues be resolved? I don’t know. I can tell you, though, that the high court of Japan has ruled that copyrighted texts published there are fair game for LLMs.

Then there’s the issue of AI “hallucinations”, which is an entirely wrong term. AIs don’t hallucinate, any more than my cup of coffee does. They simply generate bad information. When I asked ChatGPT to tell me about myself, Richard S. Crawford the writer, it told me at first that I had written a number of stories and listed a couple of my publications; but then it also listed the number of awards I’d earned, and the fact that I lived in the Bay Area with my wife and children and a dog. All of this is, of course, false. I haven’t won any awards, I certainly do not live in the Bay Area, and while I do have a wife, we have no children, and there are definitely no dogs. This leads me to wonder what the point of ChatGPT even is, if I have to fact-check every statement it makes; and when people encounter “facts” that ChatGPT hallucinates into being, how many of them are going to bother fact-checking anyway. You thought the internet was bad at spreading dis/mis-information now, just wait until Google’s top results in its searches are AI-generated articles with no human intervention or fact-checking.

There are other problematic aspects of LLMs and the companies that create them, from the environmental resources required to keep them up and running (and you thought cryptocurrencies were bad), to the hordes of Kenyan workers paid at sub-subsistence levels to keep the tools from becoming Nazi parrots. But I’ll let other people address those issues. And I’ll only mention in passing the way AI grifters are using ChatGPT to scam Amazon’s KU program for money.

AI and Science Fiction

This is a topic I’m less familiar with, mostly because I don’t read a whole lot of science fiction. I know that there have been plenty of movies that feature AIs or self-aware computers — 2001: A Space Odyssey comes to mind — and most of the time, these tools are portrayed as dangerous and, well, not necessarily fans of the human race. HAL, in 2001, killed off all the crew in that movie, and attempted to do in Dave Bowman who figured out how to turn it off by removing its memory cores. And who can forget Skynet, the AI in the Terminator franchise, that started a nuclear war between Russia and the US? And finally, let’s not leave out the intelligent machines in that vastly silly Matrix series of films².

On the other hand, the Pixar film Wall-E features an intelligent, presumably self-aware robot that basically saves the human race from itself. Or something. To be honest, it’s been at least a decade since I saw that movie.

I’m even less familiar with AIs in novels, but I do remember that in Becky Chambers’s truly outstanding Wayfarers series of novels, there are plenty of AI characters who run the gamut of ethical sensibilities, from benevolent to less so. The second book of the series, A Closed and Common Orbit, one of the best science fiction novels published in recent years, features an AI on a quest to find out what its own personhood means.

In short, AIs in media are more likely to be true artificial intelligences, sapient, self-aware, capable of emotion, all of that. LLMs are not that. They may seem it, but they are not. HAL is sapient, as is Skynet… LLMs, not so much.

Will the science fiction view of AI ever come into being? This question has been hotly debated by philosophers and technologists for decades. I remember reading John Searle’s essay in which he argued that a thermostat may be intelligent, simply because it “knows” what to do when climate conditions change³, and that was in 1991. A consensus has never been reached.

Personally, I don’t think so; at least, I don’t think we’ll ever see a human-equivalent AI. This is based on arguments I recall from college philosophy and psychology classes that human intelligence is not just a brain phenomenon, but a whole-body one; in other words, our sense of self-awareness is based not just in the brain, but takes input from all over our body, all our senses, all our organs, even the microbiome that makes up the population of our guts⁴. Unless we can build a human body from scratch and imbue THAT with an artificial intelligence, maybe we’ll see something human-like.

I feel like I’ve drifted from the topic. What was it? Oh yes, AI and Science Fiction.

Artificial intelligences were a part of the worldbuilding in Dune, as I recall (though it’s been decades since I’ve read that book). However, there was a “Butlerian jihad” which destroyed the AIs and made them illegal because they tried to take over and kill the humans.

In summary, I believe a Butlerian jihad may be just what we need right now.

I’ve decided that I’m going to recommend books I’ve read as part of this series of blog posts, and for this one I’m going to recommend the Hugo-award winning Wayfarers series by Becky Chambers. Start with The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet and go from there. You won’t regret it, I promise. And as I mentioned, while all these books are excellent, in my opinion, the second one, A Closed and Common Orbit, is the best.

I’ve been a fan of Tom Waits and his music since 1990 or so, when my friend Mike introduced me to Waits’s 1985 album Rain Dogs. I admire his range and I find his subject matter enthralling. While Jennifer says my Tom Waits CDs can “live in your car” (apparently she’s not a fan), I listen to them pretty frequently.

Here’s one of my favorite Waits songs, “I Don’t Wanna Grow Up”, from 1992’s Bone Machine:

For contrast, here’s “Drunk on the Moon”, another of my favorites, dating back to 1974’s The Heart of Saturday Night:

This song, in fact, inspired a character in my novella, “The Winds of Patwin County”, which is, I think, one of my more successful pieces of fiction.

For some reason, I associate Tom Waits with writing. And for that reason, I’m pondering a project: editing an anthology of original short stories inspired by the music of Tom Waits. I have no idea at the moment how I’d go about doing it (I imagine I’d need to get some sort of rights from Tom Waits’s label to do this). I would probably set up a Kickstarter campaign to fund the project; the money would go to production costs (it’d be self-published) and to paying the contributing authors.

I don’t know for sure, though. Any thoughts, anyone?