My colleague told me yesterday that, out of curiosity, he asked ChatGPT to do a lit review on a topic. It returned a nice list of articles. The journals are all real, the authors are all real people who work in the area, and the articles are all fictitious.

I'm not that worried about student plagiarism - I think instructors can find workarounds - and I'm not that worried about jobs being lost. I'm insanely worried about the political implications of deep fakes and so on, though.

It's already impossible for old folks to distinguish Fox News from actual news. There are a lot of uninformed middle-aged people who can easily be groomed into Fox News viewers with the right sort of well-placed propaganda, who might have been canny enough to distinguish fact from fiction a decade ago, but now are completely out of their league.

I can imagine that AI can be weaponized really poorly, and that Republicans might be bumbling idiots about it for a little while. But eventually someone will come with a particular genius for weaponizing AI, and I worry about the kinds of legislation being pushed through in Florida and Texas gaining nationwide support, and the nation veering back onto the high-speed fascist trajectory that I feared during the Trump years, (rather than the low-speed fascist trajectory that gives me time to adjust in a gradual way.)

I happen to be surrounded by math and computer people who like to point out how little everyone's appreciating the fantastic power of AI. Can we do a little hand-wringing here? It's freaking me out.

I thought this was a good essay on this one woman's experience with post-partum psychosis. She basically has a complete break from reality that lasts for about a month. It sounds absolutely awful.

The Millennial Vernacular of Fatphobia is by Anne Helen Petersen, and it uses the following tweet as a jumping-off point:

If any Gen Z are wondering why every Millennial woman has an eating disorder it's because in the 2000s a normal thing to say to a teenage girl was "when you think you feel hungry, youre actually thirsty so just drink water and you'll be fine."

— Lucy Huber (@clhubes) May 19, 2021

The article - which I enjoyed! - is a catalog of the toxic soup of fatphobia of the early 2000s, which puts it at a demographic slightly younger than me. There's a particularly nice bulleted list, which I'll excerpt part of:

• "Heroin chic" but specifically Kate Moss saying that "nothing tastes as good as skinny feels"
• The reign of terror of low-slung jeans
• The "going out top" whose platonic form was a handkerchief tied around your boobs
• The phrases "muffin top" and "whale tale" and "thigh gap"
• Ally McBeal, full stop
• The Olson Twins, full stop
• Kate Winslet as "chubby," Brittany Murphy in Clueless as "fat," Hilary Duff as "chubby," one of the cheerleaders in Bring It On as fat, America Ferrera as "brave," Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada as fat, Gisele as "curvy," Alicia Silverstone as "Fatgirl"

I am aware of nearly everything mentioned, but didn't internalize things the way I would have at age 14. (Of course, there is a similar list that could be made about pretty much any era in the past 50 years.)

So going back to the original tweet... are things actually different now? That's what I can't tell. There's obviously normal variation around how much teenagers care about such things. Maybe we won't know for another 30 years.

Slightly off-topic: I find it absolutely fascinating to have aged into a demographic where things I remember well can now be analyzed through the far end of the telescope. Specifically, the 1990s are now being analyzed and understood, and I feel like every time I hear a bit of analysis, I can better place my former self into context and understand myself better.

(Via Pocket)

Is there an interesting conversation to be held about the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit?

A thing flitted across my path on Reddit yesterday, linking to legal documents about Epstein and Trump arguing about who was going to get a 13 year old's virginity. (Probably this one.)

I don't know how to say this without sounding like an idiot, but what occurred to me is that I've actually compartmentalized someone as awful as Trump from the worst parts of Trump. I tend to think of him as a primarily racist, aggressive, pathologically narcissistic scam artist. I need to start incorporating rapist into that.

(But in a deadpan realistic way, not a dismissible overreactive female way. I've been listening to too much YMRT Erotic 90s and am currently steeped in backlash against feminists.)

Mossy Character sends in this link: Sudan conflict threatens supply of key soft drink ingredient gum arabic

[P]rior conflicts have tended to be focused in far-flung regions such as Darfur. This time, the capital Khartoum has been brought to a standstill in the fighting that broke out on April 15, paralysing the economy and disrupting basic communications.

...

"For companies like Pepsi and Coke, they can't exist without having gum arabic in their formulations," Dani Haddad, marketing and development director of Agrigum, a global top-ten supplier, said.

In their manufacturing process, food and drink companies use a spray-dried version of the gum that is powder-like, industry sources said. While cosmetics and printing manufacturers may be able to use substitutes, there is no alternative to gum arabic in fizzy drinks, where it prevents ingredients from separating.

In a sign of its importance to the consumer goods industry, gum arabic has been exempt from U.S. sanctions against Sudan since the 1990s, both because it's a critical commodity and for fear of creating a black market.

International economies are wild.