Does anybody remember those toy necklaces that were strung together with little stems that were kind of popped into little holes in little plastic pearls? Of course, that was a gendered toy when I was a child, so I never possessed them. Now I have all of Mother’s pearl necklaces as well as those of my aunt Mozelle, not to mention the ones I wheedled out of Karl from time to time. While they vary in quality, value and provenance, they are still kind of toys to me.
There are all kinds of imitation pearls, using a variety of materials. The better ones are usually glass beads dipped or even sprayed with some type of pearlescent substance. Majorica pearls are the top of the line of these imitations.
Then there are cultured pearls, which are real pearls, but not natural pearls. The latter are created without human intervention, the former by human intervention that bears more than a passing resemblance to artificial insemination. The vast majority of real pearls available today are cultured, as the natural ones are very rare and hugely more expensive. It is believed that most natural pearls have already been harvested.
Diamonds, and what looks like diamonds, come with a range, too. There are actual gemstones, white sapphires being the best of the lot, that look a good deal like diamonds, but are just passing for their richer cousin. Then there are lesser fakes, like rhinestones, that are obviously not diamonds even to the casual observer.
But thanks to the unending ingenuity of mankind, we now have available what I think of as cultured diamonds. They’re man-made, but they’re real diamonds. Just like with cultured pearls, they are made by humans, under circumstances that sometimes cause them to be referred to as lab-grown diamonds. In today’s market, just as with the pearls, natural diamonds are far more valuable.
Even when we know what is natural, we humans have a real tendency to embrace the artificial. False eyelashes have been around forever, as have wigs, falls, toppers and all sorts of hair appliances. When it comes to hair, we dye it, bleach it, straighten it and curl it. Faces are injected with Botox to smooth out the skin and with fillers to plump it out. Contouring through cosmetics can be used to hide the bumps in noses or to create cheekbones that would otherwise be unnoticed.
There are padded and push-up bras that fill with cotton what God has forgotten. If that’s not enough, there are breast implants readily available. There are other implants, too, as well as fat transfers and skin grafts to enhance the size of other parts of the body, normally seen only in bedrooms and locker rooms.
I suppose it is natural that we have now developed technology sufficiently to come up with something fake to duplicate that which separates us from the other animals, other than our ability to accessorize. Namely, artificial intelligence.
As a proud and unapologetic Luddite, I’m not embracing this. I don’t want to chat with it, I don’t want to GPT with it or GPS with it, for that matter. I say that while fully recognizing that I use some forms of AI routinely, particularly when researching and verifying information for this column. Maybe one of my more enterprising and younger friends may eventually want to show me its virtues, but I’m not signing up for a course in it in the immediate future.
As if I needed more reason to be wary, the problems that Elon Musk and his “non-woke” Grok chatbox got into show rather conclusively something I suspected all along about real, natural or artificial intelligence. After Musk announced last Friday that changes had been made to significantly improve Grok’s “thinking” by removing liberal bias.
In fairly short order, poor old Grok was sounding increasingly anti-Semitic with comments about Jewish surnames and ultimately referring to itself as “MechaHitler.” But Grok can only respond as directed based on the information made available to it. Removing the liberal bias (perspective?) and updating the software to encourage Grok’s comments to be more “politically incorrect” led to the controversy and a particularly bad week for Musk.
So it turns out that, when denied access to a range of perspectives, artificial intelligence can sound as mean, hateful and downright ignorant as…
Well, you fill in the blank.
