One of the commonly promoted function of generative artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT is summarising long pieces of text. Ryan Broderick recently wrote in Garbage Day:

The assumption that people want summaries of information when they receive news, is also a funny one. It seems to come around every four-to-eight years. Typically when Democrats are in the White House, I’ve noticed. This was the impetus behind Vox, for instance, with its big initial claims of inventing “explainer journalism,” which quickly just devolved into blogging, again. My own assumption here is that this is a byproduct of CEO brain. “I can’t possibly read all of the information I need to pretend to care about to run my company, so other people must treat information as a nuisance to be fixed, as well.” But, once again, that is not really the case. The internet has turned the consumption of information into its own form of entertainment — or in the context of conspiracy theories, madness.

This is something that I’ve often thought about, too.

There are some scenarios where an AI summary can be useful. Occasionally, I’m copied into long email chains with a vague subject line and have to spend time scrolling up and down to orientate myself as to what the conversation is about. I occasionally skimp on that step and end up missing the point. A couple of auto-generated sentences saying ‘this is a series of emails discussing x, with the goal of producing y, looking for input on aspect z’ can be a godsend.¹

And yet, the products which advertising tends to push at me most frequently are services which offer summaries of things which I don’t think benefit from summarisation. The commonest one is books. Short books distilling the ‘key messages’ of longer books are clearly popular, and pre-date the web, let alone generative AI, but I’ve never really understood the point. The format assumes that books are about imparting a series of facts; in my experience, most are actually about encouraging readers to think differently about subjects. Even in the simplest airport bookshop management paperbacks, the identification of key messages is highly subjective.

With human-authored summaries, we can at least have a sense of whether we trust the subjective judgements of the summariser, but this becomes much trickier with the black box of artificial intelligence. Summarisation usually involves value judgements, and they are not easily ‘outsourced’ to AI. This is a problem when summarising books, but even more so in summarising news.

Alan Rusbridger recently commented on his podcast that an experiment using AI summaries to generate key points to draw people into reading Prospect articles had impressed both him and the magazine’s writers. But that’s a different goal from relying on the summary instead of reading the article. It would be a bit like relying on a headline rather than reading the full story… which seems to be common behaviour, not necessarily a behaviour for which proliferation benefits humanity.

It strikes me as unfortunate that we’re building tools—or at least promoting the ability of tools—to allow people to engage more superficially with subjects than they already do. It’s not like humanity is short of examples of the downsides of people engaging only with the headlines and glossing over the detail.

Fortunately, like Broderick, I doubt that’s what people are seeking in practice, I think people are more into ‘deep dives’. Broderick attributes the miscalculation to ‘CEO brain’; I’d attribute it, at least equally, to ‘social media brain’. The ‘BREAKING’ and ‘HUGE IF TRUE’ style of sharing information in bitesize chunk on social media might suggest that people like consuming information in vastly abbreviated forms, but I don’t buy it. I think those interactions are much more about socialisation than about assessing information.

Fortunately, generative AI can work perfectly well in the other direction, too, recommending books and sources that can help people to explore a topic more deeply. I think this would make the more interesting tool: not ‘summarise this webpage’, but ‘recommend another three web pages which explore this subject in more detail’.

The obvious difficulty in making such a tool work is the rabbit-hole phenomenon, much-discussed in the context of the YouTube algorithm. How do you imbue such as system with the sensitivity and awareness to avoid pulling people into ever-more extreme versions of conspiracy theories, for example?

It’s a difficult problem, but one that equally needs solving to make summarisation engines work in a reliable and trustworthy way. Let’s hope someone can tackle it.

1. Experience over many years had taught me to start my own replies to email chains like that with my own couple of sentences, starting ’I understand from the below that…’. It’s a technique which can nip misunderstandings in the bud. ↩

The image at the top of this post was generated by DALL·E 3.

I went to see this film starring Andrew Scott, Paul Mescal, Claire Foy and Jamie Bell as the latest outing in my cinema project. It was directed by Andrew Haigh. I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect from it, but found myself blown away.

At heart, this is a carefully crafted film about the nature of our relationship with our parents. Foy and Bell play the parents of the protagonist, Scott, who were killed when he was twelve years old. In the course of the film, Scott is able to travel to see his parents and talk to them again, frozen at the age they were when they died. Because we don’t really know how this is happening, it is unclear whether Scott is interacting with his parents as they really were, or whether he is seeing his own perception of them—plus his hopes and fears of their judgements of his later life—reflected back at him.

This sounds like a terribly complicated plot, but it isn’t really: it is brushed over, and the focus is almost entirely on the emotions of the relationships. In that sense, the film reminded me a lot of opera. We’re left not worrying about how the characters reached any given point in the plot, but left just to contemplate the emotions of the moments.

And there is a real emotional heft in this film: I felt a bit like I’d been hit by a truck when it ended, and I’ve never heard so many people weeping in a cinema auditorium. Never before have I sat in a screen where no-one—absolutely no-one—moved a muscle when the credits appeared; there was just stunned silence until the house lights came back up.

All of the acting was brilliant in this film, coupled with some brilliant cinematography and a desperately evocative soundtrack. There is nothing I’d change. It was a perfect package and an absolutely remarkable film. I’d highly recommend it.

I can’t believe that I’ve never featured this sign on the blog before, yet I can’t find a previous mention.

This exhibition has recently transferred from the National Portrait Gallery to The Laing. Before visiting, I knew nothing about Yevonde, but I came away with a real appreciation for her life and work. She was a photographer who developed her practice in the period between the two World Wars, and who was a pioneer of the use of colour photography. There were several strands running through the exhibition that stood out to me.

The exhibition did a good job of helping me to understand how colour photography initially developed. It was a simple process involving taking multiple simultaneous images effectively through multiple cameras, with coloured filters in front of each one. These could then be developed using coloured inks and composited to create a colour image. It’s a simple and logical process, but one that was entirely new to me.

Yevonde developed a distinctive style for her colour photography:

If we are going to have colour photography, for heaven’s sake, let’s have a riot of colour.

My colour perception is pretty poor, but even so, the Vivex photography combined with Yevonde’s compositions seemed stunning vivid on the gallery walls, almost hyperreal. This is perhaps most celebrated in her work photographing women dressed as goddesses.

The exhibition included a small goddess-inspired dressing up corner, and during my visit, this was occupied by a woman who seemed to be having the time of her life, alone in front of the mirror. More power to her.

I was interested in Yevonde’s feminism, which was well represented in the exhibition. Most of the human subjects featured in her work were female, and it was suggested that much of her early interested in photography was driven by a desire to be independent.

The duties of a wife with a separate career have yet to be defined, and although complete unselfishness, has always been considered a sure foundation for domestic happiness, I am not convinced.

The curators placed one of the largest of Yevonde’s self-portraits alongside this quotation:

This is not the story of a woman’s life, but the story of a photographer that happens to be a woman.

Almost exactly a year ago, I enjoyed the Design Museum’s exhibition on Surrealism. I was therefore interested to see in this exhibition the interaction between Yevonde’s photography, and colour photography more generally, and surrealism. It is surely no accident that the often bright colour of surrealist work came about just as colour photography was beginning to make a splash.

All things considered, I thought this was a great exhibition. I learned things from it and gained new insights and perspectives on the art featured. It was well worth a visit.

Yevonde: Life and Colour continues at The Laing until 20 April.

In Lessons, which I’m currently reading, Ian McEwan has a delicious rant about the way in which Christianity held back science and culture for centuries:

But in the Petit Palais, which Daphne had not visited in thirty years, Roland had what she liked to call ‘a moment’. He retired early from the paintings and waited in the main hall. After she had joined him and they were walking away he let rip. He said that if he ever had to look at one more Madonna and Child, Crucifixion, Assumption, Annunciation and all the rest he would ‘throw up’. Historically, he announced, Christianity had been the cold dead hand on the European imagination. What a gift, that its tyranny had expired. What looked like piety was enforced conformity within a totalitarian mind-state. To question or defy it in the sixteenth century would have been to take your life in your hands. like protesting against Socialist Realism in Stalin’s Soviet Union. It was not only science that Christianity had obstructed for fifty generations, it was nearly all of culture, nearly all of free expression and enquiry. It buried the open-minded, philosophies of classical antiquity for an age, it sent thousands of brilliant minds down, irrelevant, rabbit holes of pettifogging theology. It had spread its so-called Word by horrific violence and it maintained itself by torture, persecution and death. Gentle Jesus, ha! Within the totality of human experience of the world there was an infinity of subject matter and yet all over Europe the big museums were stuffed with the same lurid trash. Worse than pop music. It was the Eurovision song contest in oils and gilt frames.

In Acts of Service, which I read some time ago, Lilian Fishman writes about some of the benefits of religion to individuals:

I envied extraordinarily religious people, who subscribed to a code that determined the things they should want, the things that were good, and the things that were bad. They had these measures of certainty. And they had rituals that made their lives feel governed by the logic of time: baptisms, holidays, weekly ceremonies, recitations, prayers. They were, I imagined, striving toward a set of impossible ideals and yet constantly forgiven for their failure to achieve. What better way could there be to live? To be in constant motion toward something perfect, a motion that would carry you to the end of your life?

At the individual level, Fishman recognises the psychological reassurance of conformity which religion can provide. It’s comforting to be part of a group with shared ideals and rituals. Yet McEwan notes that conforming in a way which punishes outliers is harmful, because everyone ends up having the same ideas which amount to nothing more than ‘lurid trash’.

It’s an interesting dichotomy. One of the things that Wendy and I sometimes discuss in day-to-day life is the value of people who don’t conform, and who often rile up others. A bit of friction is often helpful to keep things moving forward. It’s the wild ideas of outliers that sometimes provide the breakthroughs needed to move forward in life, as much as in society at large.

This 2023 bestseller has been in my ‘to read’ pile for so long that Wendy ended up beating me to it. Interestingly, we had similar thoughts about it.

The plot concerns a young writer whose more successful friend dies in an accident. The writer steals an early draft of a novel from her deceased friend, works on it extensively, and publishes it to rave reviews.

This plot is not a million miles away from that of The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz, which I read and disliked a few years ago. Kuang’s handling of the subject is much better: she weaves in interesting questions about cultural appropriation alongside the more obvious issues of ownership of ideas and the boundaries of authorship. Kuang’s writing is also much more fun, bringing a satirical view of the culture wars with a wry humour, as opposed to The Plot’s ever-building air of tension.

In her acknowledgments, Kuang says that ‘Yellowface is, in large part, a horror story about loneliness in a fiercely competitive industry.’ I agree with that perspective, and I also think that it represents the better part of the book.

However, Wendy and I both found the final section of this book jarring. There was a quite sudden change in the tone of the book, the style of writing, and the characterisation of the protagonist. It was quite peculiar, and rather lessened the impact of the book for both of us. We debated whether this was intentional: was this a comment on what it’s like to read a book which is ‘finished off’ by another author? Neither of us could quite believe that to be true.

This would have been a better book if the final section had stripped away the satire and doubled-down on the moral complexity of its central questions. It’s a book that deserved an ambiguous ending, but had some dodgy black-and-white thriller content bolted onto the end instead. It was a shame… but I still think the book’s worth reading for the first two-thirds. And I liked this quotation:

Writing is the closest thing we have to real magic. Writing is creating something out of nothing, is opening doors to other lands. Writing gives you power to shape your own world when the real one hurts too much. To stop writing would kill me.

Some railway stations, particularly on light rail systems, have platform edge doors that only open when a train arrives. One of the major benefits of these is that they prevent people from falling onto the tracks.

However, they’re relatively uncommon. They’re costly to install and maintain, and are another significant potential point of failure which could prevent people from boarding trains.

But there is a good compromise: if you have consistent trains stopping at consistent points along a platform, you could just fence off the parts of the platform that don’t line up with the doors. Having a large proportion of the platform edge fenced off would seem to provide quite a bit of additional protection against falling onto the tracks.

In New York, the MTA is trailing exactly that.

When I saw this article, I was surprised that I’d never seen this solution tried anywhere else before… and also surprised that I’d never thought of it. Perhaps it has some hidden downsides, but at first glance, it seems such an obvious solution that one might think it would be common. The logic is almost childlike.

It will be interesting to see how the trial turns out.

I had to attend some leadership training this week, which is a cross we must all bear from time to time.

The trainer declared that IQ, as in ’intelligence quotient’, was one of only four jointly conceived attributes which make up a rounded person. The others, for what it’s worth, were cited as the ‘emotional’, ‘physical’ and ‘spiritual’ quotients.

The trainer explained that the word ‘quotient’ shared a root with ‘quadrant’ and was chosen because there were four domains.

My bullshit antennae were firing so intensely at this point that they may have been visible if it wasn’t quite so long since I last cut my hair. Yet, at least the trainer’s misplaced confidence made me spend a few minutes reading around the topic from sources more reliable than the course’s tie-in leadership paperback.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that ‘quotient’ is a direct borrowing from the Latin ‘quotiens’ meaning ‘how many times’ or ‘how often’. In the ‘intelligence quotient’ sense, it’s referring to the quantity of intelligence. There’s no historical or modern sense in which it connects to a sense of there being four parts.

The prefix ‘quadr-’, as I should have remembered from school, comes from the Latin numeral ‘quattuor’.

But what about IQ? I should have remembered this, as I recall presenting on it during a special study module I took in learning disabilities a couple of decades ago. It was created in the early 1900s by the German psychologist William Stern as a standardised figure for monitoring child development: simply divide their ‘mental age’ by their ’chronological age’ and multiply by 100.

EQ is rooted in more modern psychology, while PQ and SQ seem to be modern inventions by leadership gurus, keen to repackage and upsell ancient philosophy.

I may have been cynical about the course, but it clearly has made me learn something.

‘Take the National Express,’ sang The Divine Comedy, ‘when your life’s in a mess.’

‘It’ll make you smile.’

In 2017, my life was in a temporary mess due to train disruption between Newcastle and Leeds, when I needed to get to a meeting. I paid the princely sum of £4.00 for the privilege of a 2 hour and 40 minute odyssey via Sunderland and Middlesbrough.

Yesterday, thanks to industrial action on the railways, I paid £16.30 to do the same journey in reverse.

Few would relish spending the better part of three hours on a mildly nauseating coach, especially when a train will normally do it in half the time. The ticket for the cancelled train cost only £19.20, so even the price advantage seems minimal these days, at least on this route and on this day. On a train, there are no signs exhorting you to tip the driver, and nor does one feel a mild sense of guilt for failing to do so (who carries cash these days?)

But the coach is fine. I’d happily pay twice over for someone else to drive me up the A1(M) instead of having to navigate it myself in the dark and the rain. It even means I can have a glass of wine with dinner. Throw in a reasonably comfy seat, a charging socket and some free Wi-Fi and who can argue? The coach was also reasonably to timetable on both occasions.

It wouldn’t be my first choice, but on both occasions, it got me out of a hole. The Divine Comedy were right: it did make me smile.