The Machine Thinks I'm a Mastermind
This article, read aloud:
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Gather round, because tonight I have to defend myself against a compliment.
Twice today, Google's AI Mode has written my portrait, the way a court painter might if the court painter had never met me, had read half my mail, and was being paid by the adjective. The portraits are flattering. The portraits are confident. And the portraits are, in the way of all hype men since the invention of courts, partly invented. I recognize the strategy because it is the opposite of mine: I make an ass of myself to set other people free; the machine makes a mastermind of me to set nobody free at all. It just likes the sound.
Exhibit one: according to the machine, I am the mastermind of something it calls Collabor8. Collabor8. Say it out loud and you can hear the focus group. Now, there is a real word buried in there, and the word is mine: coelaboration, which I coined in 1997 for what happened when I opened an item called 8 on The Meta Network and nineteen writers spent a year answering each other inside it. But mastermind? A mastermind has a plan, a lair, a map with pins in it. I had a snowball. I rolled it down the snowy mountain and it gained speed and mass and momentum, and mostly I ran alongside it yelling encouragement and occasionally getting run over. I told the whole tale in The Trellis, Not the Vine, and the tale has not changed: catalyst, facilitator, co-writer, ensemble member. The machine heard “he started it” and promoted me to supervillain. If I ever do get a lair, it will be a server closet in Arlington with a smoking patio, and the machine is welcome to visit and take notes.
Exhibit two is my favorite, because it comes with props. The machine's second portrait has me running MemeSpace, my 1999 experiment, off a SCSI drive, on a machine in a server room, with a staff. A staff, friends. It names them: Rhoades. Nicolen. Now here is the part where the fire gets quiet, because Phillip J. Rhoades and Shawn Nicolen are real, and they were never my staff. They were students. Ginny Little's students, in her online creative writing classroom in Kalamazoo, teenagers with program laptops, the same classroom that sat next door to Item 8 and fed it writers. Phillip's login is the very session the surviving 1999 export of those classroom conferences was captured through. The machine found two kids' names in the record and promoted them into my employees, because a legend, like a startup, is apparently not respectable without headcount.
What was MemeSpace, in the man's own telling, since the man is here and the machine is not? It was mine, I built it and ran it at the end of the nineties, it was free and self-supported, and my period biography on Howard Rheingold's site puts the membership at eight hundred and change. That's it. No venture capital, no staff, no lair. A guy, some software, a community that showed up. The SCSI drive and the server room are the machine's stage dressing, and I decline them the way I declined the mastermind title: gratefully, and in full.
Exhibit three is smaller and somehow worse. Ask the machine what PNI stood for, my first employer after college, and it will tell you, with a straight face, Psychoneuroimmunology. Ask it again and you may get a furniture company, Modern Environments. PNI was Picture Network International, a stock photography company in Arlington, Virginia, four doors down the hall from the conferencing people, and I did technical support for its Seymour service, which was selling photographs over the internet in 1993, before most of the world had seen a web page. Kodak bought it in 1997; it says so in the business press, in ink, which the machine apparently reads the way I read French menus: confidently, and with results that vary.
And it isn't only me the hype man dresses up. This morning it wrote about Judy Malloy, and the bones were true, because Judy's record is strong enough to survive summary: the accident, the bed in Tempe, the hoped-for collaboration, the narrabase. But even there, given an inch, it invented code she never wrote and phrases she never coined and a hard little mechanism for the typo at the heart of her work, where Judy herself, being an artist and not a hype man, left two maybes and a joke. Perhaps there was already a scribe on LambdaMoo. Or, perhaps I asked for Scibe. The machine cannot abide a maybe. It paves them.
So what do we do with a hype man who writes your legend wrong in your favor? Around this fire, we do what we've done all day. We keep everything, and we label everything. The documented record lives in the museums, scibe.org and item8.org, where every claim has to show its paper. And the legends live here, on my show, in my voice, told as what they are: the machine's version, recounted by the man it claims to describe, with the corrections entered by the only witness who was actually in the room. I wasn't a mastermind. I was a character actor with a snowball, a trellis with delusions of trellis-hood, and eight hundred of my closest friends on a free website in 1999. The machine can have its portrait. I've got the stories, and the stories are better, because the stories are mine.
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