THE MAIL
intuition from scanning the word order
in the e-mails of millions of Gmail users,
another way of describing this situation
would be to say that the other parents
e-mailing their children were more
thoughtful than Seabrook was!
Yael Swica
New York City
1
THE ROAD TO RECOVERYColton Wooten’s raw depictions of ad-
diction, homelessness, and the shuffle be-
tween relapse and recovery allowed me
to viscerally revisit my past as an addict
(“The Florida Shuffle,” October 21st). I
particularly related to the scene in which
Wooten and his fellow-“shufflers” rumi-
nate on the potential causes of their ad-
dictions. Although the correlation be-
tween addiction and one’s environment
and genetics is indisputable, I find it ad-
mirable that Wooten considers the pos-
sibility that his circumstances are, in part,
the result of his own choices. But, de-
spite rightly damning those in power in
the South Florida recovery scene, Woo-
ten does not fully reckon with how ad-
dicts may enable the system that, in turn,
enables both their relapses and their re-
coveries. If Wooten and his friends think
that their own choices may have contrib-
uted to their addictions, it is also con-
ceivable that those who spend years in
“recovery” may be complicit in the in-
surance-fraud schemes common to the
addiction-treatment industry.
Each of us has a different path to re-
covery from addiction, during which we
must progress from shuffling to strid-
ing. Wooten has miraculously managed
to find time for writing, research, and
reflection. He may still be in Purgatory,
but I believe that he has somehow
shuffled his way out of Hell.
Travis Huddleston
Greensboro, N.C.THE WRITE TOOL
John Seabrook, in his piece about pre-
dictive-text technology, wonders what
the world would be like if artificial-
intelligence programs learned to write
as well as humans (“The Next Word,”
October 14th). He suggests that people
“would stop writing, or at least publish-
ing, because all the readers would be
captivated by the machines.” Roald
Dahl’s 1953 story “The Great Automatic
Grammatizator” imagines a remarkably
similar world. The Grammatizator can
reproduce the styles of all working au-
thors, who have been paid to let the ma-
chine take over their careers, and to
never again write anything of their own.
The story’s narrator refuses to stop writ-
ing and go into creative silence. He ends
the story with a plea: “Give us strength,
Oh Lord, to let our children starve.”
Ed Allen
Vermillion, S.D.
Seabrook reported that only one person
passed his “Pinker Test,” which involved
distinguishing the psycholinguist Steven
Pinker’s words from those generated by
the GPT-2 text-writing machine. For
those readers still scratching their heads
over where Pinker’s writing ends and the
GPT-2’s begins, it may be useful to know
that each of Pinker’s sentences, whether
evaluated in isolation or in context, con-
veys a discernible piece of information,
whereas the A.I.-generated sentences do
not. For instance, the final sentence, writ-
ten by the GPT-2, attempts to equate
the words “separation” and “coherence,”
even though these words are antonyms.
I believe that this test exemplifies not
how far A.I. technology has progressed
but, rather, how poorly we humans parse
what we read and hear.
Eric Kinast
Santa Ana, Calif.
When Google’s Smart Compose feature
suggested “proud” instead of “pleased” as
Seabrook was writing his son an e-mail,
he concluded that the technology was
more thoughtful than he was. However,
given that Smart Compose develops its
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“Fabulously beautiful” —Telegraph
“Hypnotic” —New York Times
Philip Glass’s towering opera stars
countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo
as the revolutionary pharaoh who
transformed ancient Egypt in Phelim
McDermott’s spellbinding Met premiere
production. Karen Kamensek conducts
in her Met debut.metopera.org 212.362.PHOTO: RICHARD HUBERT SMITH / ENGLISH NATIONAL OPERA
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