Enough with the LLM BS, Already

I know that, in doing this, I contribute to the problem in its own way, but I simply can’t bear it anymore.

The AI frenzy I have seen among my fellow translators has to stop. It feels like I’m watching otherwise intelligent, literate folks suddenly spouting flat earth theory.

LLM/Generative AI/Whatever you want to call it doesn’t actually do what it says it does. It isn’t a useful tool. It doesn’t think, it doesn’t translate, it doesn’t explain. LLMs are sophisticated statistical algorithms that spit out words they got off the internet in “likely arrangements.” Any meaning that those words seem to have is provided solely by the reader. Any time you ignore the fact that nothing of what LLMs generate is rooted in factual reality, you are deceiving yourself. The idea that some part of the communication might be “wrong” is, in itself, a mistake. It’s all generated the same way, from statistical analysis and algorithmic generation. The good and the bad are both equally likely. Seemingly accurate BS and clearly inaccurate BS are both equally BS.

The industry calls LLM mistakes “hallucinations” but they’re really just expressions of the nature of the beast.

https://www.lakera.ai/blog/guide-to-hallucinations-in-large-language-models

The great success of LLMs is only in that they *feel* right, so no one really takes the time to check if they are, actually, so. It certainly seems amazing that the words string together in clear sentences that we can interpret as more or less connected to our prompts. But we are professionals at working with words. We should be holding our work to a higher standard that “Eh, it feels right.”

Because folks, there’s nothing under there. It’s empty. Let’s take a recent Facebook post froma a translator I saw. It was a query about the pros and cons of different translations of a tricky term. The results included sources, for example, and a lot of double talk that boiled down to “it all depends on the context.” If you actually took the time to read those sources, though, none of them actually supported any of the points of the response. They were just linked by including the terms in question. Sometimes. One of them was actually Vietnamese, which is odd given that the query was in English and talking about Japanese. But it had a (poor) English gloss of a phrase including the term, so… Source?

That is what LLMs *do*. They were trained not to be right, but to sound right. To be really convincing liars. (Which is actually a pretty easy thing to get away with when discussing elevated academic ideas, because they’ve been dominated by empty bloviating for decades, anyway. I’m sure LLM generated philosophy and linguistics papers are already filling journals, because no one ever read or understood that shit anyway.)

The trick of LLMs is, quite literally, a scam. As in, they seem to have evolved parallel to techniques designed specifically to fool people. The datasets were trained to generate sentences that felt right, rather than be right, by having them rated by non-expert users in developing nations. It is, as the kids say, all vibes. And the result is that the patterns are now set to be convincing, but nothing more.

You can see what I’m getting at here:

How much of AI’s recent success is due to the Forer Effect?

and here:

https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/

The upshot is, if you adopt LLMs into your work flow, you are intentionally adopting a bullshit engine. Nothing that comes from an LLM should ever be trusted. There is no accountability for the inevitable errors and fabrications that they bring to your work. If ChatGPT were an employee, you’d fire them almost immediately for fraud. Which you would know if you applied critical thinking to the results you’re getting, rather than allowing the facade of legibility convince you that “The Machine Understands!”

What we as translators should be doing is not wondering how to use AI, we should be educating our clients about the dangers of trusting. Any work that is done by AI is without value. Literally. If the results of AI are good enough for a given task, it was never worth doing in the first place. Which is not to say that everything we do is equally valuable. Indeed, corporate boilerplate has always been BS, so a BS engine might, in fact, be exactly what you need to do that. Whether you feel comfortable engaging in that cycle is another matter.

And that’s not even getting into the heavy environmental cost of each query, or the deeply immoral and exploitative labor practices that have lead to the current status, or the terrible people running these shows.

I know that it seems like this is the way the world is going, but we don’t have to embrace the idiocy.

Anyway, all this is to say, enough already. Damn.

Setouchi Tsurezure #5 – First Photo Show

My fifth column for Setouchi was about my experiences with my first photo show, as part of my Hikari Shayukai club. The photos I showed all ended up with someone word-play/punnish types of names, which I know the editor likes. He chose to run one with two ducks appearing to kiss, which I call “仲ががいい。。。カモ.” The name means “Good friends… Maybe” but the “Maybe” is a bit of a pun on the Japanese word for ducks.
You had to be there.

初写真展

2月16日～20日に冠山総合公園で、ひかり写友会の写真展に参加しました。まだまだ初心者なので作品を出品するのは大変緊張しました。それでも非常にいい経験になりました。

まずは他の会員と岡本先生の出品作をゆっくり観察できたことはとても良い勉強になりました。見る時には皆が優しく説明してくださり、細かい技術を教えて頂く事ができました。具体的なレッスンがたくさんありました。

期間中5日間で1,000人以上が訪ねてくださり、その中でたくさんの人と写真の話しをしたり感想を伝えあったりして写真に対して自分の考え方を見直すことができました。そして今回の一番大きい収穫は自分の作品を別の角度や視線で見ることができたということです。そのおかげで自分の写真がどう見られるのかなど「客観視をする力」を高めることができました。

いまだに写真を撮る際、自分が見た面白さや感動を伝える事がどういう事か分かりませんでした。けれどこういう機会があったおかげで一般の方の意見を聞き、少しでも撮った写真を他の人はどう見るのかを想像できるようになりました。まだまだ完璧には程遠いですが、なんとなくこの先の道が見えてきた気がします。

今回の出品作は三つです。一つは瀬戸内タイムスの読者様が以前ご覧になったことがある虹ヶ浜の松林で撮った流木の写真「龍木」でした。二つ目は二羽のナガオカモの「仲がいい・・・カモ」そして最後は萩市外の野焼きの様子を写した「秋の香り」でした。来場者の皆さんからのコメントをみると「仲がいい・・・カモ」が圧倒的に人気であることわかりました。もしかすると一瞬の動きが切り取れた事が良かったのではと思います。

自分の中では「龍木」が作品として自信があったので、その差で深く考えました。やはり動物や野鳥の行動を通して感情を動かすことは大事だと気付きました。

最近は自分の作品をいくつか萩市の下瀬信雄先生にお見せする機会がありました。先生が優しく褒めてくれましたで、やはりカモの写真を一番気に入ってくださいました。先生曰くそれは写真家として一番大きな悩みであって、解決方法は自分で探さないといけないらしいです。

先生がとても重要な課題を出してくれました。それは「誰も撮った事がない写真を撮る。」出来るのか分かりませんが頑張るしかないとおもいます。

I Am Here To Fart Around

The other day, I was talking to some friends as we walked along a small river running through Okayama City, when I stopped up short to watch a small cormorant swimming by, not two meters away. I rarely get to see them up close like that, since the local ones are so skittish, and I wanted to enjoy the moment. One friend said something like, “Oh, right, I saw you post bird pictures on Instagram. You’re a man of many interests.” Something about the comment resonated, and it rolled around in my brain as they went on talking about things I know nothing about.

I am a man of many, many interests. Almost infinite, in fact, to the point that “interests” seems to be an inadequate word for what I have. I am unable to be into just one thing, to the extent that people who label themselves by their interests seem to walk in a world alien to me. I read, constantly and meanderingly, but I wouldn’t label myself “a reader.” I play video games regularly and occasionally endlessly, but lord forfend I ever self-apply the epithet “gamer.” I only hesitantly included the label “writer” on my various profiles once I started earning a bit of money from putting words out into the world, though it’s something I’ve been doing regularly for years and years and…

What I am is not bound up in what I do, not for enjoyment or for money. It makes me uncomfortable when people try to box me in, even when I have seemed to encourage it. Many many people know me as “a sake guy” because I made websites and social media accounts and wrote a book about sake, but it’s only one thing I’m interested in. I’m not, in my own head, “a sake guy” because at any given moment, or on any given day, I give more mental space to taking pictures of rocks or singing songs about a bird I saw or helping my son figure out if Link could beat Bowser (OF COURSE HE COULD).

In the past, I have thought of myself as some kind of failure because I am not any one thing. Everyone seems to arrange their identities around a solid core, so being as nebulous and aimless as I am felt like a weakness of character. I think, if there is a thing at my core, it is curiosity. I want to know. If something catches my eye, I chase it down. I explore and dig and investigate until I feel satisfied and then the next thing catches my eye and I’m off again. But I never stick with any one thing long enough that it becomes some kind of defining element. I cannot sum myself up with a word. I will never be any great expert. Which, I think, for some people is a waste of time. What’s the point of doing anything if you don’t stick with it to the end? Isn’t it just a waste of time? Don’t we have to be some*thing*?

But then I think about Kurt Vonnegut writing about envelopes. It’s a story you might have seen on Facebook, or YouTube, or any number of the various online spaces the man himself would have hated. It was once mentioned by CBS, even, but it seems originally to have come from his collection of essays titled A Man Without a Country.

It is a story about a simple trip to buy an envelop, which takes him out into the world where he sees things and meets people and hears languages he cannot understand and that is what life is about. He sums it up, saying “Electronic communities build nothing. You wind up with nothing. We are dancing animals. How beautiful it is to get up and go out and do something. We are here on Earth to fart around. Don’t let anybody tell you any different.”

And that is how I think about who I am and what I do. For me, the point is to get out there. The point is touching and hearing and learning. I did not write a book about sake to sell sake. I wrote a book about sake so I could go meet people who do things I could never imagine possible, and those people are so fascinating to me. Now, I did that, and this time I get to do something else. And meet more people, hear more stories, and fart around some more because that’s what I seem to be here to do.

Setouchi Tsurezure #4 – Pottery Love

My fourth column for the local Setouchi Times newspaper was about my growing fascination with Japanese pottery. I discussed my discovery of the beauties of functional art, my interactions with local potters, and my growing collection.

陶芸に陶然

ライオン　ジミー

近年は日本酒の次に陶磁器にも興味を持ち始めました。それまでは毎日使っている器をあまり気にしたことがなかったのですが、手作り酒器を使うことで日本の陶芸に魅了されました。それから、いろんな陶芸家の作品を使うようになって、日常生活にちょっと彩を足しました。

言うまでもなく、萩焼の重要さを感じています。以前の取材をきっかけに萩市の波多野指月窯の波多野英雄先生と知り合いました。英雄先生の父・善蔵先生は山口県指定無形文化財保持者であり、親子で繊細な作品をたくさん作っておられます。陶芸を通して、大事な絆ができました。萩市にはよく遊びに行きますが、毎回波多野指月窯にお邪魔し、素晴らしい作品に囲まれながらしゃべったり、お茶のんだりしています。波多野先生のところで息子と萩焼体験も受けて、息子が「お父さんの為に」と言ってお猪口を作ってくれました。

その体験と陶芸家さんとの交流で、魔法の世界をのぞき込む事が出来ました。何の変哲もない土から粘土を造って、そしてその粘土を人間の能力で形になる瞬間を見るのは奇跡的な経験です。焼成の時は炎の力を実感するも言葉にならないぐらい印象的です。そして、全部が終わったらその作品が日常生活に活用される！信じられません。

もちろん、山口県の伝統的な萩焼が有名ですが、県内各地でも個性的な陶芸家さんがたくさんいます。ここ光市でも、いくつの窯元・作家さんがいます。アトリエ仁の兼清仁志先生や椿窯の上田達生先生をはじめとする、伝統の枠外で創作力の高いものを造っている作家さんがいっぱいです。

陶芸家が近くにいると一番うれしいことは、日常的に使っている器を作った人を知ることができます。現在社会ではめったにないことだと思います。使っているものはほとんどどこかの工場で、知らない人達や機械が造っています。人の手で作られたという実感がありません。それが社会のロスだと思います。

昔の伝統を守ることも大事ですが、それよりはその作り手と使い手の絆を守るのは大事だと思います。僕は毎朝コーヒーを飲む時に、百均で買ったものより大和の陶芸家八木博幸先生のマグカップで飲みます。お酒を飲む時にはよく室積のチェ・ジェホ・アトリエギャラリーで買ったお猪口と片口で呑みます。おつまみは自分の息子が造ったお皿からたべます。

大した事ではないかもしれませんが、その絆を感じながら生活する事を心掛けます。そうすると毎日美しいものと触れ合うことができます。毎日いいものを使って、毎日人の手で造ったものと接すると、きっといいことがあります。

自分へのご褒美として、今度は地元の作家さんのアトリエに行ってみてください。素晴らしい出会いが待っているかもしれません。

Thoughts on The Book of Tea

When I was a wee lad, I was a bit of an “intellectual.” This was both an affectation, in that I tried very hard to be “smart,” and something that in retrospect was actually true. I was much more into thinking and learning than I was into doing anything productive. And, now, I’ve made a bit of a decent living out of that, so, thanks dorky young Jim!

That course lead me through a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy, which did a couple of things to me. First, it made me by and large bullshit proof, as I was contending with some of the greatest bullshitters in history on a daily basis. I was trained to critically assess and question essentially everything, to accept nothing without vetting. Which is a pretty good skill to have in the age of disinformation.

Second, it made me approach things from basic principles (which is in many ways a restating of the first point). No idea, no system, no structure comes from nowhere. There is something guiding it, or which served as a basis, and philosophy is the pursuit of finding those principles so that we can understand. Anything. Everything. In other words, it is asking, “Why is this thing the way it is?”

This very long introduction is a way of getting to the point of saying, The Book of Tea offered me some shockingly good insight into “Why is the traditional Japanese aesthetic the way it is?”

But let me step back a moment. “What is The Book of Tea, anyway?”, you might be wondering. It’s a good thing to wonder. I heard about it from a Japanese podcast I listen to, called Nihon Bunka Radio. It’s a very frequently updated podcast that is basically one guy, who goes by the name of Sebastian Takagi, talking about Japanese literature, culture, and art with a rotating cast of potters, lacquerware artists, and other researchers. Takagi seems to have become recently fixated on this book, and talks about it a lot. And, since it was in English and out of copyright, I figured I’d get it off Project Gutenberg. Here’s a link.

It was written in 1906 by a Japanese man named Kakuzo (Commonly known in Japan as Tenshin) Okakura. It ostensibly addresses Japan’s tea ceremony culture for Western audiences, but what it truly does is contextualize Japanese culture in the grand historical tradition of China, and presents Asian culture as equal to European/Western, in an effort to bridge growing gaps between the two hemispheres.

That synopsis does not do the book justice, though. It is a work of incredible erudition. The idea that a man could successfully write a work referencing Chinese classical poetry and works of Taoist philosophy, tying them to Greek myth and Arthurian legend, and referencing Shakespeare, itself is astonishing. That he is doing it in his second language? And with a level of rhetorical flourish that most native speakers never achieve?

It beggars belief. I mean, read this paragraph, and tell me if you could have written it, in any language:

In the trembling grey of a spring dawn, when the birds were whispering in mysterious cadence among the trees, have you not felt that they were talking to their mates about the flowers? Surely with mankind the appreciation of flowers must have been coeval with the poetry of love. Where better than in a flower, sweet in its unconsciousness, fragrant because of its silence, can we image the unfolding of a virgin soul? The primeval man in offering the first garland to his maiden thereby transcended the brute. He became human in thus rising above the crude necessities of nature. He entered the realm of art when he perceived the subtle use of the useless.
Okakura Tenshin, The Book of Tea

And the lessons it holds! It explains how Zen ideals inherited a Toaist view of the world, and that Zen’s development in Japan was a direct influence on tea ceremony culture, which then went on to dominate Japan’s traditional art through architecture, pottery, flower arrangement, and even painting. It is a masterful summary of centuries of philosophy that inform the traditional aesthetic of Japan that so many of us still find so alluring. Along the way, it offers lessons on art appreciation, moral rightness, and

It is a key to so much, and is inspiring so much further study (the mark of a truly good book), that I feel the need to trumpet it from the rooftops. It’s short, it’s free, and it’s highly accessible despite the age of it.

Read it!