The Argument over “Truth”

Malcolm McDowell (as H.G. Wells) reacts to David Warner (as Jack the Ripper) as Jack shows Wells TV footage of contemporary (1970s) violence in San Francisco in 1979’s Time After Time.

H.G. Wells (1866-1946) first mentioned an idea that anticipated the internet in a lecture in 1937, describing it as “a World Encyclopaedia* “to hold men’s minds together in . . . a common interpretation of reality.”
A year later, he fleshed out the concept in a collection of essays entitled World Brain.
Wells was sure that the “Brain” would inform people and contribute to world peace.
Of course, he also assumed that the “Brain” would be updated by an editorial staff, and be continually revised by research institutions and universities.
Little did Wells think that ordinary citizens would be allowed to feed the future “World Brain” with hoaxes, misleading statistics, and misinformation.

Wells was not naive.
He had spent years writing, editing and creating new editions, of his Outline of History, and that was a massive task.
He realized that there was “a terrifying gap between available information and current social and political events.”
He also knew that every year technology was making the world much more confusing.
However, he clung to the notion that humans were rational, and that eventually education and information would triumph over emotion and anarchy.

His 1936 film Things to Come (story and screenplay by Wells) ends with the launch of a flight around the moon, despite the rioting of an anti-science mob.

George Orwell saw the world less hopefully.
In George Orwell’s 1941 essay “Wells, Hitler and the World State,” Orwell said that Wells was out of touch, and “too sane to understand the modern world.”
He didn’t agree with Wells that technology was a civilizing force.
Instead, Orwell predicted that technology would be co-opted by nationalism and bigotry, just as technology always had been.

Today, we all use the internet to find information.
We have access to information sites (like Britannica or sciencedirect.com) that strive for accuracy.
For a monthly fee, we can subscribe to the New York Times, or the Wall Street Journal, although newspapers have more biases and are not scholarly sources.
However, most people trust unreliable sources like Wikipedia or Facebook.
Wikipedia is a volunteer-run project, and (try as they might) the volunteers are unable to monitor all the contributions.
(It has even compiled a list of Wikipedia hoaxes.)
Tricksters get a lot of laughs from pranking us on Wikipedia—making up fake life stories, and waiting to see how long they’ll be allowed up.

Wells thought that there could be a “common interpretation of reality” in the “World Brain,” but there’s certainly no such thing on the internet.
Instead, we find lots of stories that feed our assumptions, and don’t conflict with our views.
Icons may be praised one day, and their reputations destroyed the next.
Myths are created, and then discredited.
Sometimes, it seems as if every day is April Fool’s Day on the net.

My senior year at art school, I heard about a prank-like conceptual art piece that had been done the year before (in the 70's).
Two gay students, of the opposite sex, decided to falsely tell fellow students that they had fallen in sexual love with each other, and then secretly recorded the reactions.
The tapes of other students floundering around for responses were the substance of the artwork.(I was told that the conversations, played in the school student gallery, were amusing.)
I never heard the piece.
However, I remember thinking that (although the concept was psychologically interesting), it was rather mean to create an art work that embarrassed your friends.

The internet allowed the QAnon phenomena—another piece of conceptual art? —to captivate millions of people.
(The QAnon “system of knowledge” was originally rooted in a 1999 novel Q, created by an Italian conceptual art group “Luther Blissett.”)
According to a 9/3/2021 New York Times article “What is QAnon” by Kevin Roose, QAnon teaches that the world is run by cannibalistic pedophiles who want to extract a life-extending chemical called adrenochrome from the bodies of children.
(It sounded like a genre film to me. Sure enough, there’s a 2017 comedy-horror film Adrenochrome, in which stoners kill fully-grown people so that they can get high from the adrenochrome in their adrenal glands.
No drug called “adrenochrome” exists.)

Certain people are worshipped in the QAnon belief system (ie, Trump and the late John F. Kennedy, Jr.), while others (like the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Tom Hanks) are targeted.
One wonders why the QAnon creators decided to pick on RBG and Hanks.
It could be because RBG is idolized, and Tom Hanks played “Forrest Gump”—a simple, patriotic man who believes in love.

It's not just that the internet is a cesspool of misinformation.
I also worry that AI systems—like ChatGBT and Google Bard—are being infested by all the conflicting data.
If nothing is “true,” no wonder ChatGBT is making up stuff.
AI systems are trained by being fed a combination of true data and false data, with no differentiation.
Then, text—actually built from guesses—is generated.
How are some guesses being prioritized over other guesses?
That’s the mystery.
AI-driven systems are being used to scan resumes and evaluate families for housing.
What resumes are being culled out, and which families are being placed at the tops and bottoms of the lists?
Are biases being perpetuated?

Some people equate hoaxes with “witch-hunts,” and in the 1500s through the 1700s, many thousands of women (plus a few men) were tortured and murdered because others believed they were witches.

Generally, the people punished for being “witches” were only guilty of being eccentric and/or troublesome.
Sometimes, they were envied for their wealth or distrusted for being healers, but (more often) “witches” were punished for merely being hard to get along with.

Photo of Barbara Steele as the witch being burned at the stake in Black Sunday

In the book Europe’s Inner Demons by Norman Cohn, he describes the great witch-hunt as an “example of a massive killing of innocent people by a bureaucracy,” and discusses “the power of the human imagination to build up a stereotype and its reluctance to question the validity of a stereotype once it is generally accepted.”
[Italics mine.]
It’s scary that the old stories about witches killing and eating babies match up with QAnon myths about Hollywood actors and Washington politicians.

We cling to ideas and stereotypes because we hold onto ideas for emotional reasons, not because of reasoning or logic.
Psychologists discuss the term “confirmation bias” —the idea that humans usually search for confirming evidence for their beliefs, and seldom change their minds or trust in new information.
As Mark Twain said in a speech entitled “Advice to Youth”: A truth is not hard to kill. . . a lie told well is immortal.

I think that Americans became even more vulnerable to hoaxes and conspiracy theories after the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Reverend Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy.
The shock that came from watching three widely-admired, idealistic men dying at the hands of assassins—in so short a time period (five years, 1963-1968) as it happened on television—traumatized the world, and especially traumatized the United States.
People became consumed with conspiracy theories, and (strangely) the CIA and the FBI have still not released all the JFK files.

H. G. Wells was ahead of his time.
However, he couldn’t foresee that the “World Brain” would not be as accurate as possible, or that the common welfare would not be considered.
He also couldn’t predict that people would possibly be less well-informed in 2023, than they were in 1945.
Wells said in 1936: “We are ships in uncharted seas. We are big-game hunters without weapons of precision.”
Unfortunately, even the “World Brain” (as envisioned by Wells) wouldn’t have saved us from this predicament, and the internet certainly isn’t helping.

*Americans use the word “Encyclopedia,” while the British-English term is “Encyclopaedia.” Brittanica used “Encyclopaedia” on their book spines, because during the 16th century (when the first encyclopedias were written), using ligatures like “Æ” was considered impressive, and indicated that the word was based on Latin or Greek.

ChatGPT needs a Fact-Checker

I’ve had a long career as a production person, working with the printed word from my high school days, through freelancing on magazines, and then working full-time on books; and that’s the way I paid my bills for decades.

Years ago, I found my all-time favorite job—Design Director at an encyclopedia company—and that’s where I learned more about fact-checking and copyediting the printed word.

“Fact-checking” is the process of verifying the factual accuracy in a document. “Copyediting” is the process of rewriting a document—correcting grammar and misspellings, clarifying syntax, eliminating wordiness, etc.
(Different companies have different copyediting standards; therefore, different copyeditors never make the same corrections.)
“Proofreading” usually describes checking a document against another version of that document.
However, sometimes a proofreader may find errors, in a piece of writing, that neither the fact-checker, or the copyeditor, could see.

Ideally, information should go through a review process—involving all of these steps—because human beings are fallible and make errors.
We make errors in spelling, and errors in sentence structure.
We make factual errors because we can’t read our own notes, or because we’ve misunderstood the data that we’re referring to.
Sometimes, errors are discovered in the first review, and sometimes errors are discovered (or “caught”) after the info has been posted or printed.
Sometimes, new errors are inserted, when we try to correct the original error. I think people in the industry use the word “caught” because it’s always a “hunt” for errors, and often it’s mind-blowing when we didn’t “spot” an error that seems obvious later.
(Books have more time for this process than newspapers.)

Perhaps, you’ve noticed the “Correction” boxes in the newspapers.
It’s the policy of newspapers (for example, the New York Times) to correct factual errors in a prominent space.
These mistakes are usually errors like misspelling names, or giving incorrect information.
However, if a breaking news story (for example, about a cave-in or a plane crash) tells you that 56 people died, and 57 died instead, that information will be in the next story about the event, and it won’t be in the “Correction” box.
New data is not considered a “correction.”

Correcting errors in books are handled differently.
In the past, if a publisher noticed an error after a book was printed, they would create an “Errata slip” and either bind it in at the back of the book, or place it loosely under the inside front cover.
However, that’s seldom done these days.
Modern publishers—especially for “books of facts” like technical or clinical books—usually post errata lists on their websites.

All of the above information is preamble to this article on why I find it hard to take the ChatGPT experiment seriously.
How can ChatGPT be useful if the data fed into the software is not fact-checked?
As the saying goes: “Garbage in; garbage out.”
At least 300 billion pre-2022 words (570 GB) were fed into ChatGPT. If those billions of words were taken from error-filled Wikipedia articles, unknown electronic books, and conflicting essays scattered across the internet; ultimately how useful can the results be?
Students and journalists can’t count on the ChatGPT essays to be accurate!
(Are the high school teachers and copyeditors so ignorant that they won’t notice the factual errors?) 

The only good I can see in ChatGPT is that of helping writers to organize material.
That’s sometimes difficult to do.
However, the thrill of reorganizing an essay, and making it better, is most of the fun of writing.
You learn a lot by rewriting an essay.
Often, the initial thoughts are malformed, but slowly you learn how to express what’s on your mind. ChatGPT certainly isn’t valuable in helping with the most difficult part of writing non-fiction—making sure that the facts are as accurate as possible.
It may be somewhat helpful in helping the author to phrase the facts in the best way possible, but you lose the pleasure of discovery.

In the “good ol’ days”—when printed encyclopedias were found in homes and people read daily newspapers—accuracy used to be a big deal.
The encyclopedia set I worked on strove for accuracy, but occasionally there were hiccups.
I remember one “hiccup” when an article about a South American country was commissioned for the 24-volume set, and the author of that article was afraid that the slight rewrite and clarification of her article (by editors) would result in her assassination.
She demanded that the encyclopedia be pulled back and reprinted—obviously, not a possibility in those days of print encyclopedias.
I was on the “page and picture” side in the encyclopedia process, and not the “word” side.
Therefore, I don’t know how it all turned out. However, I do remember hearing that the author was livid.
No matter how one tries to be accurate in an encyclopedia set, or a newspaper article, there will always be disagreements between the authors and the editors.
It’s simple to prove that a word is misspelled, but deciding whether or not an event is described properly is complicated.

Another problem that the editors of printed encyclopedias used to face is which people and places to include in the sets.
I remember that the fan club leader for a certain country singer was adamant that our encyclopedia set include an article about their idol.
They wrote every year, begging the editors to include an article on the singer, describing his merits in great detail.
(Today, all superfans need to do is write their own articles, and place them on Wikipedia.)
There were also big issues with the maps—for example, any maps showing the border between India and China.
There are over 100 disputed territories on earth.
Which political sides will ChatGPT take on these territories? 

I can’t get over how casual the ChatGPT creators are over the fact that material generated by ChatGPT may be inaccurate or spun entirely from falsehoods.
It’s as if they believe that as long as the written words “sound correct,” all is well.
How can intellectual discourse survive, based on that philosophy?
I’ll close with a few lines from Primo Levi’s science-fiction story, “The Versifier”*—a story about a poet who purchases a computer to write poetry for him that I discussed in my inaugural article.
This story was first published in Italian in 1960 in the Italian newspaper Il Mondo, and is still relevant today.
    Il disio di seguire conoscenza,
    E miele delicato il suo succo acro.

    The desire to ingest vast knowledge,
    A nectar of sorts, but bitter to its taster.

The lines in Italian are from Storie Naturali by Primo Levi, and the English translation is from The Complete Works of Primo Levi, by Liveright Publishing Corporation, a Division of W.W. Norton & Company. (The “Versifier” story is part of the “Natural Histories” group of short stories in Volume One, pages 417-438.)