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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| I thought about summarizing this Futurism article with AI: Once You Notice ChatGPT's Weird Way of Talking, You Start to See It Everywhere  It's not useful, it's slop. I didn't do that summary, of course. I've played around a bit with the LLMs people insist on calling AI, and of course one cannot avoid it while doing a Google search these days, but I've never used their results in my writing. Graphics, now, sure, such as the blog picture. Difference is, I have absolutely no artistic talent, but I like to think I have some small ability to write. It's not written by humans, it's written by AI. It's not useful, it's slop. It's not hard to find, it's everywhere you look. People love to call it "slop," but I've seen human writing just as sloppy, or even worse. Once you notice it, you start to see it everywhere. One teacher on Reddit even noticed that certain AI phrase structures are making the jump into spoken language. As much as I try to avoid LLM output, like I said, it's ubiquitous these days. I even mentioned to a friend that a certain sentence structure they used reminded me of ChatGPT output, even though I was sure the sentence wasn't thus generated. It's a fascinating observation that makes a striking amount of AI-generated text easily identifiable. It also raises some interesting questions about how AI chatbot tech is informing the way we speak — and how certain stylistic choices, like the em-dash in this very sentence, are becoming looked down upon for resembling the output of a large language model. There are two punctuation choices that I make, ones which you can pry from my cold, dead fingers: one is the semicolon; the other, the emdash. Beyond a prolific use of em-dashes, which have quickly become a telltale sign of AI-generated text, others pointed out the abundant use of emojis, including green checkboxes and a red X. On the other talon, I use emojis only sparingly. Tech companies have struggled to come up with trustworthy and effective AI detection tools, more often than not leaving educators to their own devices. This article is from June, and I haven't heard anything about those detection tools recently. Last I heard, they weren't very trustworthy or effective, often generating false positives. It's gotten to the point where teachers have become incredibly wary of submitted work that sounds too polished. So, my takeaway here is: don't be too polished. Throw in some deliberate typos, miss an obvious commma that sort of thing. As a side benefit, the teacher gets to use their red pen. They love using those red pens. Sure, you might get points taken off. But is that really worse than being accused of AIing when you didn't AI? |
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That's how I remember jokes. I hold onto the punchline and then just make up everything else to lead toward the ending. 
