{"id":29281,"date":"2026-11-12T17:32:14","date_gmt":"2026-11-13T01:32:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/?p=29281"},"modified":"2026-11-12T17:32:14","modified_gmt":"2026-11-13T01:32:14","slug":"but-of-course-ai-cannot-be-trusted","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2026\/11\/12\/but-of-course-ai-cannot-be-trusted\/","title":{"rendered":"But Of Course AI Cannot Be Trusted"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>First of all, the link to the video I embedded yesterday from a Facebook Group called Oddly Human, about human evolution and psychopathy, now leads only to a post on the group&#8217;s page, not a video, which I now can&#8217;t find. Hmm.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, today, I came across five similar groups, that like Oddly Human, post several times a day video essays about various intellectual topics. Most of them indicate AI content; one or two indicate a specific city location, and even a contact phone number.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/profile.php?id=61594108352987\">Primitive Mind<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/profile.php?id=61596083403107\">Transcendental Space<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/profile.php?id=61594199516746\">The Untold<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/TheShadowMind7\">The Shadow Mind<\/a><br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/profile.php?id=100077245495329\">Theory of Everything<\/a><\/p>\n<p>I don&#8217;t spend lots of time on Facebook, actually. I check it several times a day, for three or four minutes at a time. Of course, because I &#8220;followed&#8221; Oddly Human yesterday means that Fb is showing me more similar posts.<\/p>\n<p>\\<\/p>\n<p>Coincidentally, and reflecting my own reaction, <strong>Jesse Bering<\/strong> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/jesse.bering\/posts\/pfbid02XL3ScGEprBcGsVSzs64NEcAsdNJ6WtDjTUPpKcbcH1YmqjYDQtgB6WUWN1AssYKpl?__cft__[0]=AZimoQpwhPxkDyJLGT1qcwlff5YXrNXC4ql1Fe5T8opWx_1ebJtfk2vSwFrJT2nzRaVvEDbbXk-dsXUgdI_gLu-Hf0ef09y_e3J8p5X6fC5clve4D64wtoYKyZ6cH7PE09O2CCN4VeXx0CXJ85rT&amp;__tn__=%2CO%2CP-R\">posts on Fb today<\/a> about a similar video. It&#8217;s on YouTube; I&#8217;m copying the embed code.<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"It's Not Your Fault You Can't Imagine Death\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/pNXgivc0Gxo\" width=\"911\" height=\"513\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>He says: &#8220;AI or not, my compliments to whoever put this together. It&#8217;s a very watchable and humane handling of some very slippery issues.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>That was my reaction to the Oddly Human post.<\/p>\n<p>\\\\\\<\/p>\n<p>Second of all. I should say something the novel that won the Booker Prize in Britain this past week. It was <b>The End of Everything<\/b>, by M. John Harrison, a writer who&#8217;s written science fiction and fantasy novels since the early 1970s. He&#8217;s 81 now.<\/p>\n<p>I read it, over a week or so, about a month ago, inspired by the Booker longlist and shortlist results.<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s a strange, surrealistic novel, about alien invaders called the iGhetti, focusing on a man named Phillip Tennant who lives along the Kent coastline in southeast UK where alien artefacts wash up every day. He searches among them for something he can sell. The background is ambiguous and murky. Civilization seems to have collapsed; Europe seems to have gone missing. Tennant finds an &#8216;artefact,&#8217; which somehow gradually transforms into a human-like entity. And it gets weirder from there.<\/p>\n<p>There is a long tradition in science fiction of attempting to describe inscrutable aliens, or inscrutable states of reality. That reality has changed is what Harrison calls &#8220;the end of everything.&#8221; This is a fine addition to that tradition.<\/p>\n<p>That it won the Booker Prize indicates that literary critics, who have for decades dismissed science fiction (and fantasy) from serious literary consideration, have suddenly discovered something they had not realized existed. Via <em>File 770<\/em>:<\/p>\n<p align=\"center\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/i.guim.co.uk\/img\/media\/044714e910b9f6cd9660b9352db5413917bde16a\/434_0_4120_3296\/master\/4120.jpg?width=1900&amp;dpr=1&amp;s=none&amp;crop=none\" width=\"400\" \/><\/p>\n<p><strong>The Guardian, yesterday<\/strong>: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2026\/nov\/11\/m-john-harrison-booker-science-fiction?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other\">Does M John Harrison\u2019s Booker win mean science fiction is finally accepted by a \u2018snobby\u2019 literary establishment?<\/a>, subtitled &#8220;Kazuo Ishiguro, Jeff VanderMeer, Olivia Laing and other writers weigh in on the publishing world\u2019s genre wars&#8221;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span class=\"dcr-1iwzucl\" style=\"color: var(--drop-cap); font-weight: bold;\">A<\/span>s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/m-john-harrison\" data-link-name=\"in body link\" data-component=\"auto-linked-tag\">M John Harrison<\/a> was announced as the Booker prize winner on Monday evening, the 81-year-old looked gobsmacked. Decades into his career, and long overlooked by the mainstream literary establishment, he had just won a prize that has never before rewarded a writer known for science fiction, with a decidedly fantastical book.<\/p>\n<p class=\"dcr-1s160rg\">His fans, many leading authors among them, are thrilled. \u201cFor decades it was a standard \u2013 and correct \u2013 nerd whine to point out that sentence for sentence, book for book, Harrison was one of the greatest writers out there, full stop, but that \u2018mainstream\u2019 prizes never reflected that,\u201d says China Mi\u00e9ville, who last week won the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2026\/nov\/04\/china-mieville-wins-10000-goldsmiths-prize-for-the-rouse\" data-link-name=\"in body link\">Goldsmiths prize<\/a> with his 1,200-page speculative novel <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2026\/sep\/15\/the-rouse-by-china-mieville-review-a-mighty-achievement-from-the-new-weird-author\" data-link-name=\"in body link\">The Rouse<\/a>. Back in 2002, Mi\u00e9ville <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theguardian.com\/books\/2002\/may\/16\/fiction.bestbooks\" data-link-name=\"in body link\">wrote that<\/a> Harrison not having won a Booker by that point proved \u201cthe bankruptcy and back-slapping generic snobbery of the literary establishment\u201d. Now, he says: \u201cI am so delighted, for Harrison, and for fiction.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>There is no reason to think that writers of science fiction or fantasy are any less skilled than writers of mainstream novels. Except that it was obviously true decades ago when science fiction emerged in cheap &#8216;pulp&#8217; magazines. And was retained as literary critics and standard-bearers of &#8216;literature&#8217; had very specific ideas about what kinds of stories constituted &#8216;literature.&#8217; As with everything, these standards change.<\/p>\n<p>I may expand this section into a separate post, with further comments about the novel, and about the reactions to it. And a cover image.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>First of all, the link to the video I embedded yesterday from a Facebook Group called Oddly Human, about human evolution and psychopathy, now leads only to a post on the group&#8217;s page, not a video, which I now can&#8217;t &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/2026\/11\/12\/but-of-course-ai-cannot-be-trusted\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29281","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-fiction","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29281"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29282,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29281\/revisions\/29282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29281"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29281"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.markrkelly.com\/Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}