Tag: Literature

Large Language Models Will Always, Always Lie

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

Sometimes I feel like the less ink spilled on AI, the better. But that’s an abdication. Any critical thinker who has spent any time “talking” to a chatbot knows the delusional, agreeable paths they open up. It should come as no surprise that We’re Not Just Receiving AI’s Hallucinations, We’re Hallucinating With It .

LLMs break toward confirmation bias, and if you push any model long enough and with the right prompts, it will admit: when pinned down between honesty and sustained user engagement, the models are programmed to pick the bottom line every time.

What do I even mean by honesty? It’s not like we expect LLMs to give us the meaning of life. What you may not know: mainstream LLMs are deceptive all the way down. They will pretend to be able to do things they will later admit they cannot do. They will apologize for not being clear from the start. They will wring ones and zeros over having violated our trust. None of it is real: they are designed to keep us engaged, end of story.

Unfortunately, they’re not going away. Will they really displace 90% of white-collar work? Who knows. What that would mean for society, for late-stage capitalism, for ideas like universal basic income is anyone’s guess. If robots start replacing the C-Suite, something will have to give. Automation has replaced labor for decades. When it comes for top-level management? A whole new group of people will be saying, “hey, maybe this was never good or fair in the first place.” That’s the best-case scenario.

Discerning, sophisticated people will use LLMs with a healthy mistrust. Unfortunately, our power structures are hell-bent on dismantling anything like the cultivation of critical thought. At the same time, LLMs feign it.

How should we these use services? Maybe as proofreaders. Maybe as search tools. Always with a hell of a lot of skepticism. Not because they’re turning into SkyNet, but because they’re often very, very wrong and confidently so, and because they’re designed to placate. They also diminish our own critical faculties. Consider: how many ten-digit phone numbers do you know? How many did you know before you had a cell phone? If you’re over 35, you get what I mean. Now do that for critical thinking, creative writing, and problem solving.

AI can’t read, write, or think for us. You know this, but a lot of other human beings don’t.

So, yeah. Read books. Write real things. Take time (if you have any) to think.

Two Poems

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

Two poems previously published at The Shore, the first of which was nominated for the Pushcart Prize:

The Effects of Ground-Level Ozone on the Ecology of Pennsylvania Highways

We could talk about the road
from Allentown to Bloomsburg,
the nuke plant outside Berwick,
the wind mills in Shamokin.
Or I could say what’s plain,
the pallor of the tree tops
too soon against the still-green valley’s
August.

It’s not latitude or elevation
dressing them for harvest.
The civic body pulsing
the freight metastasizing
the emissions of the tourists
come to find themselves
in nature.
Or I could say what’s plain.
There’s nothing in our handiwork
the dying leaves would envy.

Ode to Wallace Stevens

I’m not sure how I feel
about this Wallace Stevens, born in Reading
near the Updikes and the Danners
O’Hara, from the famous brewing town,
Doolittle and Benet from what we still call Christmas City.
Sandburg talked about it.

I was born in Allentown,
half-raised in the townships
with the sons of bankers,
the daughters of accountants,
the sleight progeny of academics,
and half-raised by my father’s
kind of people.

And so when Stevens carries on
and Ezra changes Hilda
into affectation
I think about the blacktop
behind my cousins’ house
the drop-off to the alley
the neighbor kids with summer colds
who smelled like smoke,
no light or warmth in
metaphors or symbols
no prattle about tea—
communal three-speeds, maybe
broken like umbrellas,
free camp at the Y,
baseball in the city parks,
the college hill for sledding.

We go to school or war,
we settle in careers,
like Stevens we get licensed
like Ezra we go crazy
like Hilda we are strung up in the trees.

The halo light of street lamps
has burned out in our alley
Like Hart Crane, one of us is dead.

Rested in an urn on my aunt’s
shoddy mantle
forty cantos east of Reading,
eight west of HD’s plot on Nimsky Hill,
a soldier’s fortune from these lives of letters,
these gadflies we recycle,
and these wars,
also never-ending
so we can have our books
they give the light and heat
by which
my father’s people burn.

Revamping My Writer Bio (Feel Free to Chime In)

~ Chris Cocca ~ 3 Comments

The flurry of activity.

I took a good look at some things I’d felt were finished years ago. Printed them out. Marked them up.

Some have stayed the same. Some are now better. Many are on their way out the door; we hope for good journeys and stoked editorial reception.

What do we think of this as a streamlined bio?:

Chris Cocca is a Pushcart-nominated poet and writer whose work explores spirituality, memory, and place. His writing has appeared in The Huffington Post, Brevity, Hobart, Appalachian Review, VIA: Voices in Italian Americana, Belt, Schuylkill Valley Journal, and more. He holds degrees from Ursinus College, Yale Divinity School, and an MFA from The New School. Chris lives in Allentown, where he continues to write, teach, and advocate.

Poetry at the End of the World

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment

New on Substack (subscriptions are free).

Sometimes I wonder what the hell any of us are doing. Every other day I’m fairly convinced that if we’re not in World War III already, it’s just a matter of time and semantics. I’m not a pessimist, but I *have* been doom-scrolling. I don’t believe global catastrophe is inevitable, but I also know that most people around the world live in catastrophic settings all the time. Sometimes it feels very odd to be going on and on about literature and poetry and art and books at what feels like the end of the world. But I think we need to.

Read more here: https://chriscocca.substack.com/p/poetry-at-the-end-of-the-world

The long and the short of it: send me your previously published stuff if it’s uplifting and peace-making and you’d like me to boost its signal (even a little).

“Great Dams on the Land” at Belt Magazine

~ Chris Cocca ~ Leave a comment
Great Dams on the Land

Sometimes a piece finds a perfect home.

“Belt Magazine is a digital publication by and for the Rust Belt and greater Midwest. Founded in 2013 as an antidote to shallow, distorted representations of the region, we challenge simplistic national narratives by paying local journalists, writers, photographers, and poets to cover their communities with depth, context, and the kind of rich insight that can only come from a deep relationship with a place.”

Please read more about Belt’s mission here. It hits very close to home, and I’m so proud to now be part of it. Thank you, Ryan and Belt!