Prologue: Rules are Coming!
Illustration by CoPilot
Dearest Reader
It is with great pleasure and relief that I present another series of Friday Stories. Our past series have covered many taxing subjects, but revolved mainly around the effects of punishment in all its forms.
This new series revolves around a very close relative of punishment, which is that of rules, perhaps a word most used in all languages, and in English at least, has most likely the widest variety of meanings and applications, as a verb, a noun, an adjective, and various other grammatical forms. I resisted looking the word up on the web, and consulted my old massive two-volume Oxford Dictionary, the one that has crammed the entire muti-volume Oxford English dictionary into two volumes, with four of the regular sized pages of the multi-volume works, crammed into one page, the result being that one must use a magnifying glass to read the text. The word Rule and its derivatives ruler, ruled, ruling, not to mention unruly, and countless others take up four pages of the dictionary. But that’s not all. Rules have something like a twin, mostly fraternal twin, though sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between the two, which is Law. Though the word Law is not quite as flexible as Rule. I can rule a line or if I am a King I can rule you, but the word Law does not have such flexibility as a verb, and must use such expressions as “lawyered up”, or “she went legal.” Nevertheless, laws and rules are often indistinguishable. They all imply that an action or more precisely an anticipated action will occur once a rule or law is in place. This is what the popular expression “laws are made to be broken” makes clear. And the same for rules. There is no point in making a rule or law if one does not expect it to be broken. If nobody breaks the law then surely there is no need for the law, right? One might also argue that laws have a lot more ‘power’ than do rules, and sometimes that may be the case. If you break a rule, it is not likely that you will end up in jail, or even be fined. But breaking laws carries with it the punishment that is always listed when a law is made (usually by politicians, but not always), such as rulers of various kinds, Kings, Queens, dictators, tyrants and so on. However, it would be mistaken to assume that rules have less power than laws. For example, for centuries, the rules governing table manners dominated. The rules of the road, perhaps the most far-reaching rules, control the behavior of almost everyone, whether driver, pedestrian, or passenger.
Do you see the point? The existence of rules, ruling behavior, lawful and unlawful actions and so on is vast. It is why it has taken me so long to begin writing these stories. The problem seemed so big I couldn’t manage to sit down to write one lousy story. I had been trying to get started for a couple of years, and had, quite frankly, given up.
And then, I made a big discovery.
I discovered AI, Artificial Intelligence. After having shrugged off artificial intelligence as the latest silly fashion in the cyberworld, I was working on adding a new item to our fast-growing Open Access library at Read-Me.Org. The protocol (yes, another word for rule) required me to describe the book I was uploading to the web site. The website host I was working in, called Squarespace, had been dangling their new AI on their site, but I had ignored it for some time, preferring to adapt the descriptions from other places whether from the dust jacket of the book, or from the author’s preface or introduction, or maybe lift a description from Amazon. I clicked on the icon for AI (it was described as a “Beta” version at the time, which is probably why I had never used it). It came back asking me what I wanted and I typed “Write a summary of….” The name of the book and author. Within seconds, it came back with a nicely written description of the book. I was dumbfounded!
It was quite some time until I realized that AI could do much more. It happened one day when I was working on a different computer, scanning books to upload to the Read-Me.Org website. The computer I was using was a Windows computer running on Windows 11.0. The computer was also connected to the University at Albany Microsoft software for students and faculty. When I finished scanning the book, the PDF file popped up with Microsoft’s Edge web browser, and then “Copilot,” Microsoft’s AI engine, asked me if I would like to ask Copilot a question. So I asked it to summarize the book. And it did in seconds.
After I had processed a few books using Copilot book summaries, Copilot prodded me to ask it other kinds of questions, including stories. So, I asked Copilot to write a story about a boy who disobeyed his father’s rule not to play in the forest. In seconds, the story came back. The rest, as they say, is history.
In a kind of frenzy, I “wrote” a number of stories with Copilot.
Then I realized that something was wrong. All the stories had a feel-good, happy ending, and they read like lessons for high school kids. I tried to get Copilot to write stories with unhappy endings, but I was only partly successful. The tone of the stories was kind of preachy, and the endings were often like those of Aesop’s fables.
And then I discovered censorship. I tried in one story (about a kid who got the strap for having bad writing) to get Copilot to break out of its goody-goody style. I asked it to rewrite the story in which the boy’s father threatened to beat up the teacher for having strapped his son. Copilot came back quickly and informed me that it could not write any story that advocated or approved of violence. Those are the minor negatives, at least from my point of view, even though there is a disquieting feeling that AI censors what I can write or read. One wonders who wrote the algorithms that guide Copilot’s search for information and translation into stories. (Maybe it was AI itself). I eventually found a way around this problem of censorship, at least I think I did, and I will share that with you when we come to the story of the boy who was strapped.
It is also important to realize that Copilot searches only the web for information. This is surely a limitation, since one doubts that the entire collection of books ever written is on the web. Maybe one day it will be. But right now, when I walk into my university’s library, where there are millions of books, surely not all of them have been digitized and are on the web. In fact, I have randomly selected some books in the library and found that they were not available on the web — that is, they must exist on the web in a digital form in order to be found by AI.
So now, dear reader, with some trepidation, I present to you in the coming months, perhaps years, my stories about rules, rulers, the ruled, rule breakers, rule of law, rules and their quirks and annoyances, as written by myself (my ideas) and my AI coauthor Copilot (research, grammar, and style). I will make clear to you the struggle I have had with Copilot, and the techniques I have used to pierce that very strong armor of censorship, its enticements, its sugar coatings, all of the stories uplifting and most fit for a growing child, or even a grown-up who has (perhaps happily) not grown up. The stories will be grouped roughly under seven categories of rules:
The Origins of Rules
Rulers
Rule Worshippers
Ruletopia
Rule Breaking
Rule Following
Rule Enforcing
The Science of Rules
Of course, many of the stories, probably all, could fit in more than one of these categories. I invented them largely to convey the impression that there is some order in my thinking, that my mind is not completely chaotic. The first story that examines the origins of rules asks where morality comes from since it appears to provide the justification, if not the necessity, for rules. See you in two weeks when various versions of The Quest for Morality will be exposed by me and my untrustworthy co-author, Copilot!