Arnold Zwicky's Blog

First thing. When AI chatbots first became available for private use, there was a fashion among my friends and colleagues in the academic world to ask a bot to compose their scholarly biography. The results were hysterically inaccurate, being composed of bits of actual fact embedded in largely confabulated narratives, with invented positions held, honors received, publications, and personal details as well. We laughed, but it was also more than a little scary: what if such bots were let loose on our public records?

Second thing. I have had a Wikipedia page for some years now. It was factual, and contained some things that are especially important to me, including a comment about my role in mentoring students (this was a significant part of my professorial life, in which I was able to encourage often-disregarded students — women, working-class students, black students, older students, lgbt students), and a mention of my most significant academic honor, election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; last time I looked, the page had not yet been revised to include my most recent honor, the creation of the Linguistic Society of America’s (annual) Arnold Zwicky Award, which “recognizes LGBTQ+ linguists who have made significant contributions to the discipline, the Society, or the wider LGBTQ+ community through scholarship, outreach, service, and/or teaching”.

The confluence of the two things. This morning I had occasion to check out my Wikipedia page (intending to recommend it to a Princeton classmate as  source of information about me), only to discover that it had been rewritten by a chatbot, which had of course fucked it up. My mentoring and my American Academy election were gone, and other parts of my life, personal and academic, were worked into a strange fiction (some details to come below), As with the bot-created scholarly biographies, it was possible to track down the sources of the misinformation, but very hard to see how to get any of this corrected, especially since the bot cited actual sources as backup for its mangled claims. (That is, real sources, but bizarrely interpreted by the bot. How can they be challenged? This is not the way Wikipedia was supposed to work.)

I can see no way out of this except to have my Wikipedia page deleted. Better nothing than this shit. Here I confess ignorance: what do I do to have my page deleted? Can any of my readers offer me solid advice?

Three things from my Wikipedia page on 2/2/24.

— “Zwicky was born on September 6, 1940, in Allentown, Pennsylvania to a Jewish family.”

Well, the date and place are right (though Wikipedia has flagged these facts as needing citation, which has to come from a published source other than my own writings). But no, not Jewish (I cannot claim the honor of this identity). I have written a number of times about my being taken to be Jewish, the reasons for that, and my responses to it, which are different in different contexts.

— “Zwicky identifies himself as an atheist American Jew and from an early age as a non-dominant gay man, which led him to feel throughout life as an outcast even in the LGBTQ community, and influenced him to write extensively about these identities from the linguistic perspective, in his blog.”

Again with the Jewish. On to atheist. What I say is that I’m a non-believer (and the church I don’t belong to is a socially liberal Episcopal church), adhering passionately to a moral code. Not denying the existence of God, but expressing no actual belief on the matter, while respecting other people’s beliefs and (within limits) practices, even if they’re not my own. I wouldn’t ordinary argue over labels, but this one is important, because the label atheist has come to be seen as the name of a profoundly offensive and contemptible identity. From another Wikipedia page:

The negative attitudes towards atheists were higher than negative attitudes towards African-Americans and homosexuals but lower than the negative attitudes towards Muslims. Many in the U.S. associate atheism with immorality, including criminal behaviour, extreme materialism, communism and elitism.

In  my experience, the contempt is primarily associated with the label, which has become a flashpoint, a red flag, for hatred. So I prefer to use the label nonbeliever, which in my experience elicits much less hostility. This is in contrast to how I treat my homosexuality, which elicits hostility and contempt (or not) without regard to label: homosexual, gay, queer, fairy, pansy, faggot, whatever. Some labels are slurs, wielded as insults, but if you’re inclined to homohatred, it’s the identity and not the label that sets you off.

But then there’s non-dominant. This is the bot’s garbling of my preferring the receptive role in anal intercourse (when I engaged in this activity, which was back in the last century), of my being a bottom (as the slang goes) and of celebrating this sexual role in all of its forms (some of which are decidedly unsubmissive), and so of fighting a bias against receptives (and submissives and effeminates) in the gay male world.

— “Since the early 2000s, he has withdrawn from social life and has shifted from traditional academic writing to writing almost exclusively on his blog.”

The first part is just wrong. I have written with considerable feeling about my social isolation, which has been forced on me largely by medical circumstance, and of course by the deaths of most of my circle of friends — not at all a withdrawal from social life (which I publicly beg for, constantly). No human being reading my stuff would get this wrong.

The second part, however, is accurate. Though I’d hope that a human would have gone on to say something about what my blog is about. All those postings about cartoons and comics (and language play and visual style), all that analysis of gay porn, all those plants and animals, all that music, all those movies and tv shows, all that English dialectology, all that stuff about Switzerland and the Pennsylvania Dutch county, all those reflections on memory and on illusions about variation in language, all those recollections of my life, all those Zwickys of the world — is that all just chopped liver?

— “He has written extensively on Yiddish and Yinglish and their influence and acceptance into the spoken American language.”

I have written occasionally on these matters. But as far as languages go, my writing about Yiddish and Yinglish (even with that chopped liver just now) pales in comparison to my many postings on German, Spanish, French, and Italian. And is surely behind (for example) Chinese, Japanese, Turkish, and Finnish, maybe even Basque. (The comment is in Wikipedia as backup to its claims about my Jewishness!)

My morning. This foul Wikipedia article has consumed my entire morning and threatened my health: my rage at it sent my blood pressure and pulse rates soaring dangerously for 5 hours, only recently coming down to within normal range. I want it dead and I want it to stay dead.

This entry was posted on February 2, 2024 at 11:41 am and is filed under My life, Resources, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.