Here is an update on a story you may not yet have heard of. It manages to be at once fascinating, deeply disturbing and a perfect living metaphor of our age. AI models are vulnerable to something called “model collapse.” In the early days of LLM-based AI there was a seemingly limitless store of online content to train it on. But that’s mostly been used up. Meanwhile, a rapidly growing percentage of online content is produced by AI. If you try to train AI on the product of AI it’s a bit like locking a person in a sealed room and watching them slowly suffocate as they breath in the product of their cellular respiration (CO2) rather than the fuel (oxygen) that makes the body function. Not a perfect analogy but you get the idea. This has made the creators of AI increasingly desperate in their search for new artifacts of human intellection — a phrase I heard once from the great Chaucer scholar John V. Fleming who died this past May — to feed into large language model AI systems.

The solution? Physical books published before 2022. You can guarantee as a matter of absolute certainty that whatever their quality, their merits, whatever they’re about, they are the product of human minds.

It’s relatively easy to scan a book without damaging it. But if you’re doing it at scale the costs of scanning and digitizing a book’s contents without damaging it are vastly higher. So what AI companies appear to be doing is buying up books, cutting off the spines, feeding them into industrial scale scanners and then throwing away.

With the growing attention being given to Trump handler/confidante Natalie Harp, I looked up this November 2024 Times article which captures some of the relationship …

“You are all that matters to me,” she wrote in one of the letters, which were seen by The New York Times. The letters’ authenticity was confirmed by two people with direct knowledge of them.

“I don’t ever want to let you down,” Ms. Harp wrote, thanking Mr. Trump for being her “Guardian and Protector in this Life.”

In another letter, she told Mr. Trump that she wanted to get back to “that synergy” she used to have with him, where “we’d talk about everything and nothing.”

“I want to bring you joy,” she wrote, “to feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work.’”

At the White House, Ms. Harp is likely to serve a role unlike any presidential adviser in modern history.

Given that Natalie Harp is not only a conventionally attractive women but also Trump’s type, there’s an obvious and understandable inclination to imagine that they are involved in a sexual relationship. Perhaps they are. But my best guess is that the relationship is more akin to an emotional support pillow/blanket. If they are having an affair, mostly who cares? There are so many other higher priority dangers this rapidly-fading, degenerate man-child poses to our country and our future. If he’s receiving some kind of emotional soothing from Harp in whatever form better he get it there than from invading more countries.

The more public-relevant issue with Harp is that she appears, from pretty credible reporting, to be a key vector for Trump’s incoming and outgoing information. She notoriously carries with her a portable printer and batteries so she can print out flattering press coverage. If you’re familiar with Trump’s Truth Social feed it’s clear that he frequently bases new de facto policies, attacks, demands … what have you, on things that come from far-right sites or absurd Twitter threads. So like new claims of vandalism, justifications for his actions that need new rationales. There’s this feedback loop of randoms trying to come up with justifications, arguments, new forms of retaliation. Then Trump sees them adopts them as his own. They’re no less stupid or dangerous or absurd but like Frankenstein’s monster they become real, if no less disfigured, when he brings them to life and invests them with the power of the American presidency. Harp seems to be the vector for a lot of that. Reporting also suggests that when he fires off new demands or threats or whatever else it’s often Harp who is clicking “send”.

Needless to say there doesn’t appear to be any shortage of sycophantic idiots in the second Trump White House. She may simply have taken over some of the role once occupied by Dan Scavino who has now ascended to bigger things. So it’s not like she’s the problem. Perhaps more like she’s the current executor or actuator of the problem. In any case, she’s an important figure beyond just rumor and jokes.