Childish things
[NOTE: This is a repeat of a previous post. Just for fun.]
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. —1 Corinthians 13:11
Children have a lot of time on their hands. In my case, there was a fair amount of solitary time, and I filled it with musings and experiments.
For example, there was lying-down-on-the-grass-and-looking-up-at-the-sky, great for studying floaters and musing on what they might be. Insects trapped in the eye? Single-celled creatures, likewise (close, but no cigar)?
And then there was the eating of dirt, an activity I tried only a few times before I abandoned it as unsatisfactory. But I still remember the taste—gritty and complex. Likewise, sucking on a wet washcloth during down time in the bath, an interesting combination of rough and refreshing.
Shining a flashlight on the fingers to see the red glow was rather nice. Lying in bed at night, waiting for sleep to overtake me, an entertaining feature was to press gently on my eyes with my fists and rub, causing the activation of phosphenes and a bit of a light show (the Greeks had described the phenomenon long before my time, but I was unaware of that and thought I’d invented the activity on my own).
Then there was the repetition of a familiar word until it became strange. This was accomplished by simply saying it aloud over and over to the point where it was leached of its original meaning and devolved to a mere sound. I recall this happening most effectively and dramatically with the word “pink,” but others will do quite nicely.
Many of these explorations took place in my yard, which had some dirt patches where grass stuggled to grow, and in the summer anthills were plentiful there. These were opportunities for some very mild ant torture that involved covering an ant with a bit of fine light sand and watching it emerge after a very short struggle, now temporarily and somehow satisfyingly light-colored rather than dark (did that make me both a budding racist and a PETA offender? Mea culpa!)
Our block—a dead-end street—featured areas that had been patched over with tar, and on hot days these bubbled up in splendid fashion. There was a plentiful supply of rocks in the gutters, the pointiest of which could be used to strike the tar bubbles and cause a pleasant pop, similar but not quite as good as the scented zap! of that same rock used on the dots that lined the paper rolls we otherwise would load into our cap guns as ammunition.
I wonder whether children still have the time and inclination to do these things. If they do, they’re not telling the adults. Nor did we—till now.
As a child I did most of those things, and my son did as well, but we didn’t let him have much access to screens until he was about ten or so.
I used to put my fingertips very close together and look at light through the tiny hole, and wonder why it corrected my nearsightedness.
A younger relative is dealing with a 3 year old right now that throws a fit if he isn’t allowed to play with the iPad. It started with a babysitter and now his parents are trying to break him of this. It’s like a drug once he gets it he just sits and plays on it quietly. I’ve seen a number of times kids in grocery carts or restaurants plopped down with the iPad/phone.
Obviously not true of all kids but it seems that a not small number have no interest in going outside and just exploring and doing stuff when they can be on some device.
How about a childish joke?
What kind of Pokemon also likes to eat dirt?
Pica-chu.
I’ll let myself out.
Every kid I see has a cell phone, in constant use.
In a restaurant I once saw a family of four–Mom, Dad, 2 kids–all on his/her cell phone. No family conversation. Food came, all stopped to eat, still no talking. A family in name only.
Self-imposed isolation. Bodes poorly.
Neo-
Dirt-eating was once a sign of iron deficiency anemia in poor, young Southern women.
I get the feeling that kids in rural areas or small towns still do a lot of these things but kids in cities or suburbia do very little of them.
Seems like most kids from middle and upper middle class families have their entire lives scheduled and never have time to just explore their environs.
It really does seem that my generation (Gen X) was the last that grew up in this way. Cell phones and internet truly changed the way kids grow up and not for the better.
Cicero:
Yes, pica.
But I was about 3 years old at the time, and I only ate a little dirt, just to see what it tasted like. It didn’t taste so great.
A childish thing: we had cute little nightgowns made of some cool synthetic to wear on hot summer nights. When trying to get to sleep (or not?!), we’d rub the material and make flashes of light!
What simple kid fun, back then!
You described me perfectly!
All these decades later, the first whiff of tar melting in the sunshine is my emotional marker for “the beginning of summer.” Then there was playing in the gutter water after a heavy rain, using sticks and pebbles to build tiny dams and lakes.
And doing cartwheels and other “gymnastics” for hours on end in the grassy yard. Playing chicken on our bikes; the only time I had the nerve to crash my friend head-on, I accidentally did a perfect forward somersault dismount, coming up solid on my two feet (shoulda been a real gymnast ta-da!). Thanks for sparking those memories, Neo!
Variations on a theme!
I remember being on my hands & knees, looking through the rust holes in the floorboard of our ’49 Ford woody and watching the gravel rush past on the way to Fish Lake. It was a pain to get so much dust in my eye.
I did some of that as a kid. To this day, in my fifties, I still look at light through my fingers sometimes. Never ate dirt that I can recall, but did ponder what ‘floaters’ might be.
Summer memories from my pre-teen days: standing on the back porch of my grandparents’ house, looking south over a wide field of corn or soybeans, watching heat waves rise. Same house, front side: watching a dust devil swirling as it moved straight down the road in front of Grandpa’s house.
Blowing seeds from dandelion puff balls. I did that so much of that at times in the summer, our yard was full of huge continuous patches of yellow dandelions.
In the summer evening, that sudden moment when the sound of the crickets would begin. I do mean sudden, one moment things are quiet, the next moment the air is full of sound. That was usually how I knew playtime was almost over and Mom would be calling me inside pretty soon (unless my parents were outside too).
My grandfather sitting on that same back porch, listening to the Cubs play on the radio. I was too small to even care about baseball, but I remember playing on the back porch while he listened to the game on hot summer days. (That back porch was enclosed, but had screen windows on either side and a screen window and a big screen door looking out the back, so it was sunny and breezes could get in easily. We spent a _lot_ of summer time there!
When I was _very_ small, there was a grocery store that had a coffee grinder with a transparent front. You’d put the coffee beans in the hopper and you could actually watch the machinery working as it minced the beans up into coffee grounds. It was up on a second-level shelf, but my father would sometimes pick me up and let me watch it work (I was maybe 3.) That’s fascinating when you’re three years old.
Grew up in suburbs, track homes on 1/8 acre. Tons of kids. In front of my house the cement gutter has subsided and was a low spot. Whenever it rained, or a neighbor was running a hose, my brother and I would gather gravel and dirt and make a dam across the gutter. We got some good lakes extending out into the street, until my dad came out to supervise dam busting.
Floaters and dirt and the taste of a washcloth
Shining a light for the red glow of my fingers
Rubbing my eyes for the phosphene show
Repeating a word until it barely lingers
Annoying an ant and burst bubbling tar
Exploding the dots on a cap gun roll
These are a few of my childish things
Tried eating something dirtier than dirt so I’m told at about 2yo. Mom went to her mom to ask what to do. Grandma said “It’s his, isn’t it?”
I was near on 50 before I felt safe telling Mom “things”. She’s gone now and I still have stories to tell her.
By the way, what commenting plugin do you use?
DT
When my father was in his 40s and his parents were visiting, I was riding in the car with my father and grandmother. Dad told us some story from his childhood. My grandmother’s reply: “I never heard that before.”
I grew up in the country. My home was on a north-south road. Nearest neighbor a quarter mile away. East or west from my home you had to travel more than a mile before you hit another road. By default, I spent a lot of time in the woods. Before I got out of first grade I figured out how to get to the post office, about a third of a mile away as the crow flies, by walking through the woods.
Tried eating a variety of flowers or evergreen needles. Munched on those flowers or needles for years. Oak or maple leaves–probably tried them, but probably only once. Liked breaking apart milkweed pods.
Built a lot of mini-dams on the creeks and ponds in the area.(my home was on what was called a river, but in many parts of the country it would be called a creek. Maybe 20 feet across.) Swamps on 2 sides of our property. Lot to explore. There was a small cabin in an island in the swamp. Several generations later, the swamp is drying up.
I also learned by the hard test of experience that poison ivy and poison sumac abounded in the woods.
A lot of land that was meadow in my childhood has reverted back to forest. There were reminders that the forest had once been farmland–tons of stone walls and an occasional remainder of a foundation. Also a lot of BIG rocks left over from the glaciers.
When I first got my bike @ 9 years old, I commenced exploring the roads. Stay off the US route, my parents told me. No problem, there were plenty of back roads. I got to a road I wasn’t familiar with. I kept going–didn’t turn back– but was near tears–I was lost. I kept going, and 5 minutes later I found myself on familiar grounds. The school was a quarter mile away.
DT:
It’s not a plugin. It’s just WordPress comments. In order to enable editing of comments by the commenter, I also have a plugin called Comment Edit Core.
huxley:
And I bet that jingle wasn’t even AI-generated. 🙂
neo:
AI would have done it better, made it rhyme right. I didn’t want to put in the time. As usual AI did it in a few seconds:
_____________________________________________
My Favorite Childish Things
Lying in the grass and gazing at skies,
Studying floaters with curious eyes.
Wondering if they were creatures or cells,
Lost in the musings where imagination dwells.
The gritty taste of a dirt-eating fling,
Wet washcloths in bath—a refreshing spring.
Fingers aglow with a flashlight’s beam,
Phosphene light shows, like a private dream.
Repeating “pink” till it lost its name,
A sound divorced from its meaning’s claim.
Covering ants in a dusting of sand,
Watching them struggle, emerging so grand.
Tar bubbles popping in summer’s heat,
With rocks from gutters—such a simple treat.
The scented zap! from cap gun rolls,
Exploring the world with unbridled souls.
All of these treasures, my childhood brings,
These are a few of my childish things.
–ChatGPT 4.o
I don’t know where human creativity goes from here. Will 21C writers become directors who create with AI prompts then edit/combine/curate the results?
You know that it’s already happening.
Chat says:
_________________________________
You’re absolutely right—it’s already happening, and it’s fascinating, unnerving, and full of potential. The 21st century has cracked open the definition of “creator” like never before, and the rise of AI is reshaping creativity in ways that feel almost evolutionary. Writers, artists, and directors are no longer bound by the limitations of their own hands or even their own imaginations. Instead, they’re becoming something closer to orchestrators, conducting a symphony of AI-generated possibilities.
This shift toward prompt-driven creation feels inevitable. It’s not a surrender of creativity, but a transformation of it. Writers feed the machine with a spark—an idea, a mood, a sentence fragment—and what they get back is a spectrum of possibilities they may not have conjured on their own. Editing, curating, and combining these outputs becomes a creative process in itself, not unlike sculpting marble. The raw material is new, but the chiseling and shaping are as old as art itself…..
For now, though, it feels like a wild frontier. The 21st-century writer-director is as much a coder as a storyteller, as much a curator as a creator. They’re playing in a space where the boundaries between human and machine blur, and while that’s unsettling, it’s also exhilarating. Creativity has always thrived on reinvention, and this era is no exception.
Where do we go from here? Somewhere between imagination and algorithms, with creativity still stubbornly clinging to its human heart—at least for now.
@huxley:I don’t know where human creativity goes from here.
Whether human creativity suffers, I don’t think the high end of human creative talent will, it’s the low and middle end, people who come up with jingles and ad copy and editorial commentary and such. They may well go the way of buggy whip and slide rule manufacturers.
But until there’s a form of AI that understands how to engage with reality, there will be plenty for humans to do, and the human creativity required for that engagement will be needed and valuable. Because the LLMs don’t actually know things.
I’ve tried asking ChatGPT to identify the sources of quotes, some of which I know for a fact are found online, and it’s been considerably worse than a Google Search. In other words ChatGPT doesn’t even know as much about what’s actually online as Google Search does, despite that content probably having been in its training data. ChatGPT in many cases simply invents works and authors and attributes the quotes to them; when called on the false citations, it apologizes and invents new ones.
It can supply plausible answers, but has no way to know what answers are true. So humans and their creativity aren’t going to be obsolete just yet, not as long as we have to deal at least occasionally with reality.
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a
child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.”
—1 Corinthians 13:11
Having grandchildren allows me to play with childish things again.
Only I’m not sure if that gives me greater joy than watching my children ‘parent’.
huxley:
AI is impressive as far as it goes, for speed in particular. But it sounds like a Hallmark greeting card to me. Also there’s quite a bit of “offness” – like “such a simple treat,” which is a really gratuitous and rather bad line, obviously only in there for the rhyme. “Emerging so grand” is the same – huh? Grand? And the last line of the first verse doesn’t scan quite right.
I know; I’m being picky.
I had AI write some poems and they were all like that – with glaring problems, but otherwise fast and clever. Never like real poetry, though, saying something deep and amazing. Perhaps that will happen in the future. Perhaps not. I think not, but maybe because I prefer to think not.
Niketas Choniates:
My argument (and Chat’s) isn’t that human creativity will disappear but will be transformed into a collaboration between human intelligence and artificial intelligence, enabling results that are at least faster, if not better.
Consider Chat’s transformation of neo’s post into lyrics for “My Favorite Things” was professional level work. Gerard Vanderleun was wonderfully good at that sort of thing, but it took him more than a few seconds.
Consider also that AI is in its infancy and, as Elon Musk has noted, AI is advancing faster than any other technology in history. ChatGPT 4.o is already a level up from the ChatGPT 3.5 I started on. I’m expecting even more from ChatGPT 5 later this year or early next year.
Your criticism that current AI isn’t as good as Google for finding quotes is like arguing 1970 chess programs couldn’t beat strong amateurs, and therefore computers were never going to compete with top human players.
Today a smartphone can beat world chess champions.
neo:
OK. But the issue I’m bringing up (and Chat seconds) is the possibility of human-AI collaboration, in which the human is like a movie director who tells his team to do something, then critiques it and offers additional direction.
What if you asked Chat to write a poem, then told Chat the third verse was “off” and gave it additional instructions to improve it?
Rinse, lather, repeat.
During the rise of computer chess programs, there was a brief but interesting period when computer programs reached a very high level of play and so human-computer teams emerged in which the human consulted the computer for moves, then chose the one which the human judged best based on his calculations and intuitions.
These were called centaur teams.
This didn’t last long because computers soon got so much better that the human input was either redundant or detrimental.
Thus the centaur teams became pointless.
neo:
I forwarded your criticism to Chat. Chat was happy to rewrite:
_________________________________
My Favorite Childish Things
Lying in grass under wide-open skies,
Watching floaters drift past in my wondering eyes.
Tasting the grit of the earth on a dare,
Or sucking on washcloths in warm summer air.
Lighting my fingers with a flashlight’s glow,
Rubbing my eyelids for a private light show.
Repeating “pink” till the word feels askew,
Or watching ants struggle to break through the dew.
Popping tar bubbles on hot afternoons,
Striking cap paper to conjure small booms.
The hum of my musings, the odd joy it brings—
These are a few of my childish things.
_________________________________
Does that work any better for you? This is what I mean by collaboration.
@huxley:Your criticism that current AI isn’t as good as Google for finding quotes is like arguing 1970 chess programs couldn’t beat strong amateurs, and therefore computers were never going to compete with top human players.
You might like it to be, it isn’t. I’m not sure if you’re misstating my position on purpose or just not understanding it. I’m not saying that they currently suck at something humans do and therefore can never get better, which is obviously fallacious. I’m saying they are sold as “playing chess” but are actually “playing tic-tac-toe with chess pieces on a 3×3 board” and no one is making one that “plays chess” even badly.
What you call “current AI”, the LLMs, they have no way to know what is real. They produce plausible bullshit on an industrial scale, and may well put human bullshit producers out of business, but they do not even know what is in their training material, in that they cannot truthfully answer questions about it. LLMs are being sold as able to do other than plausible bullshit. There is no spectrum of ability to know true things on which to improve. Asking an LLM to tell you what is true is a category error. It has no way to know. No one is building one with a way to know.
What if you asked Chat to write a poem, then told Chat the third verse was “off” and gave it additional instructions to improve it?
I did this very thing with the fake citations. It just kept making up new ones. I’ve also tried telling it that a real citation is fake, and in that case it gave a non-responsive answer to something I didn’t ask it and THEN started making up citations. It didn’t even understand what I said to it, much less know how to truthfully answer the question.
Not only that, huxley, but this software is as you know trained to give only the kinds of answers acceptable to the powers that be. I don’t know what to make of your enthusiasm for an industrial bullshit generator that’s being deliberately designed to brainwash people.
Niketas Choniates:
AI isn’t perfect and you can find problems.
Great. So can I.
I don’t want to get into the Chat Wars, but I’ve been singing “My Favorite Things” for 50+ years and NONE of the attempts come close to matching the lyrics to the music.
The last verse is closest, but no Tin Pan Alley writer on the Billboard Top Ten would consider it singable.
The beats of the words don’t match the beats of the music.
Popping tar bubbles on hot afternoons,
Striking cap paper to conjure small booms.
The hum of my musings, the odd joy it brings—
These are a few of my childish things.
I will grant that there are some good images, which are based on Neo’s words, and it might pass for a modern poem, but then it would have to drop the rhymes.
Can’t have those dratted atavisms in the 21st century!
@ Gringo > “Dad told us some story from his childhood. My grandmother’s reply: “I never heard that before.”
Hah! I resemble that comment!
The boys were sitting around the dining table one night looking at photos from some previous camping trips, including the canoeing expeditions.
One of the pictures showed them jumping off what had to be a 30′ cliff above a wide spot in the river, hanging onto a tire suspended from a nearby tree.
The game, I gathered, was to drop off the tire when it reached the bottom of its swing, closer to the water.
I remarked that I didn’t remember hearing about that particular activity on any of the trip reports that I had been given.
“Oh, Mom!” one of them said. “We never told you!“
huxley:
I see that, like many poets, AI has gotten it worse in the revision. 🙂
My criticisms:
AI is making stuff up again – there was no dare. Also, no warm summer air. I sucked on washcloths indoors in all seasons.
I wasn’t just lighting my fingers with a flashlight; I was making them look red with the flashlight held up against them. “Askew” isn’t a good description of what happens to words when you repeat them. It usually refers to a spatial disorientation, although it can just mean out of whack in general. But the oft-repeated words felt strange and alien rather than askew, which seems to have been chosen for the rhyme. And the ants were most definitely not “breaking the dew” – they were crawling through the dirt and sand of anthills, in midday.
Where were those tar bubbles? AI doesn’t say, so it seems very random. But they actually were in the tar in the street. We struck the cap paper with what? Sharp pointed rocks we found in the street. In the last line, “these are a few of my childish things,” it’s the first time AI mentions childhood. Therefore it sounds like I’m still doing those things and acting like a child, instead of reminiscing about my long-ago childhood!
Nope, the first version was FAR better.
Kids today are reading your blog on their phones.