The Palm-Eyed Man

Who owns your vision?

One of the odder comic-book supervillains is the Ten-Eyed Man, a crook with the ability to see through his fingertips. How this enables him to fight hand-to-hand is unknown, since you’d think making a pair of fists would leave him blind, but whatever. I think about that guy when I think about how we experience the world through modern media. Here I am, tapping away on the keys of my laptop to express that thought instead of having a conversation or talking into a webcam.

I got a new phone last weekend. Same companies (Samsung and Verizon), same service plan (more or less). Everything’s pretty much the same, except for those little niggling differences that make you feel like you’ve slipped into an alternate universe.

One subtle difference is in framing. Almost no two phones are exactly the same size and shape, so my experience of the virtual space is taller now. My scrolling window, the photos I take, the banking information I go through, everything’s just a little bit more elongated. Thaat’ll proobaablyy aaffeect myy miind iin soome weeiird waayys, buut II woon’t woorryy tooo muuch aaboouut iit.

Some differences were temporary. I deleted a bunch of apps that Samsung and/or Verizon thought I needed. Candy Crush? No thank you, I have enough addictions in my life already. I don’t need two separate apps both named “Voice Recorder” when I’m already using a third.

I also had to restore the speech-to-text feature, which was still available but no longer a default for typing. That’s an odd change to me. I figured it was a fairly popular feature, certainly more so than a “translate to foreign languages” feature or a “make a password out of your biometric data” feature. (What does the latter have to do with typing?)

I’m still deciding whether I want that biometric-password feature. I only just now figured out how to take screenshots again. But the one feature I’ve had to mull over the most, for obvious reasons, is the AI-assisted writing.

I’ve decided I’m into it—largely as an instructive example of how not to write things. For all the style options it offers (professional/casual/polite, social media/blog post/emojified), it’s all pretty bland and (as usual for AI) not as informed as it likes to pretend it is.

For example, when I asked it for help writing this piece, one topic that it kept recommending I discuss was how hard it was to transfer data over. Data transference was a big hurdle when I got my last new phone, that’s true. But it’s fairly trivial now, since just about everything on our phones is on the cloud. You’d think AI would know this. Although maybe it’s better that it doesn’t? IDK.

AI doesn’t get the details right about Lois Lane either, and she’s a topic I’ve been meaning to get back to for awhile. I’ll spare you the full text of the article I had Poe.com try to compose, but the upshot is that it thought Lois started out respectable and just kept getting more respectable as the decades went on until the present day, representing how well we’ve solved the problems of equality between the sexes forever! (cough) According to Poe, Lois didn’t have an evolutionary arc, or series of arcs, so much as an evolutionary straight line.

Yeah, that’s not so true on either front. In a couple of days, I’ll get into Lois Lane’s eras tour—especially her villain era. But first, I want to talk a bit more about AI writing filters—and what some actually imaginative ones would look like. Tomorrow for that!