We have been anxiously following the news from France, first the heat waves and now the wildfires. Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, the weather is same-same: solid blue skies, warm days, overnight fog off the Pacific which works much better than air conditioning to cool our nights. I realise that the weather in our micro-climate (south of San Francisco) is so boringly good it is not worth mentioning. Alas.

I had a funny experience with AI this week. I am working on a new translation whose author quotes a book by Jacques Derrida. I made a draft translation of the paragraph concerned, then looked online for the Derrida book’s translator. My first thought was to search with IA; I asked Gemini to find the translation for me, giving Gemini my draft translation as guidance. IA’s returned the Derrida book’s translation to me was promptly returned to me, flatteringly much like my draft.

Pleased at having saved myself a lot of searching and maybe even a trip to the university Green Library West Stacks (a place one would never want to get lost or locked in), I asked Gemini to give me a page reference, at which point Gemini started sending me increasingly obviously wrong answers. I got irritated, Gemini apologized increasingly abjectly for wasting my time with made-up answers (as they/it disarmingly admitted) to my questions. A bit of this and I started wondering about the translation they had given me — wasn’t it suspiciously close to my draft translation?

Indeed. When I asked Gemini to find the translation it/they — what are Gemini’s pronouns?—had simply sent me back my own translation, framed as an answer.

Remind me to tell you some other time about the West Stacks labyrinth.

Beverley Bie Brahic