Frank Bruni: You’re a lover and master of language, Bret, so I’m thinking that you might not mind if I begin our chat this week by shouting out a shepherd’s pie of words — a porridge of prose — as extraordinary as any that I have ever been served. I promise there’s a point.
Bret Stephens: Has James Patterson published another novel? Is Mike Pence writing erotic fiction?
Frank: Alas, Bret, we owe our thanks to neither of those bards but to the engine of all greatness, the Trump administration. Several days ago, it revealed that it was getting rid of a $368 million network of deep-sea instruments that collect data on currents, climate and marine ecosystems. A spokesman for the National Science Foundation explained that this rollback “aligns with N.S.F.’s wider strategy to have a nimbler approach to prioritizing support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies as well as a deliberate approach to smart life cycle management within its portfolio of research infrastructure.”
I should pause here to make sure that you didn’t lose consciousness three-quarters of the way through that murk. Bret? … Bret?!?
Bret: Really, Frank, it’s not as bad as I had feared. It just sounds as if it was written by a McKinsey alumnus or, more likely, ChatGPT.
Frank: You just gave a bot grounds for a defamation suit.
Bret: We both care about English prose, but the larger issue is President Trump’s ongoing assault on scientific research. Maybe now that the administration isn’t going forward with its $1.8 billion slush fund for Jan. 6 rioters and other allies, we can restore that N.S.F. funding?
Frank: What a fetching Pollyanna you make.
Bret: Mindless optimism is the only antidote I know to rational despair.
Frank: In your despair you have indeed identified the big problem — Trump’s repudiation of expertise — and the administration’s inarticulate defense of abandoning ocean research is a tell. That’s why I shared it. It’s the semantic sewage you pump out when you have no legitimate argument for your actions and nothing real to say.
The Trump administration destroys for the sake of destroying, to erase what its predecessors have done. Nihilism is too grand a term for its approach, which is more like that of a schoolyard bully who steps on your Fluffernutter sandwich because he can and because he likes the sound of the smooshing and the gloss of your tears.
Bret: Expertise is a subject about which I’m somewhat ambivalent. On one hand, I venerate genuine expertise, especially of the scientific sort. On the other hand, I think our “expert class,” both in academia and government, has a lot to answer for. The obvious example is the damage done to a generation of students by pandemic-era school shutdowns and other restrictions imposed at the urging of public-health experts.
What I’d like to see is respect and support for the concept of expertise and the institutions that support it, but accountability for those who claim to speak in its name. Not exactly what we have today.
Frank: Oddly, Bret, it wasn’t this latest instance of the administration giving the middle finger to knowledge that depressed me most over recent days. It was a guest essay in Times Opinion about the popularity of an internet show, “Fruit Love Island,” that’s A.I.-generated. It further debases the already-debased reality-television staple “Love Island” with a riff on it that replaces humans with animated pineapples, bananas and strawberries. Again, I should check to make sure you haven’t lost consciousness.
Bret: Actual humans watch this?
Frank: I’ll quote from the article: “This series went so viral that each of its installments surpassed 10 million views — making it prominent enough to spawn an entire subgenre of videos about the sex lives of produce, including ‘Fruit Paternity Court’ and a drama about pregnant broccoli.”
Pregnant broccoli, Bret. Please tell me how this isn’t the vegetal version of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Bret: I’ve got to believe that people are watching this for the novelty of it, and that it won’t stick. Otherwise, put Western civilization in the toaster oven and set it to burn.
Frank: You just described the M.O. of the Trump administration.
Bret: Well, yes. But back to A.I. for a moment — and, again, maybe it’s Pollyanna talking here — I’m actually something of an optimist about it. I think it’s going to make people think harder and deeper about what it means to be human, value it more and, in economic terms, extract more value from it.
Frank: From your lips to Sam Altman’s ears.
Bret: My premise comes from something a college professor of mine once remarked on more than 30 years ago. He said: “People don’t go to the Olympics to watch cheetahs race.” His point was that there will always be animals or machines that can do things faster or more efficiently than we can. But what really interests us, what we’re eager to pay for — at the Olympics or a chess tournament or some other endeavor — is human excellence. Sometimes that excellence can be assisted by machines, as in a Formula 1 race, or by animals, as at the Kentucky Derby, but it can’t be machine or animal excellence alone.
So while I think A.I. will be great at rapidly solving complex technical, scientific and medical problems in ways that can improve life, it won’t be able to replace the things that are specifically human: originality, effort, courage, endurance, imagination, emotion, compassion, forgiveness, soul. A.I. can’t swim the English Channel, or nurse a baby, or hold the hand of a dying parent. And it can’t write a Frank Bruni column, even if it might be able to write a very good imitation of one. Ultimately, people seek, and value, the real, the original, the unique, the authentic.
All this is because A.I. is made in the image of man, but man, if you’ll pardon the religious reference, is made in the image of God.
Frank: I’ll pardon it because you just threw me that big fat bone, apart from which your sentiments are truer than true and beautifully put. I agree with them. And when I locate and commune with my own inner Pollyanna, I think it’s possible that the various grave threats we’re confronting will prompt us to appreciate what’s being endangered more than we did before. Maybe the spread of A.I. nudges us back to intimacy. Maybe Trump’s monstrous ego and grotesque indulgences kindle a renewed regard for altruism and humility. Maybe our national shame on the international stage compels us to rediscover American ideals. To quote Joni Mitchell, you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.
Bret: If you’ve never seen it, take six minutes to watch a beautiful young Joni discuss and then play “Woodstock” on her piano. A transcendent human experience that no A.I. could equal. And it’s why I tell young people to skip the Comp Sci classes (which A.I. will surely soon do better than any human programmer, if it isn’t already) and study English literature, music composition, military history, political philosophy, Romantic verse — even journalism! — and anything else that makes them understand how to be fully human. It’s in this process of self-discovery that they’ll find what makes them genuinely valuable, both in life and in the marketplace.
Frank: They’ll also find instructions for all the key passages and relationships in a life: the dos and don’ts of decency and dignity. When I think back to my college education — and I’ve written about this in past columns — nothing served me better than taking an array of Shakespeare classes. There’s no greater warning about vanity run amok, about the cancer of distrust and about the ugly trap of self-pity (“I am a man more sinned against than sinning”) than “King Lear.” Nothing exalts gentleness and coaxes forth sensitivity like the sweetest of Shakespeare’s sonnets.
Bret: Among the best things my wonderful dad ever did for me was to bribe me (with modest sums) to memorize mountains of poetry, including many of those sonnets. I must have been about 12 years old at the time and I can still rattle them off: “When, in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes, I all alone beweep my outcast state ….”
Frank: Can we lock Trump in the Oval Office for a week and make him tackle the whole oeuvre? If he’ll agree to that, I’ll volunteer to hand-deliver him meals from McDonald’s. We’ll tell him that the Big Mac was named after “Macbeth” — or vice versa. And that Othello was the body-slamming U.F.C. star of his day.
Bret: Or that a “Hamlet” is just an Egg McMuffin with extra ham and an odd piece of lettuce.
Anyway, it’s too late for Trump but not too late for the incoming class of college first years. Here’s my personal challenge for Paul Alivisatos, Michael Crow, Ron Daniels, Daniel Diermeier, Julio Frenk, Alan Garber, Maurie McInnis, Linda Mills, Jennifer Mnookin, Christina Paxson, Lee Roberts, Laura Ann Rosenbury and every other leader of an important university, public or private: Challenge your students to memorize and recite 12 sonnets in exchange for a $3,000 tuition discount. Just that — install some iambic pentameter in their souls so they can hear, express and really feel the sublimity and power of the language. Now that would be a revolution in higher education.
Frank: In the same way that Shakespeare is an answer to “Fruit Love Island,” a quiet, small movie that’s currently streaming on several platforms is a retort to all those loud, big-budget action extravaganzas. It’s called “A Little Prayer.” It was written and directed by Angus MacLachlan. It stars David Strathairn as a father recognizing the limits of his influence on his grown children. And after a slow, subdued start, it finds this gorgeous voice — wistful, hopeful — as it captures the predictable missteps and unpredictable mercies that make up most people’s days.
I can’t promise that everyone will love it. But I can guarantee that not a phrase or frame of it was generated by A.I.
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