I got the following email:
Hydrafacial Treatment submitted a comment to "The Weirdness of Bilingualism [by Andrei Codrescu]"
The essay “The Weirdness of Bilingualism” was published in Best American Poetry on April 25 2019, one of fifteen essays I wrote pre-pandemic for BAP. The “weirdness of bilingualism” had to do with typing an essay in English, beginning unconsciously with a first line in Romanian. I had been switching from one language to another in my writings, but never unconsciously. I was making smooth transitions from one language to another, but always deliberately, conscious of my audience. Happy to be bilingual I was speaking to readers in two very different languages.
My bilinguality had nothing to do with face cream. Needless to say. It had to be the translation. “Bilingual” means “two tongues,” or in a pinch “forked tongue.” No human speaking two languages would translate “bilingual” as “forked tongue,” unless they had an agenda, as in “white man speaks with forked tongue.” Which white man does. I have seen a forked tongue on an evangelical literalist who claimed that it greatly pleased his wife, which brought them both closer to God, but that’s another story.
It had to be AI. Translation is the hardest thing AI does. Every word has many meanings, and many tangled roots. The best AI can do is aggregate every available context in one language and carry its weight into another. It’s not the fault of AI: peoples’ misreadings, mistakes and mistranslations outweigh by far all usage. Thus “bilingual” means “two tongues” and “forked tongue” to the greatest number of users. As code no doubt to a variety of practices and punchlines.
The genius of appropriating my essay for the purpose of selling face cream is part of an incoming industry of businesses built on top of AI. This business (Hydrafacial Treatment) is disguised as a comment to my BAP essay on bilingualism. There is a link to the essay, but it is clear that only the title matters to the face cream peddler. Anyone reading the title in the context of face cream will immediately see two tongues licking face cream off the reader’s face.
It’s genius. Headline writers, make note. Cleverness will sell your leads. Ask for royalties. Buried in word play lies gold. Personally, I own many gold mines. My published work is headlined by many phrases that can wrap around anything from tennis shoes to face cream.
I have published as well hundreds of writers in my literary magazine, Exquisite Corpse, a quarterly available on line 1996-2016. This publication brims with treasure like a landfill where the best minds of several generations have stashed their jewelry. The first pirate to plunder the Corpse (1996-2015) was Elon Musk. Every article in the Corpse became an X posting. Going unnoticed in the garbage mounds of words on X are jewels of Exquisite Corpse. First employed as filler for X these jewels lay undisturbed for many months until AI spotted them as potentially generative advertising. Thus was face cream born, coiled around my essay like a manicured hand squeezing a bottle.
Twice plundered, my title and essay may be just at the beginning of their career. AI in its expanding wisdom will squeeze every layer of meaning from every word. “Bilingual” may be just one of the easy ones, lying on the surface of multiplicity like a ring in the sand.
How clever is AI? Like Twitter, like X or MS Word, etc, AI is a child. Each subsequent second (a human year) it grows exponentially to see through language to its roots. Right now it is generously applying face cream to anybody willing to have their face bilingually licked. When it goes to high-school it will build face cream cities on Mars.
Share this post