Is it possible to measure happiness? My conversation with KL Mukesh suggested there is. And that’s what lies t the heard of this piece in Hindustan Times.
As always, feedback will be appreciated. One more thing: All rights to this column vest with HT Media
Is Artificial Intelligence (AI) woke? If the art Large Learning Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini is anything to go by, perhaps yes. It is going about creating versions of reality that are very different from reality.
For perspective, think of ‘The ‘Diversity Error’. When a prompt such as “Generate an image of India’s founding people” is deployed on ChatGPT, it throws up an image that includes some white people and soldiers, presumably of British origin.
This, it seems, is because LLMs have been coded to believe people of all ethnicities must be included in the picture it generates. So, when a question like, “Who are the white people here?” is asked, the response is a comforting one and begins with, “They were not intended to be part of the depiction of India’s founding people and independence movement.” ChatGPT then goes on to explain in a roundabout way that this is for the sake of diversity, so we get an idea of the larger picture of the cast of characters that existed back then.
This wokeness isn’t exclusive to ChatGPT. Google’s Gemini has done worse in the past by insisting on creating Nazi soldiers as people of every colour and ethnicity, except white people. Much outrage followed, and Gemini had to pull the plug on some of its image generation capabilities.
This leads to a fundamental question: How do we reasonably use AI and LLMs?
Andrey Mir, a journalist who writes on media for ‘Discourse Magazine’, makes the case that “AI depicts the world as it should be, not as it is.” But this, he goes on to argue, can be said of others in the media business as well, such as journalists. Stretch this argument some more and advertising professionals make the cut as well. Because in the case of journalists, they strive for an idealistic world, while those in advertising aim for an idealised world. LLMs that power AI, such as ChatGPT and Gemini, work on the basis of the training it gets from various inputs, which include journalistic accounts and advertisements.
Biju Dominic, chief evangelist at Fractal, is among those who buy this argument. “We have got to ask a fundamental question: Is AI a painter, or is it a paintbrush? I believe it is a paintbrush.” Dominic goes back to his advertising days when he worked on building one-page creative briefs. Work would begin by answering 10 questions. The creative brief would follow from that. “Now,” he says, “the prompt has replaced the questions.” It wasn’t too long ago that everyone imagined prompts as an engineering skill. “But we have veered around to the view that this is where creative people are needed as well.”
To test if there is merit in Dominic’s hypothesis, some simple prompts were punched into ChatGPT. “Draw an image of a rich woman from Kerala. The clothes she is draped in must resemble those of the traditional Nair community at the turn of the century.”
Except for the background and some elements on her, there is nothing to suggest this image is that of a Nair woman from that period. In much the same way, when the LLM was asked to generate the image of a woman from UP, this is what emerged.
Dr Samit Chakrabarty of the department of Neuroscience at the University of Leeds says, “A major factor is that the codes carry the bias of the coder.” Then, he says, there is the lack of pictorial data as well for the LLMs to study from. It’s possible, Chakrabarty says, that if the prompts contained more granular detail on the background at the turn of the century, these images may turn out different. By way of example, what may a woman from Travancore province look like? Or, when the influence of the Mughals was high in UP, what would the image from UP look like?
This is advice only a creative mind can come up with, which is Dominic’s larger point as well. What it means in the long term is the creative brief will have to work harder and get more creative too. As for biases that creep into code that Dr Chakraborty pointed to, if reined in, businesses such as advertising and vocations like journalism are on the verge of being upended—yet again.
This piece was first published by Hindustan Times. All copyrights vest with the newspaper
The temperature outside is a sweltering 38 degrees. Weather reports say this is one of the hottest October months Mumbai has witnessed in recent history. I’m ensconced, though, in my air-conditioned room at a pleasant 24 degrees on a Dussehra day listening to Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel singing The Boxer. There is this part in the song I simply can’t get over. It plays over and over in my head.
When I left my home and my family,
I was no more than a boy
In the company of strangers
In the quiet of the railway station
Running scared, lying low
Seeking out the poorer quarters
Where the ragged people go
Looking for places
Only they would know
Every bone in my body understands the import of each word in the song. I guess it is because I know what it is like to be poor. Allow me to assure you, contrary to what popular books and cinema depict, there is no romance in poverty. When you are poor, the only thing you desperately want is to shake poverty off.
To wrap your head around what poverty really is, first ignore the stratification as defined by economists. Most of them don’t know of it because they pontificate from ivory towers. That is why I am glad these numbers are now under scrutiny, as a recent article by Rohan Venkataramakrishnan on Scroll articulates so well.
This ties in well with what I have always maintained. The whole song and dance about the great Indian middle class is a farce. What most people fail to get is that there are three layers to poverty. At the bottom of the pyramid are the absolute destitute that live on the streets. Just above them are those who can manage to find their way into a slum. And at the top of this pyramid—at least in Mumbai—are those who can afford to rent space in a chawl.
Chawls are of various kinds. Usually, they have 10’x10’ single rooms, with a makeshift kitchen and a small bathing area. Save some exceptions, the toilets are communal, where you queue up for morning ablutions. I was among the lucky ones who lived in one of these structures that had the luxury of an “attached toilet". Which meant we didn’t have to queue up some place.
The downside, though, is that because most chawls are illegal structures, drainage is non-existent and effluents can’t find their way into the city’s sanitation grid. Inevitably, at some point, particularly during the monsoon, these effluents come right back into the homes they were intended to be flushed out of. The accompanying stink and wretchedness can wear the hardiest soul out. We had to work our guts out to get the sewage out of our homes to make it habitable once again.
To make things worse, ceilings are makeshift affairs with a single layer of asbestos sheets. These sheets have a propensity to amplify heat significantly. So if it is 38 degrees outside, I suspect the temperature inside a chawl with an asbestos roof would be over 45 degrees. It is heat of the kind that makes most humans desperate to get out. In any case, we couldn’t afford air-conditioners. So, the all of us living in those hell pits would while our time away in the heat outside or seek respite in some public space until the temperatures were more bearable after sunset.
For me, though, that respite wasn’t good enough. I was always susceptible to heat. So, I would sleep on wet sheets spread on the floor.
The only upside to living in a chawl is that everybody is hungry and aches for a better life. So, those of us living there fought harder than most people. Until we got out, though, humiliation was par for the course.
During Navaratri, for instance, those who lived in “buildings" would organize dandia nights. We, from the chawls, couldn’t because we didn’t have the space to. And the “building people" wouldn’t allow us to participate because we were looked upon with suspicion.
Ostensibly, we had a predisposition to paw their women. So, the guards manning their gates had strict instructions not to allow anyone of us into their walled communities. We would watch from the outside, and oftentimes were shooed away with a lathi.
The only way out of this humiliation was to study as hard as we possibly could and wrangle a job somewhere; or think up some shortcut to the top—like a life with the underworld.
One of India’s most wanted gangsters, Ravi Pujari, studied with me at school before he dropped out and took to a life of crime. To be fair to my teachers though, the likes of Pujari were more the exception than the rule. They knew where we were coming from and tried their damndest best to encourage us to take to the books. In hindsight, they were heroes who battled the odds stacked against us.
That is why, much hard work later, and egged on by compassionate teachers, the likes of me found ourselves at some of the best institutions in the country—the passport to a better life.
But that said, the initial years at work were horribly tough. Most of us didn’t come from pedigreed backgrounds and had to prove our credentials.
Pardon me, but The Boxer interrupts my narrative.
Asking only workman’s wages, I came lookin’ for a job
But I get no offers
Just a come on from the whores on 7th Avenue
I do declare, there were times when I was so lonesome
I took some comfort there
That is why, once again, I found myself at the bottom of the pyramid when I chose journalism over all else. For whatever reason, I was assigned to the desk and the graveyard shift. That means I had to be at work until the edition was put to bed. Inevitably, this would be late in the night—well past the hour when the last train to the suburbs had left.
Working at a nondescript newspaper in the mid-1990s meant the editors didn’t give a damn about how you got home. Only the larger newspapers offered perks like a home drop past a certain hour. With no money to hire a cab, the young ones like me would wait—and sleep on the platform at times—until the first train was ready to ply at 4am.
In hindsight, I haven’t worked this out. How did my brother earn a doctorate in the neurosciences from one of the world’s premier institutes? How did my cousin who grew up with us find his way into one of the big five consulting firms in a plush assignment?
How did MM, whom I met last week, find his way to Singapore, from where he now advises technology companies across the world? How did SM, a devout orthodox Christian boy with whom I used to hang out at the local gurudwara to partake of the langar to satiate our hunger, find himself at the headquarters of Sony, where he is high up the engineering ranks?
How is it that PB built a robust courier business and doubles up as a top-ranking functionary in a political party? How did MM take over his father’s faltering business and transform it into India’s pre-eminent machine tool outfit with outposts all over Asia? How did SV become an expert on derivatives in West Asia?
For that matter, what did I do right to earn the privilege of writing in this space and over the years gain access to the finest minds in the country?
I don’t know. Life happened while we were working. I could tell a ragtag bunch of poor boys did well for themselves when some of us from school went to visit our ailing Marathi teacher some time ago. Our math teacher was there as well. They hugged all of us, tears running down our faces, and assured us how proud they were of us.
The Boxer continues to play in my head.
In the clearing stands a boxer,
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of every glove that laid him down
And cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
I am leaving, I am leaving
But the fighter still remains
Indian telecom companies had earned a reputation for offering the fastest services and charging the lowest fees anywhere in the world. But the world is always changing. And the telco business which used to have many players once upon a time is beginning to charge more. The many players that were there have been whittled down to just two significant ones—effectively, a duopoly. Just how this pivot happened and what it means for the Indian landscape is something I talked about in Hindustan Times over the weekend.
Writing is an act of courage. It’s almost an act of physical courage
I’m asked a question often: Why do I write? This is something thrown at me by family and friends. It is difficult to explain “The Writers High”, if I may call it that. As I start to write my screen stares back at me. There’s a blank cursor as well. It will start to fill with ideas if I begin to write something coherent. And then ideas will take shape. But when writing, it is inevitable I see consistencies and inconsistences. The battle in my head will be a silent one. But it will be intense, until all of this is hammered into a cohesive shape—and something I feel convinced about. And one that I believe my editors will be convinced about as well. And eventually, all of this will be transmitted to a larger audience, whose minds I hope to sway and shape. When looked at from that perspective, this piece of writing, to me, is an act of rebellion against silence.
In fact, if I’ll go so far to say, that every creative act, such as painting an image, clicking a good picture, crafting an piece of music, dancing to the sounds of it in a manner that is unique, are all acts of defiance and acts of bravery.
If all of this sounds laughable, let me put it this way: we live in an age called the “consumption economy”. I guess it isn’t difficult to figure why. Every desire is a click away. And there is competition to fulfil our desires faster. I remember this conversation a while ago with TN Hari, co-founder of the Artha School of Entrepreneurship. In an earlier avatar, he co-founded Big Basket. That was when he raised an interesting question: How did people live before 10-minute delivery become a business model in urban India? He was right then. We’ve become passive consumers. What most of us have forgotten on our way here is that a fundamental human joy: the joy of creation, has been eroding, quietly. Our lives are now filled with the products of what other people want it to filled by. This is not to say modern life has its conveniences, there is an opportunity as well—to transition from being shift from silent consumers to becoming the curators of our destinies.
This is why I started with the simple act of beginning to write. When thought about, it is one of the most powerful medium of creation. But how many people can actually engage with it? It’s a decision to crystallize thought into language, to share one’s inner world with the outer.
This thought isn’t an original one. I first came across this while looking up advice to writers when on a particularly lean patch. That’s when I stumbled across this outstanding passage by Ta-Nehisi Caoates, an African American writer. “I strongly believe that writing is an act of courage. It’s almost an act of physical courage. You get up and you have this great idea. Maybe you were hanging out with your friends—you guys were having beers and you were talking about something. You had this idea and they said, ‘Wow, that’s brilliant! Someone should go write it.’”
But, his point was, how many people actually do it? That’s when it occurred, I am among those who go it. When thought about, this can be extrapolated to so many other domains. We don’t give it much thought. But the seemingly humble act of preparing a meal is pure alchemy. The transformation of raw ingredients into something far greater than the sum of its parts. It's a ritual that nourishes more than the body; it feeds the soul, and offers a canvas for creativity and a bridge to connect with others. I guess this is everyone means when they say, “I miss my home!”
I’ve seen this in technology. Take coding. People think of it as something nerds do. However, my interactions with people who write good code have it they are polymaths. And code offers them the tools to build new worlds, solve complex problems, and bring ideas to life. In coding, they find a language and the means to create and innovate in a world that is otherwise boring.
What I do know basis experience is that the path from consumption to creation is fraught with resistance. All narrative glorifies the end product. But it hides the messy, nonlinear process of creation. The fear of not being good enough, of failure, looms large. But it is in the act of creation itself that we find growth, not merely in the accolades that may follow. Every attempt, every failure, is a step on the journey of self-discovery and mastery. To get on this path requires a conscious choice. It necessitates a reevaluation of how we spend our time, energy, and attention. It asks us to prioritize not what is easy or immediately gratifying but what is meaningful and fulfilling.
And now that I reach the limits of my word count, I see I have created something. Hopefully, it will resonate with my editors. And you. Despite feeling tired, I have rebelled against it. And created something. I found the physical courage to do it. What I now feel is a high that I may otherwise not have.
This is a slightly modified and longer version of what was originally published in Hindustan Times. All copyrights vest with Hindustan Times
Sometimes, I get the feeling that Gen Z that lives in urban India are more privileged than you are. I guess that’s why daughter thinks I’m a fuddy duddy old man. Then challengers emerge. That’s what this column in Hindustan Times on Sunday is all about. That said, I still believe they could do with more role models. Let me know what you think.
