Words of the Day 2026-05-12

UPDATE Finished! Thanks for your patience.

Whoopsie, lost control of my schedule. Here’s enough to get started. Please check back in at 11:00am, when I will have filled in all the blanks. —lambert

On this day (1789): “William Wilberforce makes his first major speech on abolition in the UK House of Commons, reasoning the slave trade morally reprehensible and an issue of natural justice.” • 1789 was quite a year!

Deepfake, from Merriam-Webster: “an image or recording that has been convincingly altered and manipulated to misrepresent someone as doing or saying something that was not actually done or said. ‘Two artists and an advertising company created a deepfake of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg saying things he never said, and uploaded it to Instagram.’ —Samantha Cole”

“Taylor Swift files to trademark her voice and likeness in era of AI deepfakes” [NBC News]. “The global pop superstar on Friday filed trademark applications for two audio clips of her voice. In one, she says: ‘Hey, it’s Taylor Swift, and you can listen to my new album, ‘The Life of a Showgirl,’ on demand on Amazon Music Unlimited.’ In the other, she says in a lower register: ‘Hey, it’s Taylor. My brand new album ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ is out on Oct. 3 and you can click to presave it so you can listen to it on Spotify.’ Swift also filed for a third trademark to protect an image of her onstage, wearing one of her signature sparkly bodysuits and strumming a pink guitar. Swift is one of many celebrities confronting the issue as AI content generation tools become ever more sophisticated, even as AI companies add guardrails to prevent harmful uses of their models. AI experts have suggested that individual trademarks from celebrities like Swift could become more common as stars attempt to attain stronger legal standing to sue if their likenesses were replicated without explicit permission.” • Stars?! How about us dull normals? Maybe I should wear a sparkly bodysuit. Readers, what do you think>

“James Cameron Accused of Stealing 14-Year-Old Girl’s Face for Main Character of Billion-Dollar ‘Avatar’ Films” [Futurism]. “An Indigenous actress is suing director James Cameron and The Walt Disney Co, accusing Cameron of stealing her likeness when she was a teen to create the main character of Disney’s hit “Avatar” franchise — an extraordinarily lucrative film series about imperialistic theft of indigenous land, resources, and people. Filed Tuesday by native Peruvian actress and activist Q’orianka Kilcher, the suit alleges that Cameron ‘extracted’ Kilcher’s ‘facial features; from a photo of her playing Pocahontas in the 2006 movie ‘The New World’ and ‘directed his design team to use it as the foundation for the character of Neytiri,’ one of the ‘Avatar’ franchise’s main characters. When ‘The New World’ was filmed, Kilcher, now 36, was just 14. ‘This case exposes how one of Hollywood’s most powerful filmmakers exploited a young Indigenous girl’s biometric identity and cultural heritage to create a record-breaking film franchise — without credit or compensation to her — through a series of deliberate, non-expressive commercial acts.’” • Whoa, too meta! “[A] series of deliberate, non-expressive commercial acts sounds important. I wonder what it means?

“Doctors’ growing AI deepfakes problem” [Axios]. “AI is helping make doctors the unwitting stars of deepfake videos that hawk questionable products or spread misinformation, prompting calls from clinicians for more privacy and transparency laws….. Physicians say they’re increasingly discovering instances in which their identities are used to promote wellness and longevity supplements and unapproved medical devices…. The deepfakes aren’t limited to people. Health systems are uncovering faked diagnostic images and other clinical data that can wreak havoc internally…. The American Medical Association called on federal and state lawmakers last week to close legal gaps and modernize identity protections to address what its CEO John Whyte called a public health and safety crisis. The physicians group also wants a crackdown against deepfake creators and rules to force tech platforms to more quickly remove impersonations.” • It’s possible to sort out the worst of ‘em because they have funny names and no bios (though all social platforms are extremely sketchy about biographical information; stuff like institutional affilation, that you would expect in a normal citation. Also, there seem to be some words that appear disproportionately, floaters amidst the slop: “quietly” is one such.

“Bizarre moment at Berkshire’s annual meeting spotlights cyber risk” [TKer by Sam Ro]. “Berkshire Hathaway’s annual shareholder meeting was destined to be interesting as the first without its now-retired CEO, Warren Buffett, MC’ing the event. But Buffett, who remains chairman of Berkshire’s board, made a few cameos. One of them was pretty eerie. Kicking off the Q&A on Saturday morning, the spotlight went to a video where ‘Warren from Omaha’ asked the first question” ‘Hi. My name is Warren from Omaha. I’ve recently undergone, let’s call it, a significant change in role….’ The fun moment quickly turned serious when CEO Greg Abel informed the audience that it wasn’t Warren Buffett. ‘As you’ve all picked up [oh?], that was a deepfake,’ Abel said. ‘But here’s the interesting thing. That was done with zero input from Warren. Voice, photo… we were able to obtain that with information that’s out there, and replicate those actions and that voice.” • I don’t know if “interesting” is the word I would use. Is there any use case for this technology that doesn’t involve theft or fraud?

Dad Joke of the Day: What do you get when you put your hand in a blender? A handshake.

Consciousness, from the OED app: /ˈkɒnʃəsnəs / ▸ noun 1 [mass noun] the state of being aware of and responsive to one’s surroundings: she failed to regain consciousness and died two days later. 2 a person’s awareness or perception of something: her acute consciousness of Luke’s presence. ▪ the mind’s awareness of itself and the world: consciousness emerges from the operations of the brain.” • Consciousness-raising dates from 1968. Naturally. Anyone interested in this topic should consider reading Frank Herbert’s goofy and spooky Destination Void, where a consciousness that turns out to be God-like is constructed out of mechanical parts. The project team repeatedly tries to define “consciousness”:

“The Claude Delusion” [Mason Westfall, Defector]. “If you asked philosophers what the most mysterious thing about the mind is, most of them would say: consciousness. It’s just a really weird thing. An exhaustive physical description of a brain state doesn’t obviously tell us anything about why that state would be associated with the experience of tasting strawberry rather than the experience of sneezing. What is it about that physical state that makes it feel some particular way, that the physical states of being a sodium ion or a national economy presumably lack? Why should anything feel any way at all? These are heady, profound questions about what we are and the universe in which we live. It’s hard to even imagine what satisfying answers to these questions could look like, which is why they have produced centuries of chin stroking. Until recently, we had it on relatively good authority that only conscious things could produce spontaneous, grammatical prose. The emergence of large language models (LLMs) calls that correlation into question. However impressive or unimpressive one finds the outputs, they evidently can produce grammatical text in natural language, and yet they seem remarkably unlike the conscious creatures we are familiar with. Even if you think it’s obvious whether or not LLMs are conscious, a full explanation of why or why not is hard. It’s hard because consciousness is already mysterious in the human case. We don’t know what about a physical brain makes it conscious, or what consciousness does (or, even, if it does anything at all). So what are we supposed to look for to decide whether an alien system is conscious.” • And after that buildup, the piece seques into a richly earned beating of Richard Dawkins.

“Vegetative Patients May Be More Aware Than We Knew” [Katie Engelhart, New York Times]. “Once Aaron’s eyes were open, Tabitha would not leave his side… Tabitha decided that she would spend this time reading as much about the vegetative state as she could. Almost right away, she came across news coverage of a study that had been published in The New England Journal of Medicine in August 2024… The paper described the results of a 17-year international, multisite study that examined 241 unresponsive patients with “disorders of consciousness,” each in a coma, vegetative state or minimally conscious state…. The patients in the paper had all received advanced neural imaging, either a functional M.R.I. (fMRI) or an EEG, in which electrodes were placed on a patient’s scalp to detect tiny electrical signals beneath it, or sometimes both. Each person was then asked to do several cognitive tasks: to ‘imagine playing tennis,’ to ‘imagine opening and closing your hand,’ to ‘open and close your hand.’ Of the 241 patients, 60 appeared to do what they were told. When they were asked to imagine playing tennis, the brain area that controls motor planning lit up in the very same way that a healthy person’s brain would. When they were asked to imagine opening and closing their hands, it did the same. The patients were all severely brain-damaged — they had brains that, in some cases, looked too physically degraded to possibly sustain a conscious thought — but nevertheless, here they were: imagining themselves swinging a tennis racket.” And: “Reading the paper, Tabitha learned that research into covert consciousness was not new — that the first time a patient diagnosed as being in a vegetative state was found to have hidden consciousness was back in 2006. But now a large-scale study showed how prevalent the condition really was: one in four. By some estimates, around 50,000 Americans are in a chronic vegetative state, with another 200,000 to 400,000 in a minimally conscious state. If the paper’s findings were extrapolated, this meant that tens of thousands of them could, at that very moment, be covertly conscious but assumed to be unthinking.” • One in four is a lot for the medical profession to miss. Are they, too, “unthinking”?

“20 years after we knew: The end of ‘persistent vegetative state’?” [Religion News Service]. “The very concept of “persistent vegetative state” is, first of all, deeply offensive. No living, breathing human being is a vegetable, regardless of how disabled they are. Second, the concept was always a profoundly sloppy category into which many folks with different kinds of brain injuries and diseases were shoved. If it wasn’t brain death, and it wasn’t a coma, well, maybe it was a vegetative state? Despite this medical and scientific shoddiness, thousands of doctors have told family members that their loved one is in a vegetative state and that, essentially, he or she was no longer there.” More: J”oe Fins, one of the most influential secular bioethicists in the world, wrote a seminal book on the topic of vegetative state back in 2015. Titling it “Rights Come to Mind,” Fins masterfully uncovered the big lie about so-called vegetative state. He not only highlighted that about 25% of those deemed to be a vegetable are able to demonstrate consciousness (something we knew well before 2015), but also — with the right therapies — Fins demonstrated that people who cannot demonstrate consciousness in this state often do get better and become conscious again. As you read the book, you can almost feel Fins being stunned by all of this — especially in his being moved to aggressively call for a new civil rights movement for those with these types of brain injuries.” And: “The New York Times Magazine piece also confirms what Fins found: Despite 20 years of data on this question that challenges the practices, the practices have largely not changed. Once ‘vegetative’ is written on someone’s chart, there is largely no coming back. No rehab, no reassessment, insurance authorization stops. Families who claim their loved ones are conscious are ignored or dismissed as irrational. Nurses sigh, expressing exasperation that such patients are still on their floor. Physicians turn away from video taken by a hopeful family.”

Fortune: Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial “we”. –Mark Twain

Cultural Marxism, from the OED: “1. Used disparagingly, chiefly among right-wing commentators: a political agenda advocating radical social reform, said to be promoted within western cultural institutions by liberal or left-wing ideologues intent on eroding traditional social values and imposing a dogmatic form of progressivism on society. Later also more generally: a perceived left-wing bias in social or cultural institutions, characterized as doctrinaire and pernicious. This sense has its origins in the antisemitic belief that Jewish intellectuals were behind an attempt to subvert western culture. In quot. 1938 (in the context of fascist ideology), this belief derives from the fact that Karl Marx’s family were originally Jewish; in later use it is associated with the fact that the Frankfurt School (see note at sense 2) predominantly comprised Jewish philosophers, many of whom emigrated to the United States. 2. The theory that the oppression of the working class is effected through social and cultural means. The theory of cultural Marxism was originally developed by the Frankfurt School of social theorists as an elaboration and critique of the economic theories posited by classical Marxism.” • Another of expressing sense 2 is that it’s an oxymoron.

“Cultural Marxism” [Lars P. Syll]. “As with anything so overused, we forget what made the idea potent in the first place. This, naturally, is the point, and it ultimately works in the Right’s favor. Of course they see Marxists around every corner, we tell ourselves. It’s ridiculous. And it is…. Against all this, A. J. A. Woods’s The Cultural Marxism Conspiracy: Why the Right Blames the Frankfurt School for the Decline of the West (2026) offers a welcome corrective. The short book—Woods’s first—traces the genealogy and evolution of this right-wing bugbear. Of course, Woods points out, Cultural Marxism isn’t real, at least in the way the Right thinks of it. The idea that Marxists have taken over the educational and cultural apparatus of the United States, of the entire world, is ludicrous on its face. The real question, as Woods frames it, is what kind of society, what course of history, makes it possible for such a flagrantly silly idea to take root and spread so thoroughly?” • Good question!

“The Serpent in the Garden” [Commonweal]. ‘Woods shows how conservatives and far-right influencers like Paul Weyrich criticized the older American right for being “more interested in being right than winning power.” At a 2020 conference, William S. Lind, who effectively coined and popularized the term “cultural Marxism” in an American context, described its value to the right in affective rather than analytical terms. He argued that “cultural Marxism” works as a “delegitimizing tool in the United States, because many Americans regard anything even remotely Marxist as illegitimate.” As Woods writes, there was therefore no need to “quibble over definitions of Marxism or prove that political correctness is genuinely Marxist, because, as Lind claims, the American public does not generally care about these academic debates. Do not waste your time on research, Lind counsels.” The term “cultural Marxism” is best understood as a floating signifier under which the right lumps a vast array of disparate phenomena to undermine their credibility. Woods puts it well early in the book: “The elements of cultural Marxism/s have been deconstructed and reconfigured time and time again as reactionary political forces across the world search for new ways to justify their opposition to equality, democracy, and justice.’” • First it was Gingrich making “liberal” a cuss word. And now it’s Lind — and his influencer heirs — doing the same with “cultural Marxism.” Seems like the stakes are higher?