Skygack

I have to tell you, strange but realistic, I am less likely to post things here about current work I'm doing because I don't want to be gazumped or have my thoughts stolen by AI. I have a strong sense that it would regard things like this blog as easy pickings. I mean, obviously it takes 0.1 seconds to read everything and sift through it and perhaps even reject a lot, but I am reasonably good at sourcing things (except when I forget) and I probably do quite a bit of decent research for nothing.

So whereas a few years ago I would have been very generous in discussing my current research into Mr. Skygack, and whereas admittedly I have fine tuned the Mr Skygack wikipedia page - probably more of a boon to AI than this blog - I am still reluctant to put the interesting sticky bits up here for a bot to snatch. 

But I had nowhere else to go with this snippet so I just wanted to show how actually fucking useless AI can be (though I don't know how old this particular kerfuffle is or whether it's even real, I suppose). So for context: I'm interested in a short-lived comic strip phenomenon called 'Mr. Skygack, from Mars', which ran in US newspapers between 1907-11 in its initial incarnation. The feature was syndicated, ineptly by our standards, and different papers did different things to try and promote it / be associated with it. One paper, for instance, had a competition for a dinner set which required entrants finishing a sentence about Mr. Skygack. He also very quickly got in the general conversation, so journalists and columnists would throw him into their musings - along the lines of, I wonder what Mr. Skygack would make of... etc. One paper had the genius idea of throwing in various lines along the general lines of, 'Mr. Skygack coming soon' and 'What would you say to Mr. Skygack?' and, like the above, 'Mr. Skygack here to-day'. 

So why a computer wants to go through Newspapers.com and clip out particular death notices, I don't know, but you can see what the confusion was here, because I guess a computer can't see a context of the top line being just one more iteration of spruiking Mr. Skygack, and instead assumes that it must be the headline for the article following. Icing on the cake is that it reads the 'a' in 'Raber' as an 's', so Mrs. John Raber becomes, in death, Skygack Rsber. The other details the computer has recorded, such as the children, are just a mangling of misread names; the name of her spouse - I mean obviously the spouse should be Mr. John Raber - I can't work out where that crazy jumble came from. Doesn't matter. Mildly amusing though I suppose if you are vested in people not being replaced by machines, or whatever we're calling this now.