Arts & culture – Yet Another Unitarian Universalist

Your politics are being manipulated

You’ve probably already seen (or heard about) the New York magazine article titled “The Feed Is Fake.” Here’s reporter Lane Brown’s lede:

“Joe Lim estimates that 90 percent of what you see on the internet is advertising in disguise, and he should know. For three years, Lim ran a company called Floodify, which at its peak operated 65,000 dummy social-media accounts used to drum up attention on behalf of paying clients. On a typical day, he says, Floodify posted 50,000 videos across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and X, all of them designed to pass for the unscripted output of ordinary users….”

The article is behind a paywall. Of course, you can find plenty of commentary giving summaries of the article on various social media outlets. Also of course, 90% of those commentaries are going to be fake. In other words, the problem with social media is not AI slop. The problem is hidden marketing campaigns that manipulate the algorithms of social media platforms to deliver the content they want you to see. Nor do the social media platforms mind, because all these marketing campaigns cause you to spend more time on their platforms.

If you use any of the major social media platforms — TikSlop, Youcrude, Facecrook, whatever — you’re being suckered into believing “people” are talking about things…that no one is actually talking about.

And it’s not just merch and music that are being marketed to you. Your politics are also being manipulated. Take, for example, the Superbowl Bad Bunny kerfluffle:

“Some narrative campaigns don’t just push one side of an argument; they push both. That, [Keith] Presley says, is what Gudea [a behavioral-intelligence firm that uses AI to track the sources of viral phenomena] saw in the fuss leading up to Bad Bunny’s performance at the Super Bowl halftime show in February, which broke along predictable political lines: MAGA-aligned commentators complained about the NFL’s decision to hire a Spanish-speaking artist, and progressives pushed back. Gudea analyzed 3.7 million related social-media posts and found that fewer than 4 percent of the accounts in the conversation generated more than a quarter of the content. Also, the two opposing narratives were mirror images of each other in volume and posting cadence, suggesting that the same culprit may have been amplifying both sides of the fight. Gudea speculated that nation-state actors might have been responsible, but it’s not the only possibility or even the most intuitive one. By the time the controversy burned itself out, the NFL had gotten exactly what it wanted from a halftime show — a week of saturation coverage with a culturally divided country griping about its programming choices — while Bad Bunny got the kind of attention that even a global superstar can’t always buy directly….”

Remember this the next time you get all worked up about some issue from politics or the culture wars. There’s a 90% chance that whatever conflict you’re getting worked up about is a marketing campaign being forced on you. And that other 10%? Since we’re so influenced by the 90% that is marketing, most of the remaining 10% is probably real people who are merely mimicking what the marketing campaigns are doing.

Today’s so-called conservatives have little or no interest in classic conservative issues like individualism and excessive rationalism. Today’s so-called progressives no longer pay much attention to classic leftist issues like the well-being of working class and lower middle class people. Whatever you may think your politics are, your politics are not your own — you’re being manipulated.

And this helps explain why, when I look at the social and political stands taken by the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) — or by those Unitarian Universalists (UUs) who oppose the UUA such as the “Gadflies” — I mostly see the same old political standpoints being pushed on social media. Whatever you may think UU politics are, our politics are not our own — we, too, are being manipulated.

Question-and-answer sermon

I’ve done question-and-answer sermons for years. Those are the sermons where people in the congregation write their questions on cards, and the worship leaders give extemporaneous answers to the questions — without any advance preparation.

Another thing I’ve been doing for years is sending the texts of my sermons to anyone who asks for them, such as people who are shut in and can’t make it to the service, or people who simply prefer to see a printed text. With livestreamed services, there is less demand for printed texts of sermons, but there are still one or two people who like to have them.

I’ve never tried to come up with a printed text for a question-and-answer sermon before. But this year I thought I’d give it a try. I randomly picked one of the many online transcription services. I tried Any Transcribe, which uses a combination of voice recognition and generative AI to come up with a transcript; this service is currently offered for no monetary charge (though I’m sure they steal whatever data I give them).

It generated a pretty good transcript. But it then took me about 90 minutes to clean up the transcript so that it was a readable text. Cleaning up included removing repetitions, adding paragraph breaks, fixing punctuation, and clarifying those passages that did not translate well to print. If you want to see it, I’ve posted the resulting text on my sermon website. If you’re into this kind of thing, you can also compare the edited transcript with the livestream recording (that recording will be taken down soon, as per our congregation’s usual practice of only leaving recordings up for 3-4 weeks).

Some observations from this process: (1) The transcription generated by the Any Transcribe service requires substantial editing; their voice recognition is pretty good, and the AI helps clean up lacunae in the voice recognition; but it’s far from perfect. (2) AI can not yet replace a good human editor. (3) As always, extemporaneous spoken word does not always translate well to the printed word. (4) Question-and-answer sermons are a lot of fun in the moment, but transcribing one of them is probably not a good use of anyone’s time (nor is it a good use of AI, considering the carbon footprint that results).

Noted with minimal comment

Excerpt from Maxim Topaz, Nir Roguinb, Pallavi Guptab, Zhihong Zhanga, and Laura-Maria Peltonenf,“Fabricated citations: an audit across 2·5 million biomedical papers,” Correspondence, The Lancet, vol. 407, issue 10541, P1779-1781, 9 May 2026:

“Scientific literature depends on the integrity of its references. Each reference implicitly asserts that a verifiable source exists and supports the claims being made. When references point to non-existent studies, readers, reviewers, and policy makers are unable to evaluate the evidence.

“Fabricated references (references whose claimed titles correspond to no existing publication) can arise from paper mill activity, intentional misconduct, or uncritical use of artificial intelligence (AI) writing tools. Large language models (LLMs) generate plausible sounding but fictitious references, a well documented failure mode; previous studies estimate that 30–69% of LLM-generated references in biomedical contexts are fabricated. These references are often correctly formatted, attributed to real researchers, and bear plausible publication dates, making them difficult to detect by conventional peer review. To our knowledge, no systematic audit of reference integrity across the biomedical literature has been conducted until now.

“We present findings from a reference-integrity audit of 2·5 million biomedical papers spanning 3 years, showing that fabricated references are embedded in the peer-reviewed literature at scale, and that the rate of fabrication is accelerating….

“In 2023, approximately one in 2828 papers contained at least one fabricated reference. By 2025, this had risen to one in 458 and in the first 7 weeks of 2026, one in 277 papers had at least one fabricated reference. The fabrication rate increased more than 12 times, from approximately four per 10?000 papers in 2023, to 51·3 per 10?000 papers in the fourth quarter of 2025, reaching 56·9 per 10?000 papers in early 2026….”

In a note at the end, the authors state that they used generative AI: “During the preparation of this work the authors used Claude (Anthropic) in order to assist with code development, grammar, and punctuation. After using this tool, the authors reviewed and edited the content as needed and take full responsibility for the content of the publication.”

So the message here is not “don’t use generative AI.” The message here is: “If you use generative AI, you need to know its limitations, and you need to take responsibility for things like fact-checking, checking references, etc.” In short, when you use AI, you still have to take full responsibility for whatever AI produces.

Comic zine

I got inspired by a comic zine Tracey gave me, and decided to publish some of my own cartoons in a 32-page print zine. It sells for twelve bucks + shipping online — which sounds like a lot, but only 2 bucks goes to me. (In person, I can sell you a copy for about six bucks). The description of the book:

Portraits of Old White Guys in Power: Here are sixteen portraits of old White guys in power, dating from 2018 to 2026. From well-known figures like Donny Trump and Larry Summers, to lesser-known figures like Ralph Dollinger and John MacArthur, are all portrayed with sympathy and sensitivity. These portraits depict moral exemplars we can all look up to. 7 x 7 in. 32 pp.

I hope you sensed the sarcasm in that description. All the cartoons appeared on this blog, though I’ve updated and redrawn many of them.

May Day

I went to see Ken today. He and his Morris dancing friends got up at dawn, singing and dancing to make sure the sun came up. Thank you, Ken.

But that’s not the May Day I’m thinking oh right now. I’m thinking of International Workers Day, celebrated everywhere in the world except in the U.S. International Workers Day commemorates the Haymarket Massacre in Chicago, when (to oversimplify) workers were gunned down while exercising their right to assemble publicly — in a peaceful demonstration seeking the right to an eight hour day. International Workers Day is not celebrated in the U.S. to help everyone forget the Haymarket Massacre, and to forget that ordinary working class people have rights and needs.

And here we are today, with the two dominant political parties pretty much ignoring the working class. I have to give credit to the Republicans, at least they pretend to stand up for the working class. The reason given for Republican tariffs was to bring jobs back to the U.S.; the reason for immigration crackdown was to keep jobs for American working class people. Of course, it hasn’t worked out that way, for neither tariffs nor immigration crackdowns have created jobs; all that has happened is prices have gone up and ordinary working people are worse off than before. The Democrats, for their part, seem to have the forgotten working class completely. They talk about No Kings and letting trans kids play sports — both of which I happen to agree with — but I’m not hearing much talk about decent jobs, support for unions, and pathways for struggling families to make economic progress.

And neither political party seems to think of workers as somehow human. Instead, they treat workers as economic abstractions. To quote Marx: “Political Economy regards the worker like a beast of burden, he must receive enough to enable him to work. It does not consider him, during the time when he is not working, as a human being.” Except sometimes I think our two political parties don’t even care if the workers get enough to enable them to work.

I find myself in agreement with Rev. Dr. William J. Barber — the real battle is against poverty. He lays out his arguments in his book White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy. The real needs of poor people — who Barber says constitute 40% of the U.S. population — are being ignored by both parties. And those real needs boil down to the words of an old poem for workers: Bread, and roses too. Jobs, and dignity and beauty.

Working people, poor people, are getting left behind. They’re sending out a mayday, and no one’s listening.

Philip Gulley on why war doesn’t work

I first encountered Philip Gulley a couple of decades ago in the book he co-wrote with James Mulholland titled If God Is Love: Why God Will Save Every Person. In that book, Gulley and Mulholland set forth a Quakerly approach to universalism.

The current U.S. war in Iran has prompted me to seek out other pacifists. This is not an easy time to be a pacifist. While I’m hearing quite a few people who are opposed to the war, I’m not hearing people who are opposed to all war — only to this war. Or maybe they’re just opposed to the current administration.

So I was pleased to stumble across a blog post Philip Gulley wrote back in March in which he makes the case that all war is wrong:

“…We have mastered the ability to number the war dead with great precision. 175 schoolgirls killed when we bombed the school in Iran. Thirteen American soldiers dead thus far, thousands of Iranians and Israelis, the numbers growing every day. We have perfected the science of counting bodies. What we do not count, what we conveniently forget are the parents, siblings, and friends whose lives are also shattered when their loved ones die. What we do not count are the lives haunted by grief, those yet unborn who will one day bear the scars of their ancestors’ wars. And bearing those scars, are more likely to perpetuate and multiply the pain of war. We are never able to fully count the eventual casualties of war….”

And he adds a pacifist statement that is both Quakerly and Universalist:

“Friends, resist with all your heart the temptation to love only some.”

If you’re a Universalist pacifist like me, you might find Gulley’s post worth reading in its entirety.

3 AI dangers you might consider

Here are three emerging AI dangers, with brief comments on their implication for religious professionals and congregation. Since a large percentage of the population is already using generative AI for various purposes, let’s make sure we’re using those services wisely and well.

AI danger number 1

Your chatbot logs, and the queries you make to chatbots, may be accessed by lawyers during lawsuits. See, for example, how one law firm used such files in a defamation lawsuit against a Youtube influencer. In this lawsuit, the Youtube influencer is being sued for defamation by a woman, about whom he allegedly made intentionally defamatory comments. The woman’s lawyers claim to show that the influencer’s ChatGPT logs reveal his malicious intent.

As usual with anything to do with Big Data (including the web, the broader internet, text messaging, etc.) — you have to assume that anything you put into electronic format can and will be made public in ways that you might not like.

Nothing new here, but it’s a good reminder that congregations and religious professionals should refrain from placing any confidential information into chatbots. in addition, congregations and religious professionals can help educate people about this very real danger — including educating teens (e.g., in OWL programs), people going through divorces, etc.

AI danger number 2

The title of a peer-reviewed study says exactly what AI danger number 2 is: “Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence.” To quote the editor’s summary in full:

“The sycophantic (flattering, people-pleasing, affirming) behavior of artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots, which has been designed to increase user engagement, poses risks as people increasingly seek advice about interpersonal dilemmas. There is usually more than one side to a story during interpersonal conflicts. If AI is designed to tell users what they want to hear instead of challenging their perspectives, then are such systems likely to motivate people to accept responsibility for their own contribution to conflicts and repair relationships? Cheng et al. measured the prevalence of social sycophancy across 11 leading large language models (see the Perspective by Perry). The model’s responses were nearly 50% more sycophantic than humans’, even when users engaged in unethical, illegal, or harmful behaviors. Users preferred and trusted sycophantic AI responses, incentivizing AI developers to preserve sycophancy despite the risks.”

An obvious implication is that there are specific and measurable dangers if you use AI as an inexpensive therapist. Unfortunately, lots of people have good reasons for turning to chatbots for mental health support — mental health professionals are expensive and may not be covered by insurance; in many places there is a shortage of mental health professionals; for many people there remains a significant social stigma for referring to mental health professionals; etc.

Congregations and religious professionals should be aware that some people are relying on chatbots for mental health support. While we are not qualified to provide mental health support, this might be an area where we could help create low- or no-cost mental health services and/or steer vulnerable people to existing low or no-cost services.

AI danger number 3

The U.S. Copyright Office has denied copyright protection to certain AI-generated works: “In general, the office will not find human authorship where an AI program generates works in response to user prompts….” See the U.S. Congress webpage on “Generative Artificial Intelligence and Copyright Law.” There remain questions about how much human influence is required before a work may be protected by copyright.

I’d expect this to be mostly a concern for religious professionals. If we use generative AI to come up with sermons, music, curriculum materials, etc., we should assume that material is not protected by copyright and can be used freely by anyone. In addition, it’s wise to be aware that generally speaking your prompts (and maybe even output generated by your prompts) can be used by AI companies for many purposes, so e.g. assume that you are giving away the rights to any text you enter into a chatbot.

There are legitimate uses for generative AI (think: people with dyslexia who use it to clean up writing). However, it appears that many current generative AI services are not well designed, nor do they make clear the potential dangers in using their services. I’m not saying “don’t use generative AI ever,” but I’m also not saying “AI is the solution to all our problems and we should use it for everything.” Using generative AI is analogous to using a chain saw — great tool for specific purposes, used wrongly it can cut your leg off. So read the (non-existent) warning label and wear safety gear.

Perry Mason

Over the years, I’ve written blog posts on several obscure topics. Some of those obscure topics — making your own burial shroud, washtub bass, composer A. B. Windom, etc. — result in some interesting correspondence.

Most recently, Don O. was looking through my collection of information about the Perry Mason books (not the TV show, mind you, but the books). I have a complete listing of the Perry Mason books, and have gradually been adding notes to each book about recurring characters, plot devices, and legal matters. Turns out Don is a professor of physics, and he sent me email pointing out how Erle Stanley Gardner, the author of the Perry Mason series, used some pretty good science in one of his novels. Thank you, Professor Don!

While I was updating that Perry Mason information with Professor Don’s contribution, I wound up rebuilding that corner of my blog, and I was able to add notes for several more of the books. If you’re a Perry Mason fan, check it out.

Wayside Pulpit

Tracey got a comic zine for me at a recent comic convention. Drawn and written by Sanika Phwade — who bills herself as “an illustrator, cartoonist, and reportage artist” — it tells about a minister who has fun with the signboard outside her church. The zine opens with the words: “Pastor Jamie Washam changes the sign outside the First Baptist Church in America every week.”

The cover of Sanika Phwade’s comic zine about Rev. Jamie Washam’s signboard

According to Phwade, by putting short aphorisms on the signboard, Rev. Washam is continuing the tradition of her predecessor: “He would call it The Wayside Pulpit — that preaches a sermon to whomever is passing by. I love that! But I also like having fun with these.”

As the keeper of the Wayside Pulpit outside our meetinghouse, I was jealous when I learned that people actually talk to Washam about the things she puts in her Wayside Pulpit. But then, her Wayside Pulpit is edgier than ours is. I put up sayings like “The moral arc of the universe is long but it bends towards justice.” No one comments on things like that. When Washam put up the phrase, “God Is Non-Binary,” sixteen people made comments:

“I have learned that it is the same signs that evoke both positive and negative reactions in people. Fifteen have said positive things about ‘God Is Non-Binary,’ and one person said, Hey what are you thinking? And I said well, let’s sit down and read genesis together. Because the text does support that. They thought I was just popping off politically, and yes I totally picked that up from Pride Fest. But it is completely substantiated by the text.”

Genesis 1:27 does in fact say, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” That is, both male and female are created in God’s image, which implies that God is (ahem) non-binary. Oh ye of little faith who try to place limits on God, limiting him to one gender (regardless of the pronouns we humans use to describe him).

World Ukulele Day

Actually, February 2 is World Ukulele Day. But Mary Beth, our music director, decided we would celebrate it today, by accompanying the first hymn in our Sunday service. We had maybe two minutes of rehearsal, which is why the photo below shows us all looking at the song sheets on the music stands. But we played it through, we didn’t totally suck, and we had fun.

Screen grab from the livestream. L-R: Mary Beth, Steve, Micah, me.

Mike Lynch, who organized the first World Ukulele Day, said the goal was simple: “Take your uke out of its case and play it.” Beyond that, he said you could use your ukulele to bring some fun and joy into the world. I don’t know how much joy we brought into our Sunday service, but we certainly brought some fun. Besides, Mike Lynch often played uke at his church, so what we did was very much in the original spirit of the day.

The real World Ukulele Day is tomorrow. Plan now to take your uke out of the case and play it….