Recently, I’ve been toying with the analyses over at Uclassify.com – an online analysis system that uses machine learning to infer things about the text that it’s fed. For example, was Adam Smith’s tone a happy or upset one when he wrote his Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations?
It turns out he was happy. Almost deliriously so. He had a serious pin fetish, of course, as we all know: perhaps one as great as young Stanley in Terry Pratchett’s Going Postal. Adam Smith’s pin fetish is so famous that it was celebrated on the old twenty pound note – though he was recently replaced with J.M.W. Turner. I have yet to discover an artificial intelligence project that can tell me anything about the mood of a watercolourist.
Incidentally, was Sylvia Plath happy? According to the same analysis tool, ‘Mood’ she was. This when I fed the algorithm the text of her poem, Mirror. An 80/20 split between happy and upset… which is horrendously wrong but quite amusing. Perhaps the computer just likes poems.
But… and here’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question for those of you who read Sugar and Spiiice… was Adam Smith a bloke?
Gender Analyzer (Version 5) says he was. Well done, Gender Analyzer… for discovering something that we already knew. Computers are still catching up, thank goodness. Incidentally, Sylvia Plath was 95% female, by the same yardstick.
The thing is, though, Big Data works. If you give a machine enough training data, it’ll discover patterns that are more commonly used by one type of person than another. It will learn to distinguish – and it’s tireless. These tools are out there, trawling through everything we write.
The reason I mention this is because Bryony Marsh is reported to be happy (though not quite as happy as Slyvia Plath, which is a worry, given her suicide…) and 81% female. When I challenge Gender Analyzer (Version 5) to chew on some of my other writing such as the text of my non-TG fiction, I’m identified as a male.
Is gender, then, just a construct? Something that we can wrap about ourselves, once freed from the cues of voice and appearance? As we isolate and mask ourselves, telecommuting and distancing as we continue to fight COVID-19… who cares what you wear? Who knows or cares, ultimately, who and what you are?
Strange times.
Sugar and Spiiice 