How to Thwart AI

Slowing down the machine

My Cursive Handwriting

It was just something in my genes like my brown eyes, certainly not a gift such as a brilliant mind. My dad, you see, had both: a brilliant mind and the beautiful cursive.

I would watch his fingers dash off his signature with the big bold letters DEF and I’d stand in awe of his hand. His brilliant mind, however, was often up for debate by my mother. No such hesitation for the U.S. Navy—they sent him to Harvard to be a codebreaker. I inherited the cursive.

It never occurred to me it was a gift until I was writing on a legal pad in one of my on-line writing groups. When someone asked me to post my writing I said, “I write by hand not on the computer so I can’t share.”

Well said another writer, “make a screen shot and then share it on-line.” That was when I was exposed as a beautiful cursive writer.

When I researched the theory that cursive might be a problem for AI, I found out machine learning has trouble understanding how to read the old-fashioned writing. Is it possible my age and my gift could combine to thwart the dreaded artificial intelligence so feared by everyone?

One of the challenges for AI to read cursive writing is what’s known as the ‘ligatures.’ This is where letters like ‘sh,’ ‘th,’ are connected.

Each person’s handwriting is unique and letters are connected differently by every writer. Although AI is becoming better at solving patterns, it’s one more stumbling block in the hurdles it faces.

While I don’t have my dad’s brilliant mathematical mind, my teacher, Jeannine Ouellette tells me my superpower is Micro/Flash. (Stories of less than 250 words.)

The Codebreakers (240 words)

The huge oak table is littered with Lucky Strike cigarette butts, ashtrays overflow, wire baskets are heaped with index cards, the work surface covered with pens, pencils, rulers, and erasers. This is the U.S. Navy’s underfunded, under-resourced, under-appreciated attempt at an organization that would change the direction of World War II. This classified operation was an assembly-line process where intercepted messages were catalogued, assessed, evaluated, and deciphered by intelligence analysts.

Under pressure to break the Japanese code before another attack, the codebreakers sat around the table, pens and pencils poised, the puzzle in front of them, mocking them, daring them to figure it out.

My father, wearing a white t-shirt and dog tags was a part of this unit. His mathematical skills and beautiful penmanship were the perfect combination for the painstaking job of handwriting multiple copies of the index cards with key information underlined and later used by the cryptanalysts who were working the messages.

The index cards sit on the wooden table

Four by six in inches

Space to make a list

Jot down names

Decipher the enemy’s code

Cards shuffled and divided up

One slips onto the floor

Into a crevice in the wall

A siren rings out in the dark

The drone of planes overhead

The index card quivers

The code deciphered

Hidden in a crack in the wall

Clearly on the 4 X 6

Too late the words in Japanese

December 7, 1941—Pearl Harbor

Yes, this is micro/flash fiction. A made-up story, a fantasy with index cards coming to life. Of course at the time everything was classified so who’s to say this never happened.

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Remember, there’s no expiration on dreams,

Trish

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