Glitch Apple is a collaboration between myself and an AI called “Dragon.” Dragon is a speech-to-text app a company called “Nuance” developed for another called “Apple.” In Latin an apple may be called malus, as in Malus domestica, and that malus also means “bad” was not lost on Jerome of Stridon, translator of the Latin Vulgate, who, deliberatively lost in the wildness of false cognation, chose that word over all others for the generic fruit (Hebrew פְּרִי peri, Greek καρπός karpos) he found in Genesis 3:2 in a garden. In the Garden a leggy snake seduces Eve with a piece of peri from the so-called Tree of Knowledge, an apple in our modern eye, thanks to Jerome, as said, also Milton. She eats of the fruit, her eyes are opened, and she learns to tell good from evil – the first nuance. Nuance the company began as a gleam in the optical input unit of futurist Raymond Kurzweil. That gleam passed through the digestive tracts of corporate bodies called “Xerox” and “Visioneer” to emerge in 1992 as “ScanSoft.” ScanSoft was swallowed by the ostensibly smaller “Microsoft” in 2022. In 2020 Dragon and I made a poem we could not now, for in three short years, his year-round mind have grown too nuanced. That should read ear and mind. And that should be read as metaphor. I don’t believe in AI any more than I believe in God.
It was High Covid Days. Everything bad seemed possible. I sat down at my computer, opened MSWord, tapped CONTROL twice to turn on Enhanced Dictation, and began reading Genesis 3, King James Version, aloud. Dragon transcribed what he thought he heard me say. Some of his hot takes disclose a cold accountant heart: for subtil, “subtotal.” Others show him a stickler for high school classroom composition rules: for And he said, “Andy said.” Many betray a distaste for archaism: for Yeah, hath God said, “Yeah, Scott said.” And all emerge from the black box of the covenant between ourselves and our Dagons. For lest ye die, “nasty diet.” For and evil, “hey, beautiful.” For it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel, “if sugar is the head on Bruce’s hill.”
Glitch Apple translates a singular error made by Eve and Adam in cosmic innocence as a multiform linguistic error made in willful ignorance. With one slip they fell the cosmos zenith to nadir. With one slip they fell the cosmos Xena today dear. My own error is legion but won’t extend past the edge of a photostatic page. This piece gets a Flesh Kincaid Reading Ease score of 73.0, making it suitable for students in grade 7. Who knew?
Christopher Patton recently moved to Toronto to begin new life as a literary curator. His recent exhibitions include Typographia, drawn from the Rare Book Collection of the Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies at the University of Toronto, and Box 15, a deep dive into an archival box of handwritten documents in the Palaeography Collection at Massey College. He has published five books, most recently Dumuzi (Gaspereau Press 2020), which you can read about here.
