We’re back from Ecuador! Thanks for making do with my old Table Talk columns. Actually, readership was up for those two weeks, so that’s gratifying. (In my opinion, some of my best writing took place in the years B.C.; that is, Before Computers. I have all kinds of stuff that I probably should preserve by putting it up online, though that would mean typing it by hand from yellowed pages in long-extinct publications. Maybe I’ll do that for the next time I need to step away from this blog for awhile.)
Anyway, our accreditation-related visit to a Lutheran school in Cuenca, Ecuador, far up in the Andes, was wonderful, fascinating, and inspiring. I’ll be telling you all about it. In the meantime, we’ll return to our regularly scheduled programming with our Monday Miscellany!
This week:
Thoughts on Charlie Kirk. U.S. test scores hit new low. And AI-written books on Kirk’s murder go on sale hours after it happened.
Thoughts on Charlie Kirk
In church in Ecuador, my junior-high Spanish couldn’t keep up with the sermon. But then the pastor mentioned “Charlie Kirk.” I couldn’t tell what the Ecuadorian pastor said about him, but he said the name in a sad, concerned way.
I was amazed that word of this young man’s assassination had reached all the way from far-off North America to the equatorial Andes and that it resonated with meaning even here. Why has this crime had such an impact?
I think many people see it as a major escalation of our political conflicts. It’s bad enough to assassinate or try to assassinate politicians or other governmental leaders. Now a private citizen is murdered because of his opinions. That puts all Americans in jeopardy. It also jeopardizes American liberties–freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of assembly–and, in doing so, strikes at the ideals that define America.
Many people see Kirk as a martyr. After all, he was evidently killed because of his moral beliefs as defined by his Christian convictions–his opposition to transgenderism in particular, but he also didn’t approve of homosexuality, abortion, and other shibboleths of the cultural left. Do other Christians who believe the same way have to worry that some Americans think such opinions deserve the death penalty?
Some on the left made the ludicrous claim that the killer, Tyler Robinson, is an alt.right, MAGA-supporting Groyper, which is what late-night host Jimmy Kimmel said that got him temporarily suspended. In reality, Robinson, thinking of his transgender love interest, said that he killed Kirk because he “spread too much hate.” As if stating an opinion is more hateful than killing a man in cold blood.
Maybe this assassination will be, as in the title of his organization, a turning point. The public can see what the current madness leads to and back away from it. The words from Kirk’s wife Erika moved the angry crowd at the memorial service to applause and are resonating across the political spectrum. She says of her husband’s 22-year-old, internet obsessed, furry, gamer killer:
“My husband, Charlie. He wanted to save young men, just like the one who took his life. On the cross, Our Savior said, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.’ That young man… I forgive him,” Kirk said. “I forgive him because it was what Christ did, and it’s what Charlie would do.”
U.S. Schools’ Test Scores Hit Record Low
The test scores for American 12th-graders fell to the lowest level ever recorded!
That was the finding of the National Assessment of Educational Progress, as reported by the U.S. Department of Education.
Only 35% of high school seniors are proficient in reading. Only 22% are proficient in math.
An article on the subject quotes an expert:
“Students are taking their next steps in life with fewer skills and less knowledge in core academics than their predecessors a decade ago,” said Lesley Muldoon, executive director of the board that oversees the tests. “This is happening at a time when rapid advancements in technology and society demand more of future workers and citizens, not less.”
Why has this happened? The article blames the usual suspects: the COVID shutdown, social media, cellphones.
AI-Written Books on Kirk’s Murder Go On Sale Hours after It Happened
Just hours after Charlie Kirk was killed, books about the assassination went on sale on Amazon.
Titles like The Charlie Kirk Shooting: A Nation on Edge by Casey D. Parisi and THE LEGACY OF CHARLIE KIRK: A Biography of His Rise, His Movement, and His Tragic Death by Andrew West could be bought on Kindle for $7.99.
One book even promised to discuss the shooter, even though no one had been arrested at that point.
These titles were, of course, generated by AI.
Amazon has a policy requiring that any book written by AI has to say so. These titles were soon taken down.
But the problem of AI-produced books goes beyond these instant news titles. As Ryan Zickgraf reports at Unherd,
Over the last year or two, Amazon’s Kindle store has been inundated with AI-written novels — so many that the Authors Guild and the Romance Writers of America have raised alarms about “spam farmers”. The YA-friendly “romantasy” genre, one of publishing’s few growth sectors, has been targeted with slapdash ChatGPT concoctions that mimic bestselling series.
In January, a prolific romance author writing under the pseudonym K.C. Crowne published a Russian mafia-romance novel called Dark Obsession. Soon, screenshots began circulating showing what appeared to be a raw AI prompt embedded in the middle of the book: “Certainly! Here’s an enhanced version of your passage, making Elena more relatable and injecting additional humor while providing a brief, sexy description of Grigori.” A ChatGPT help ticket found in the text of a bodice-ripper was a smoking gun that reveals just how seamlessly AI junk is creeping into the mainstream.
Music has fared no better. On Spotify, a fake AI band named Velvet Sundown racked up over a million plays before it was discovered that their music, promo photos, and backstory were all computer-generated.
Film is next. OpenAI this week unveiled its first animated feature, Critterz, to be released in 2026, an experiment in letting a text-to-video model churn out entire cinematic sequences for a massive discount.
We have been surrendering our ability to think, write, and learn to AI. Now we are surrendering our creativity to AI.
Human beings are reduced to being consumers of what AI produces, spending our money on what can only be conventional reiterations of highly conventional types of literature, music, and art.
At least there is a word for this now: AI slop.
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