Notes from a Cave on Chat GPT

You might not be surprised that longtime musician Nick Cave, an Australian pioneer of what is thought of today as Goth rock, would pretty much reject the idea that the Chat GPT AI has any role in creating music.

You might be surprised that a large part of Cave's argument rests on the idea that God's resting on the seventh day of creation implies "creation required a certain effort on God’s part, that some form of artistic struggle had taken place." But Cave, one of secular music's few confessed Christians, has been long fascinated with the Old Testament and the struggles found therein.

His argument is simple as he answers a question from a fan who talks about hearing a songwriter praise how fast Chat GPT enables him to create lyrics. If there is no artistic struggle that he suggests is a part of all of creation, then what good is what is produced? You don't have to believe in a six-day creation to follow this idea, either. A good, old-fashioned Big Bang and evolutionary development vision of Earth will work just fine, as long as you entertain the idea that God's hand was at work. Spoiler: I sort of do.

Back in May I made fun of the way the Writers Guild of America strike might produce no noticeable dropoff in the quality of movie and TV writing, and in fact we might be better off if some of the Guild's members reduced their output.

But their reasoning is sound: Among other things, writers don't want studios to replace them with AIs  Even though so very much of modern TV and movies are written by hacks or by people performing an amazing imitation of them, the shows are still being written by people. There is a minute but real probability that whichever wordsmith threw the paint-by-numbers chum onto the screen in one of  Dick Wolf's retreads could get better.

Could Chat GPI? Not in any real way that counts. If someone is more specific in their requests -- a task which suggests a knowledge of language that ought to be put to use on a keyboard instead of a query box -- and if we feed the maw of the disposal more real words and real work, then it might produce something "better" than it does now. But it would be the same as the difference between finding a completely smushed tomato and a miraculously whole one that survived the reducing knives of the InsinkErator. It's still stuff that came out of the drain.

Chat GPI is less messy on your carpet. But like Nick Cave, I believe it robs humans of the work of creating. And, for myself, it involves giving up a piece of the image of God written into all of us, and exchanging it for speed. It won't be a good bargain.

Unfrantic

I like Wordle. I was thinking about why the other day when I solved the daily puzzle (three guesses! Woot!).

Although Josh Wardle and partner Palak Shah developed a visually appealing and very simple game to play, I don't know if that's the feature that most attracts me. I also don't think that it's just the idea of the word game. I like word games, but in recent months favorite Words With Friends became so thick with ads and did so little to screen those ads for legitimacy, variety or even working code that won't freeze your tablet I had to stop playing.

I think, in fact, I like it most because once you have played for the day you can go about your business until the next day. Wordle is a quick diversion that's not specifically designed to grab and hold your attention as long as possible. Unlike a big chunk of modern online content, the goal is not to monetize your blank unstaring gaze at the screen.

Technically, Wardle didn't have monetizing as a goal at all. And even though the New York Times purchased it from him, they have experienced a rare realization that something which the Times did not produce already worked and they didn't mess with the core of the game. They have tinkered with a few things, both sensible (fewer British spellings) and not (removal of words Times staff found uncomfortable, like "slave," "lynch," "fetus" and "Weiss.") Most of their changes have been outside the main game architecture and thus easily (and probably wisely) ignored.

And it's that one word, one day architecture that I appreciate the most. No algorithm designed to keep me scrolling, no emphasis on conflict to grab my eyeballs and chain them to the virtual galley bench. A quick, interesting, fun, satisfying and rewarding experience before moving on to the day's business. I think they once called it "play."

(P.S. - I have no idea if the word "Weiss" was ever a legit Wordle guess. But since it represents a modern NYT embarrassing failure, I thought it was a good joke.)

Precision Language

Economics professor Tyler Cowen noticed that a nearby library is being renovated and expresses his fear that the remodeled structure will have fewer books rather than more. He created a German neologism to express that fear:

Öffentlichebibliotheksumbaurenovierungssammlungsbeschränkungsangst.

I started to read the comment thread, thinking that because professor Cowen is an extremely intelligent man the people who read his posts -- your humble author excepted -- must also be extremely intelligent and I would benefit from perusing the discussion. I was wrong; there was a bunch of sniping about censorship and then a bunch more sniping about how public libraries are an artifact of a past life that we need to leave behind.

Very fun post, though.

Round and Round

Over at Vulture, Molly Young writes about "garbage language," or the horrendous outpouring of nonsense phrases, acronyms, repurposed words and whatnot that afflict people who try to work in businesses and offices.

Part of Young's purpose is to try to find out why this kind of language has become the kudzu of the workplace. Even when communications consultants or advisers come in and -- often using their own special cache of garbage language -- point out how this sort of stuff makes it harder to be understood than easier, it persists. If by some miracle it's killed, it rises like an unstaked vampire and feeds until the problem is as bad or worse than before. I've always thought that some of the fuel for this kind of lexical fog was similar to that found in academia: If I hit a sufficient percentage of obscurancy in my communication you have to keep me around because you don't know what I'm talking about and you don't want to have to do my job yourself.

According to Young, one of the reasons people deploy garbage language is also part of its greatest problem: It confirms, she says, that delusion is an asset in the modern workplace. The speakers of garbage language convince themselves that their verbal deformations are actually better than the plain brown wrapper of the basic grammar textbook. They are being more precise, more descriptive, more efficient! One or another of them who might have read an avant-garde stylist like Tom Wolfe or Hunter S. Thompson might even believe they are being more creative. Lord knows Wolfe could press a word into service for which it did not seem fit, until after he did it, and they believe they might just tread that path too.

But they don't. As Young says, it's a delusion. For most everyone who tries to do a job, the best memo is not exciting or zingy or cutting edge in its vocabulary. It's the one that spells out what the job is, how it needs to be done, who should be doing it and when it should be finished. In the course of my working life I have run across a couple of supervisors who understood that. May their tribe ever increase.

Vocabulary

According to this Tweet from Haggard Hawks, the Welsh word "hiraeth" refers to an interesting mix of nostalgia with homesickness -- it's more than just missing the attributes of a particular time and place; it's thinking that time and place is actually more your home than any current situation.

It could be a useful word, but we have to realize that every time and place is one of mixed blessings. More conservative-leaning folks such as I might have a sense of homesickness for the 1980s and the presidency of Ronald Reagan. But that was also a decade with Ted Kennedy in it, which means that although the occupant of the White House was significantly smarter and more dignified then than now, Washington waitresses and Kennedy campaign staffers are a good deal safer today.

I Say Nay!

Over at Dustbury, Charles offers an opinion on an item he read about the way that modern writing tends to aim lower,  reading-level wise, than it did once upon a time. The item he quotes is right on: The best response to a first encounter with a new word is a dictionary (or, in emergencies, Google).

Charles is also right on -- we can't be too far from the day when the choice to write above someone's head will be taken away from us on the basis of vocabulary privilege or some similar nonsense.

I say nonsense because I have never in my life experienced any benefits from having a strong vocabulary. During the school years, polysyllables attracted "donees" for my lunch money but repelled the chicks en masse. When writing for the newspaper, they earned me significant editing. While they were useful in seminary, that's still a form of academia and is therefore of no value to the real world. In fact, seminary gave me an entirely new realm of vocabulary I can't use in real life, such as "hypostatic union." The phrase refers to the Christian understanding of how the divine and human natures of Christ co-relate within one person, but I'm never going to say it in a sermon. Not because other people can't understand it -- but because if I do use it I'll have to explain it and I'm lazy.

But I have one issue of strong disagreement with Charles' piece, and if you look at the comments you'll see it's shared by some other of his readers as well. We reject utterly his opening contention that he is not a writer and I personally would sentence him to reading non-gender and inclusive re-workings of Strunk and White.

Who Run Bartertown?

On a website I read now and again, I saw a story that asked if a certain thing was possible "in Trump's America." The author didn't really go on to say if this thing was possible or not; he just took  President Trump to task for calling members of a criminal gang "animals."

I'm a little leery of dehumanizing people via labeling them myself, but the thing about the article that sort of bugged me was the phrase "Trump's America." I see it a lot, and it's usually connected to an opinion that there's something wrong and it's the president's fault. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't; I'll leave that to other folks to decide and for still other folks to make a lot of hay over it. But I'll push back against this "Trump's America" thing, like I would against "Obama's America" or "Bush's America."

Because it's not. It's my America. It's all of those the article writers' America. It's our America, and all of the touch me not unclean spirit down-your-nosery they can summon from their righteous keyboards changes not a bit of that. England's government, technically, belongs to the Queen. She reigns there, which is why British warships are called Her Majesty's Ship So-and-So.

But in our government, we don't have a ruler. We have an employee. Sure, sometimes we make stupid hiring decisions, but that happens mostly because the two firms to which we outsourced the job search come back with some really awful candidates. Still, he doesn't own the country and it's silly to put his name on it.

One person secured a majority of electoral votes by convincing about a fifth of the country to vote for him. That's it, period. He didn't change everything; he can't. Because if he could, then the last guy could have too, but if he had, then this guy shouldn't have been able to get elected.

So stop whining about how it's "Trump's America" and start thinking about how it's your America just as much as his, and how you might go about convincing people what there is about it that needs fixing. You won't sound so above-it-all, but none of us are that much above it anyway.

The Man in White

The death Monday of Tom Wolfe leaves only a few left of the writers who in the 1960s and 70s pioneered what came to be called "new journalism." It married reportage with literary techniques in long-form pieces that were anything but a bare recitation of who, what, when, where, why and how.

Wolfe may have had the largest impact of the list, exposing the emptiness of "radical chic" in the late 1960s, the pretentiousness of wide swaths of modern art and architecture a few years later and the steely core of test pilots and astronauts in the growing years of the Mercury space program and supersonic flight. Through fiction he showed late 1980s New York City a picture of itself warts and all and uncovered the color line that wasn't completely erased by the green cash flow of the New South. He lifted the lid on the creepy gumbo of hedonism, new Puritanism and shallowness of the modern university.

His novels rested on a journalist's reporting and his journalism had fiction's flair, perhaps because he did not simply write words the way we do when we're just communicating information. Wolfe used language -- every facet of it on which he could lay his hands. Funky punctuation? All of those literary devices we were supposed to memorize in English class like alliteration or onomatopoeia? Multiple voices in narration and dialogue? All of those and more. If Winston Churchill was supposed to have mobilized the English language and sent it into battle, Wolfe mobilized it and sent it out to help people understand an increasingly weird and troubling world. It may sound like a much lower goal, but all Churchill had to do was defeat the Nazis. Wolfe had to explain why people paid money for a Jackson Pollock painting.

In reflecting on this loss with a friend who used to work at the newspaper with me, we discovered that one of the most depressing things about Wolfe's passing is the way it highlights how few successors he and other new journalism wizards have working today. Wolfe's success was probably as much alchemical as it was anything else, but one of his secrets was his command of the linguistic and stylistic rules with which he played fast and loose. Knowing them, he could choose obedience, transgression or some mixture so that he could make his points. Imitators, raised on a diet of transgression alone, have little to no understanding of how to communicate anything other than their own self-worth.

In National Review's blog The Corner, Richard Brookhiser offers a brief appreciation for Wolfe and his gifts, closing it with what would serve as a fine epitaph: "He enriched American letters and life."

Yup.

A Whatsit By Any Other Name...

As they often do, the good folk at Mental Floss offer up a list of some interesting and obscure words, grouped together under some theme or another.

However, the headline of the story overpromises: "10 Things You Didn’t Know Had Names." I did know what "badinage" meant and from time to time I even use it in a sentence. Thus, I believe writer Adrienne Crezo owes me a word. Which one? Well, if I knew that it wouldn't qualify for the list now, would it?

Lexicographical Rubbish Heap

Stories appear each year that announce new words which make it into the dictionary, but how do dictionaries decide what words to leave out?

There is indeed a process. Online dictionaries don't remove words, since a single entry takes up very little data and you might as well keep everything. That's what search engines are for, after all.

But printed dictionaries sometimes have to, because otherwise even the simplest editions, designed to help students or people learning to speak English as a second language, would get too cumbersome to use. Several categories exist before a word completely disappears, such as notations that it is historical (Now hist.), or even an obsolete (Obs.) term. If a word hasn't been used since about 1930, it gets labeled obsolete and is a prime target for reduction depending on the purpose and scope of a dictionary.

The cutoff is much earlier if the word is an obsolete or compound form of a current word, about 1800. So there goes our hope of never hearing about Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders again. On the other hand, they provide solid job security for the word "carbuncle."

Insults From the Auld Sod

Generally, insults inspire comebacks. Sometimes, the verbally challenged will come back with a physical blow. Sometimes the cerebrally challenged will come back with a lame, "Your mom!"

But for the life of me, I can't figure out how you'd come back from being told you were a "moulting desert ram." I don't even know what it means. So I suspect most people engaging in a battle of wits with an Irish person from the early medieval period would have to slink away in shame.

Not to mention if you were called a "horn of an infertile cow," "son of stammering, surly, puffed-up foreign woman" or "comb of a castrated cockerel, smoky-colored, bent and crooked."

Of course, if you also were an Irish person of the early medieval era, you could whip out some counterattacks. Letting the person who just insulted you know he's a "boiled cow's udder" ought to set him back on his heels a little.

Watch Your Language

At Mental Floss, you can find a handy list of "old-fashioned swears" to use in your moments when it seems profanity is required.

The list is interesting, although I don't know if these words constitute "swear words" the way we think of them today. Many of them come from oaths that the speakers might have taken more seriously than we do some of the four-letters we sling around. But the author is right on target that overuse has robbed many of our current words of their shock value and power. When every other word is the four-syllable combo that implies the subject is Oedipus in full-on Jocasta-shipping mode, then a user loses the ability to use it to truly insult someone.

All he or she does, in fact, is show a vocabulary too limited to think of something new.

Order of Descent

Writing at Fee.org, Sarah Skwire examines a letter George Washington wrote to Moses Seixas, a leader of the synagogue at Newport, Rhode Island, in 1790.

Seixas had written Washington noting how important the concept of a nation without a state religion of any kind was to his people, who had been the victims of many a pogrom, purge and persecution among the establishment-churched nations of Europe. Seixas expressed his and his people's appreciation to Washington for his role in creating the new Constitution and government.

Skwire's article examines some of the meaning of Washington's reply and reflects on what an officially neutral state made for minority groups and minority faiths. What struck me was Washington's reply letter. Can you imagine in your wildest flights of fancy either of our two major presidential candidates being able to compose something like this? Can you imagine them thinking through any issue this deeply and then crafting this kind of a response letter? Can you suppose either of them employ staff people who would be able to do so in their stead?

I'm not suggesting that either candidate is dumb -- they do and say many dumb things, but they both sport degrees from top schools. Mr. Trump attended Fordham University and graduated from the Wharton School of Finance and Commerce at the University of Pennsylvania. Ms. Clinton graduated from Wellesley College and Yale University School of Law. Although education and dumb are not mutually exclusive, or so my mirror tells me, both candidates seem to have more than merely the sneaky murine cunning they regularly demonstrate.

I am suggesting that neither of them is much of a thinker. Neither of them does much reflecting on anything beyond poll results and defending their indefensible characters They certainly don't mull over ideas at the level of the first man to hold the job they both want, who was twice the thinker that either of them are for all that he held no degree and may have been largely self-educated with the occasional help of tutors.

He outshines them in several other regards as well. But we'll be reminded of that daily once one of them wins.

This Is, How You Say...

Dr. Tim Lomas, a professor at the University of East London, became fascinated by the way that some languages have words which just don't translate exactly into English. So he began compiling a list of them,. He also studied the way that English simply absorbed some of those words into itself and began using them to express those concepts they described in their native habitat.

As Dr. Lomas notes in a Scientific American article on his project, words referred to as "untranslateable" are such only if you insist on some kind of one-to-one correspondence between the words. Those words do translate, but it takes several words or even some sentences to do so. He gives the example of the German word Treppenwitz, which literally translates into English as "staircase wit." But it describes the great comeback or pithy comment that comes to you too late to be a good response in the conversation. If "translate" means only the one-to-one substitution mentioned above, then Treppenwitz doesn't translate. But since there is an English idea that it matches, then it does translate, but requires several words for that to happen.

Folks in my profession have to deal with this kind of thing a lot, because our primary source documents are in two distinct languages: Greek and Hebrew (there's a sprinkling of Aramaic in there as well). Modern Greek and Hebrew have words that struggle to cross over into English, which is bad enough. But we have to work with ancient versions of both languages, which are more or less not spoken today. However difficult it is to make connections between modern cultures with different languages, multiply that many-fold when one of the cultures involved hasn't existed for more than a thousand years.

A single word in Greek might require a paragraph of explanation in order to be adequately understood. And there are some Hebrew passages which translate just fine -- but they make no sense when they do, because those words aren't used that way any more (ancient Hebrew's lack of written vowels adds to the fun).

Of course, some of my colleagues insist on that as a license for their overly prolonged orations, but that's just mean in any language.

Well, Naturally

Writing at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Noah Berlatsky explores the awfulness of academic writing, specifically digging into why academics who start out writing poorly never seem to improve?

Berlatsky says that part of the problem is what many people suspect it is -- somewhere along the line someone sold academia (and the rest of us) on the idea that if something is obscure, then it must also be profound. Academic folks therefore don't write in their wackadoodle way to hide that they've nothing to say, but because they've bought the line that if any meathead can understand what they're talking about then they aren't being truly intellectual.

There's probably some truth to that. Every profession or group has its own specialized slang to a greater or lesser degree. And understanding it when no one else does can often give that feeling of insider-ness that many of us love.

But, Berlatsky says, when the desire to veil the simple so as not to be thought simplistic mates with the kind of poor writing skills seemingly everywhere today, then there is a kind of obscurantist symbiosis that locks in the bad style and death-by-polysyllable traits for the duration of a career.

Highly technical writing probably should be a little tough to understand for the non-specialist. After all, if some depth of study has gone into learning the details of a subject then it would be kind of a wash if the study turned out not to be necessary.

On the other hand, the source of the difficulty should be in things like the terms of whatever specialty's being discussed. If I'm reading something on a particularly challenging area of geology, for example, then I ought to be slogging along because I have to pause and look up words. But I should not be slogging along because the writing itself muddles things and the sentences under consideration would remain impenetrable if they concerned how to boil water.

Part of the problem, of course, is that few people have to suffer academic writing at its highest and most abstract level. And many of those that do turn around and become academics themselves, and they're not spilling the beans. Who knows what might happen to them if they exposed their profession's deep secrets?

It Takes Work to Fail This Hard

When I was a young Friar earning my degree in journalism and applied brewery product testing, I subscribed to the Chicago Tribune. Most of my J-school classmates did as well. We would get a New York Times now and again, but the Trib was the "local" paper and it employed several of our instructors. The Chicago Sun-Times was another frequent but not daily read because the Trib had news about the suburbs, which was where most of us lived. And after Rupert Murdoch bought the Sun-Times, the Trib also had Mike Royko, who most of us wanted to be when we grew up.

Our journalism school was named after the guy who brought the Trib into the big time, Joseph Medill. It may be one of the very few journalism schools in the country named after a Republican. At least until someone tells the students what party Medill belonged to and they stage a mass walk-out because the association triggers them and they find themselves horrifyingly supportive of capital gains tax cuts. This will also be a way to tell the real journalists. They will walk out as well, but they will head for the nearest pub, interview each other, and file a story before getting hammered and complaining about how great things used to be until they pass out. I will not dignify with a response any claims that I speak from experience.

So it is with head-scratching confusion I note that Tribune Publishing Company has renamed itself tronc. Yes, tronc, without any capital letters. The neologism represents "TRibune ONline Content." It also represents an early favorite in the Dumbest Idea of 2016 sweepstakes, and states a pretty convincing case to be the Dumbest Idea of 2017 as well. There's a statement from a company official at the link, but I don't recommend reading it if you like sentences that make sense. It reads like it's the kind of thing someone would say if they were the kind of person who thought "tronc" was a good name and changing to it a good idea.

Over at Dustbury, Charles mocks the idea as well, although in French since he is much more cosmopolitan than I. But in any language, "tronc" remains a lousy idea. The company said it wanted to try to create a new identity as it transformed itself from a legacy media company into a modern content provider. So this silly new name is an attempt at branding.

Well, tronc, you have succeeded in branding yourself. But I very much doubt that's happened the way you wanted it to, unless the association you wanted people to make with your new name was "WTH?"

Science Has the Coolest Words

This article at Quanta outlines how some pretty modest-scaled experiments might do just as much to help us understand the most exotic features of the universe as do those experiments conducted in gigantic facilities like the Large Hadron Collider. With the added benefit of having much less chance of creating a black hole that would destroy life as we know it.

The combination of our annual denominational meeting plus drugs from a recent medical adventure have left me a little tired, so rather than comment on the whole article I will just note the measurement used to gauge the force in one of the experiments. A "newton" is an amount of force; it's equivalent to the force used to depress a computer key. One of the experiments will measure fractions of that force in units called "zeptonewtons."

It's hard to call a day bad when you learn that there is in the world a real thing called a "zeptonewton."

Word Count

Way back in 1972, Robert Fiengo and Howard Lasnik published a scientific paper in a journal called Linguistic Inquiry. The title: "On nonrecoverable deletion in syntax."

"Nonrecoverable deletion" is a kind of gap in communication that can't be figured out by the context of what's being said. The article at Real Clear Science's Newton Blog explains how a lot of our communication involves gaps or incompletions, but we understand what's being said because the statement comes in a recognizable context. That context makes the unspoken or unwritten words implicitly there even if they aren't explicit.

The previous sentence has an example of a recoverable deletion. The full sentence would have ended with "explicitly there" in order to match the information given in the phrase "implicitly there," but most people reading it fill in that blank. The missing information is "recoverable" from earlier in the sentence. Fiengo and Lasnik's paper argued in favor of what linguists called the "Recoverability Condition" by means of a very simple but profound argument: Their paper is completely blank. They use no words at all.

You can see where this leads. By leaving out everything, they have made it impossible to deduce implicit communication from context, because there is no context. If there's nothing there to start with, then nothing's there to be left out and consequently there's nothing to figure out.

This is opposed to most modern political speeches and opinions given on television and the internet, which mean nothing or even less but use a great many words to say it.

There Are No Words...

Let's say you lived in England sometime just before calendars needed four digits instead of three, and you had a hankering to describe an amount of things. You had, for whatever reason, found a thousand somethings and it turned out there were a thousand of the thousand somethings. You could write "a thousand thousand," but you were about out of paper and didn't have the room for it.

According to this article by Pierre Bienaimé at Nautilus, you would have been out of luck, because "million," the word we would use, didn't exist yet. Language researchers suggest that there wasn't a need for the word because most people rarely encountered anything in that kind of quantity. Most people's worlds were pretty limited. Rich people might have thousands of certain kinds of animals and kings might have thousands of men in their armies. But at least in Old-English-speaking areas, you could account for almost every number you'd regularly run across by referring to multiples of those thousands.

Bienaimé's article points out that the word "million" was probably imported from French along with a lot of words we use today, in the years following William the Conqueror's 11th century invasion of the British Isles. Advances in mathematics and encounters with wider regions of the world than those known before meant people ran across the idea often enough that they grabbed a word to use to replace the clumsy "thousand thousand." The doubled phrase retains a kind of archaic flair and that seems to be the usual purpose if it's used today.

Words, whether newly minted or not, do seem to crop up as they're needed. When I bought my first computer, it featured an amazing 56K modem, meaning of course that it could transmit 56,000 bytes of data every second. In discussing speeds and file sizes, we often used "K" as a descriptor. "Meg" or "megs" and "gig" and "gigs" get used more often today, and we are probably on our way to whatever shortened version of terabytes and petabytes we will be bragging about in five or ten years. Or sooner.

Opposites Attack!

We're certainly used to the idea of words that have antonyms, or opposites. And we have all used words that seem like they should have opposites but don't.

The good folk at Mental Floss have hunted up some words that do have opposites, although those opposites are not very intuitive. Déjá vu's opposite is not vuja de, despite what you may have heard. It's actually jamais vu, which translates from French as "never seen." Technically, the first one references a new event that feels strangely familiar. So the second describes a familiar event that feels as though it has never happened before, like finding your car keys before you are late to work.

"Ambidextrous" means being equally skilled with either left or right hand. The opposite might be simple ordinary left- or right-handedness, but the Mental Floss researchers suggest it's really "ambilevous," which means you are equally clumsy with either hand. On the other hand (heh), I'm not sure how that's different from ambidextrous. Both hands have the same skill level; it's just that it's pretty low.

In science-fiction stories, there are sometimes robots or androids that gain intelligence and free will. If they are mobile, then they might be called "automatons," or "self-movers." Though machines, they have become capable of desiring and directing their own movements. Giant computers that become self-aware are generally not called automatons, because they can't move. Unless they also develop mind-control powers and force their human servants to pick them up and carry them places.

The opposite of automaton is a "heteromaton," or something that can act only when moved by outside forces. An example of this would be a politician, whom we notice can only move or speak when acted upon by outside forces in the form of opinion polls.