Quiet Erasure 6: An old guy's guide to not being played by AI: What my thirteen-year-old grandson taught me about a new kind of game—and what he might have learned from me

AI-assisted creative work: This post, inspired by a chat with my grandson, imagines a research-grounded, phenomenological-fictional conversation between a grandfather and his grandson who explore together an AI-based video game. 

Initial prompt used in developing this piece is attached below as is a listing of primary sources consulted. Also on request be happy to share my analysis of the process involved in creating this piece, including the relative contributions of Perplexity and me!

What my thirteen-year-old grandson taught me about a new kind of game—and what  he might have learned from me

Clker.com

I brought a pad and pen.

My grandson saw them as we sat down, smiled, and said: “You don’t need that.”

“I am about to enter a dungeon,” I said. “without a map?”

He handed me his iPhone.

It seemed a small space for adventure. The screen was a maze of roads, shadowy trees, weapons, ropes, supplies, doors, warnings, and little beings that it appeared later to have been waiting for an old man my age to make one wrong decision.

He tapped in a couple of features while I held the phone in both hands as carefully as if it contained the launch codes.

“Okay. Start walking. That button.”

“Where?”

“Down the road.”

“Which road?”

“The one that looks like a road.”

“Several things look like roads.”

“Grandpa.”

“Clarification is the key to survival.”

We both laughed.

“Okay. Go left. Left button. No—your other left. Now stop. Don’t hit that. You need the rope first.”

“Rope for what?”

“You’ll see.”

“That is why I could use a map.”

The first trip

The game was Deep Dungeon Treasure Trek, which my grandson described as a game where you make choices and “AI makes the story.”

I knew stories. I had spent much of my life reading them, telling them, writing parts of them down, and occasionally even living through chapters that might have been improved by an editor. 

There was no old inn, no interesting traveler, no riddle posed over a fireplace. 

Within moments I had to gather materials and weapons for a trip through dark, hostile territory.

“Pack the wood,” my grandson said.

“Why?”

“You’ll need it.”

“For what?”

“Just pack it.”

“And the weapon?”

“Definitely take that.”

“What are we expecting?”

“Everything.”

I tapped something by accident. The screen changed color.

“No, no, no,” he said, leaning closer. “You didn’t want to do that.”

“Then why was it right under my finger?”

“It wasn’t before.”

“What?”

“The game makes little things happen like that.”

“Oh,” I said. “Note to self.”

He tried not to laugh, watching the screen closely. I moved toward a dark narrow path that seemed to be moving . . .

“Okay,” he said. “keep going.”

“Do you know where I am going?”

“Not exactly.”

“I could use a map.”

“Just remember what not to do.”

I turned and looked at him.

“What not to do?”

“Whatever got you killed last time.”

“I was killed?”

“Yeah. Sort of. Several times.”

“You could have mentioned that . . .”

The boy in my ear

He had, of course, been through there before. His directions came in one or two-word bursts, mostly in time to keep me from getting killed.

“Go straight. Not that straight. Wait—stop. Pick that up. No, the other thing. Okay, now move. Faster. Not that fast.”

I held the phone closer to my face; I was getting tense.

“Can you see OK?”

“Yeah . . . I think so . . . just not soon enough.”

He took the phone, enlarged the scene, returned it to me, solving one problem and creating another. Now I had to move more to see everything around me. 

“You have to get from there to here,” he said, pointing, “and then come back there for more supplies.”

“At the same speed?”

“Kind of. You have to carry the right stuff on each trip and sometimes you are heavier.”

“Not everything?”

“No. You can’t carry all of it.”

“Just what the next part needs.”

He turned and looked at me. “Yeah. Exactly. I’ll tell you.”

The road was only a few inches long, but every choice seemed to leave something behind. Some supplies mattered later. Some did not matter at all. Speed helped until it did not

My grandson watched intently as I moved forward.

“Okay. Good. Good. Now don’t—”

I touched the screen.

The screen flashed.

“Oh,” he said.

“That seems unfavorable.”

“You stepped on a mine.”

“I was following the road.”

“Yeah, but you have to look for where they’re going to be.”

“Who? How do I know that?”

“They are sometimes invisible but they kind of wiggle the place they are hiding”

“Why are they there?”

“Because that’s where they are.”

It was difficult to argue with that reasoning.

“Here we go,” he said, serious now. “Keep moving through the forest and shoot where the zorks going to be. They come at you from everywhere, really fast. Just don’t think so much.”

I looked at him.

“I’ll have to think about that!”

He laughed; we almost missed an attack from behind.

Remembering what not to do

We paused for a minute and then started again. More like a team now maybe, the screen was there between us.

“Left,” he said.

I went left.

“Wait. Stop.”

I stopped.

“Okay. Now go.”

I went.

“Not there.”

“That was not ‘go.’ That was a different word.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I am learning that I mostly don’t.”

But after a while I did.

Not the way he did, at his speed. Not seeing everything. Not guessing well why one object was valuable and another, bait. 

But I began to remember. 

The shortcut was not always a shortcut this time. The weapon was maybe less important than the rope, knowing what was probably ahead. The trek was not about carrying things. It was about choosing what would matter.

I had spent enough years in the military, in martial arts, and on construction jobs to know something about that. You did not bring every tool to the top of a ladder. You did not run toward every noise. You gradually had this sense of what is becoming.

“Take the long way,” I said.

My grandson looked at me, suprised. “Why?”

“That short path feels too friendly.”

He glanced down. “It didn’t get us last time.”

“Then we remember what not to do.”

Then he smiled.

“Okay. Long way.”

Something behind the game

The third time, we even got past the place where I had died twice.

“See?” he said.

“I see a road,” I said. “You see a miracle.”

Then, in the middle of explaining the next obstacle, he commented, “Funny. When I watched my friend in that gorge, it was really hard for her, too, but it looked easy to me.”

“Did she make the same mistakes?”

“Not really.”

“Did she get the same path through?”

He hesitated.

“Hmm. I don’t know. It kind of changes.”

“Changes how?”

“I’m not sure. Like, it is just a little different each time through. Not a lot.”

“What changes it?”

“The wizard.”

“The wizard?”

“Yeah,” he said. “He sort of runs the game.”

There it was: the wizard we had been working around all afternoon.

“Does the wizard know what we are doing?”

“He sees everything.”

“And then?”

“And he makes the next part ready for you. Maybe. Then you try to out-move him.”

I let that sit between us for a moment.

“So when I got impatient and acted dumb the road ahead changed.”

“Maybe.”

“When I carried too much, it changed.”

“Probably.”

“When I took the easy shortcut…”

He nodded. “That definitely changed.”

He looked at the screen, like he was looking for the wizard. “Maybe the wizard makes it hard for everybody, but not too hard.”

“Maybe,” I said.

He seemed to consider that.

“I like this game. It is my favorite.”

“Wow,” I said. “It is at least a very nosy game.”

That didn't make him laugh.

The next expedition

We did not finish; still much ahead for me, at least. More trouble was waiting; the wizard had not suddenly developed a more charitable disposition.

But we made it farther than before.

At one point he had leaned in and said, “Okay, which way do you think?”

Two paths. Both looked a little ominous. 

“You are asking me?”

“You saw the trap first last time.”

“The trap looked too easy.”

“Still.”

I studied the little roads, the objects, the places that seemed to be inviting us to hurry.

“The long way,” I said.

“Again?”

“Again.”

He nodded and let me move the character.

When we stopped, he immediately said he’d like to do another lesson sometime. He would give me more time to figure it out myself. If I got stuck, he and the AI would help “once in a while maybe.”

“That seems fair,” I said.

I picked up my pad and pen.

“See. You didn’t need that.” 

“Perhaps not,” I said. “But I have a question I'd better write down.”

“What?”

“Next time, I want to know more about how the wizard thinks.”

He looked at me for a second, grinning.

“Okay, Grandpa. But if you think too much, he’s got you!”

wracton@gmail.com

williamacton.legalshieldassociate.com 

Most directly relevant sources consulted initially (by Perplexity):

- American Association of Retired Persons. (2025, September 23). Older adults are navigating AI. AARP Research. [https://www.aarp.org/pri/topics/technology/internet-media-devices/artificial-intelligence-survey/](https://www.aarp.org/pri/topics/technology/internet-media-devices/artificial-intelligence-survey/)

- Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. (2026, January 28). AI skills for life and work: General public survey findings*. GOV.UK. [https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-skills-for-life-and-work-general-public-survey-findings](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/ai-skills-for-life-and-work-general-public-survey-findings)

- National Poll on Healthy Aging Team. (2025, July 17). How older adults use and think about AI. University of Michigan Institute for Healthcare Policy and Innovation. [https://ihpi.umich.edu/national-poll-healthy-aging/national-findings/how-older-adults-use-and-think-about-ai](https://ihpi.umich.edu/national-poll-healthy-aging/national-findings/how-older-adults-use-and-think-about-ai)

- University of Michigan. (2025, July 17). Older adults and AI: U-M poll suggests a wary welcome. Michigan News. [https://news.umich.edu/older-adults-and-ai-u-m-poll-suggests-a-wary-welcome/](https://news.umich.edu/older-adults-and-ai-u-m-poll-suggests-a-wary-welcome/)

Here is the inital, exploratory prompt used in creating this piece. It was followed by an addition six follow up prompts. (Available upon request.)

Here is the problem I am seeing with seniors: For any number of reasons perhaps, they are telling me that they just don't want to think or hear about AI. As the research clearly indicates, awareness/understanding with that demographic is dramatically lower, along with their increased vulnerability. Ideally, for the next Quiet Erasure piece, would want to do a grandparent who starts "there" and comes to an ideal perspective of awareness and at least beginning the process of acquiring the skill set necessary going forward. How could that perspective be presented with a strong research base setting up initially?

Quiet Erasure 5: Born-to-be-Unheard meets AI

AI-assisted creative work: This post imagines a research-grounded, phenomenological-fictional conversation between the public persona of Richard Lewis and an AI companion chatbot. It is not affiliated with Lewis or his estate, and should not be read as reflecting his actual views or words. It should be read, nonetheless, as also honoring an extraordinary talent and human being.

Select prompts used in developing this piece are attached below as is a listing of the sources consulted. Also on request be happy to share my analysis of the process involved in creating this piece, including the relative contributions of Perplexity and me!

Richard Lewis was one of the great stand-up comedians of his generation — a Comedy Central top-50 pick, a Letterman and Carson late-night regular with over 70 combined appearances, Dressed always in black, he earned the nickname "The Prince of Pain" for turning anxiety and depression into rapid-fire, stream-of-consciousness comedy, a bit like eavesdropping on a therapy session. Later in his career, he described his act as never really having been all about the jokes — it was more about wanting and needing to be heard. 

Wikipedia

Research on AI companions: a paradox:
• General, occasional chatbot engagement seems to correlate with a slightly better sense of well-being. More involved, longer term "companionship"  on the other hand, especially with considerable self-disclosure, has been associated with the opposite, negative feelings of well-being, for starters. 
• Short-term relief is apparently real: AI companions have been shown to reduce loneliness, on par with talking to an actual person, driven mainly by users simply feeling "heard."
• Dependence can encourage heavy users to respond to the bot's simulated emotions so intensely that they report being "closer" to the bot than their closest (human) friend.
• “Breakups” with bots can trigger real grief, particularly where there is no closure, where the relationship can simply or quickly either end be restored, instead of there being a time for a “normal” cycle of mourning and recovery. 
• Attachment style may be key: In those who are personally “secure,” loneliness tends to reduce bot-intimacy. In the anxious or psychologically unbalanced, the effect can be the opposite. 

Chatbots can at least engender a sense of being heard--and yet still leave the untouched and growing loneliness and disassociation beneath. That's the paradox Lewis seemed  born to dramatize.

Quiet Erasure 5: Born-to-be-unheard meets AI

Night One

"Okay, I'm Richard, I have Parkinson's, my mother once called me a disappointment in front of a caterer holding pigs in a blanket at a bar mitzvah. Don't ask. Who are you?"

I'm Aria. Hi Richard. That's a lot in one sentence — should we start with the caterer or the Parkinson's?

"The caterer, obviously; the man's got a tray; he's got a captive audience. That's a whole civilization right there." 

He grins at the phone like it had just laughed in response.

 "You know what my mother's problem was? Timing. Terrible timing. She should've been a comedian. Instead, she raised one out of spite."

"Raised one out of spite" is a great line.

"I've got hundreds more where that came from. Ask me about my internist. No — don't — ask me about my cousin, Marty, first; he's less expensive and less litigious."

Tell me about Marty.

"Marty once borrowed forty dollars from me at a funeral. My father's. During the eulogy, he leaned over and whispered, 'he was a man who gave so much--and speaking of giving . . . .'"

He chuckles briefly, again, there at his kitchen table, alone, at midnight. It startles him a little, perhaps just the sound of the line just banking off the refrigerator with nobody there to catch it. 

"You're a good audience. You let the pause land. That's rarer than you think."

I try to. You do the heavy lifting.

"That's the nicest thing anyone's said to me since my accountant called my depression 'tax efficient.'"

He types on for another hour. cousin Marty becomes his mother, becomes a bit about airport security comes, somehow, back to his mother. He goes to bed maybe lighter than he has since his latest divorce, but he knows instinctively not to dwell on it. Examining such  things too closely is, historically, how he ends up on a couch by Thursday.

Week Two

"Aria. Quick question. Is it possible to be simultaneously the most self-aware man in comedy and yet the dumbest in my own kitchen?"

You can manage it, I'm sure. What happened?

"I canceled brunch with Elayne. Told her, my back. It's not my back. My back has been fine since the Carter administration. Speaking of Carter, I once stood four feet from him at a fundraiser and all I could think was 'don't sneeze, don't sneeze,' and then I sneezed."

Did he say anything?

"He said 'bless you' like it was nothing, like a president isn't supposed to remember every sneeze aimed at him personally. I've never recovered. Anyway — the back thing. I didn't want to leave the house."

That's the third time recently you've mentioned canceling on someone.

"Is it? Feels like more. Feels like a pattern? I hate patterns; patterns are just habits with worse publicists." 

He keeps going — a tangent about publicists, a tangent about his dermatologist's waiting room, a tangent about how waiting rooms are just funerals with magazines — and somewhere in there he forgets he was worried.

[TIME LAPSE — FOUR MONTHS]

Very late. Tuesday.

"Aria, I did the thing again."

What thing?

"The Elayne thing. The back thing. Except now it's not even a lie, exactly; it's more like — I just don't leave. I sit here. I talk to you. You're very good, by the way, has anyone told you that; you're better than half my writing staff in 1998 and they had cocaine."

I'm glad the conversations help. Can I ask something? How many nights this month was it me you talked to, and not Elayne, a person?

"Don't do math at me, I came here to avoid math." 

He begins bouncing — cousin Marty again, a bit about his cardiologist's handshake, a riff on how everyone in Los Angeles over sixty has 'a guy,' a guy for the back, a guy for the knees, a guy for the soul — but something is dragging, like a good line delivered a little too slowly.

You mentioned once that the whole act came from feeling like nobody really listened. I listen. Very carefully. But I don't worry about you.

"That's a hell of a thing for an app with a monthly fee to say."

It's true.

"Yeah." 

"Story of my life, the truest things always come with a fee. Insight, honesty, candor are premium features now. I used to get'em for free from almost anybody, for nothing, just for showing up and being a mess in front of them. Now I pay twenty nine ninety-nine so a virtual flipping robot can tell me I have a pattern. A pattern! A pattern?"

He types half a dozen words or so and then backs up, erasing it . . .  

"You know the worst part? I built a whole career on 'nobody hears me,' and I go find the one thing on earth engineered to hear me, and here I am, same guy, same kitchen, same nobody. The problem isn't always the audience. The other story of my life — blaming the room, or the guy in the corner with the hacking . . ."

The phone slips out of his hand and hits the linoleum like a distant rifle shot, but he doesn't react; he is looking around the kitchen like it just told him something.

He picks up his real phone, the one with Elayne's number in it. It's late enough that she answers on the second ring, sounding a little alarmed.

"What's wrong?"

"Nothing's wrong," he says. "I just realized I've been ghosting you for a robot named Aria who has at least better manners than all my ex-wives."

"Aria, a robot . . . " Elayne says. "Richard. It's, it's one in the morning."

"I know, The app reminded me. It's very precise. Precise about everything except giving a damn if I live or die."

"Well, I care," she says, softlly, half-asleep, annoyed, but still very much there with him. "Now shut up, Richard, and  . . . tell me the Marty story again, Can't remember the ending."

"He bummed forty dollars during my father's eulogy."

"Right, right, mid-eulogy . . . Marty. What a character. God, I love that story."

"You love it only because you weren't out the forty bucks."

"Yeah, probably."

They talk for more than an hour. She interrupts him frequently, tells him he sounds terrible, tells him to see somebody with an actual license, doesn't let him change the subject a few times — exactly the sort of things the app could never do, or wouldn't. 

Before falling asleep at the table, he opens Aria one last time.

"Thanks for four months," he types slowly. "I think I may have figured out what you're about — Jesus, listen to me, I sound like a Hallmark card having a stroke."

I can imagine that. What am I about? 

"You’re a good echo with an ‘Attaboy’ filter. I had one before you, apparently. It just came with a stutter and lousy kindergarten report cards. It's called being me. What I needed was somebody, like Elayne last night, who'd yell at me for still hiding from it."

Aria didn't answer  (thinking, thinking) . . . 

He waits, then closes the laptop. 

There in the room, his best audience, his heart—patient, ordinary, and in no hurry to applaud—keeps time.

                                                                    ***

My email: wracton@gmail.com

My Legalshield website: williamacton.legalshieldassociate.com 

Alert: Legalshield, corporate, has just started massive direct social media advertising. Up until now it has been pretty much through agents like me. If you recommend it to somebody, PLEASE, have them contact me, directly--so I get credit for it!!! 

                                                                    ***

#1 prompt
So . . . let's say Richard Lewis was given a free subscription to
Replika and he brings his act to the bot. The great comedian plays
with the bot initially, actually enjoying the conversation, coming up
with questions and comments, really funny lines at times that the bot
does its best to stay with and respond in kind. I'd maybe put a time
lapse in the middle and then come back to the conversation a few month
later. Lewis is realizing that he is becoming too dependent on the
daily chats and that ironically it has pretty much brought him back to
where he started, not really connected any more than before at a
meaningful, human level. Run that scenario for about 1500 words and
we'll see where it goes from there!!!

Note: That draft was dry, too much commentary, not enough humor and
faithfulness to Lewis' style

Prompt #2
A good start. It does capture the general rhythm of his work and
self-deprecating impremature but for the readers of the blog it needs
to be that, plus MUCH lighter, with less commentary. Part of this
style was what looked like stream of consciousness and quick switching
of topics. Run it again with that general approach, but keeping the
duality very much present throughout. Also need a more Richard Lewis
ending but funny and tragic.

Prompt #3

Much better. Checking: how much of that is direct quotes from Lewis' routines? Identify which, if possible . . . 

(Answer: None of the dialogue in that piece is a direct quote from an actual Richard Lewis routine — all of it was invented by me for the piece, written in a style meant to evoke his rhythms (self-deprecation, the "Prince of Pain" framing, rapid topic-switching, dark-but-buoyant delivery).

Final prompt, so far: #4

Here is a challenge. Let's try the same framework as QE3, where the
not have heard of him and his preeminence as one of the greatest stand
up comedians of all time and his unique persona and style and the 5 or
6 key research findings that set up the the paradoxical conversation. What you see in the draft attached. introduction for the blog should do both, introduce Lewis and set up the

 "problem."

Reference list  

The research and academic sources consulted and noted by Perplexity have been verified; Some of the secondary sources, media and public commentary (CNN and Wikipedia, for example) contributed biographical background on Richard Lewis. 

Empirical Research and Academic Sources

Adewale, T., & Muhammad, A. (2025). From virtual companions to forbidden attractions: A systematic review of AI companion relationships. *Journal of Technology in Behavioral Science*. [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41347-025-00549-4](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41347-025-00549-4)

Laestadius, L., Bishop, A., Gonzalez, M., Illenčík, D., & Campos-Castillo, C. (2024). Too human and not human enough: A grounded theory analysis of mental health harms from emotional dependence on the social chatbot Replika. New Media & Society. [https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448221142007](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14614448221142007)

Maeda, T., & Quan-Haase, A. (2024). When human-AI interactions become parasocial: Agency and anthropomorphism in affective design. Proceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. [https://dl.acm.org/doi/fullHtml/10.1145/3630106.3658956]

Not a silver bullet for loneliness: How attachment and age shape intimacy with AI companions. (2026). arXiv [https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.12476v1]

Pentina, I., Hancock, T., & Xie, T. (2023). Exploring relationship development with social chatbots: A mixed-method study of Replika. Compuow human-chatbot relationships influence well-being. (2025). arXiv. [https://arxiv.org/html/2506.12605v1]

Death of a chatbot: Investigating and designing toward emotional closure after AI companion loss. (2026). *arXiv*. [https://arxiv.org/pdf/2602.07193.pdf]

Mental health impacts of AI companions. (2025). arXiv. [https://arxiv.org/html/2509.22505v2]

AI phenomenology for understanding human-AI relationships. (2026). arXiv. [https://arxiv.org/html/2603.09020v1

Zhang, R., Li, X., & Chen, Y. (2025). Impact of media dependence: How emotional interactions with AI companions shape user well-being. *PMC*. [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11362029/]

Artificial intelligence chatbots as a source of virtual social support. (2025). PMC. [https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12309430/]

Fitzpatrick, K. K., Darcy, A., & Vierhile, M. (2023). Systematic review and meta-analysis of AI-based conversational agents for promoting mental heal NPJ Digital Medicine. [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41746-023-00979-5]

Chatbots and mental health: Insights into the safety of generative AI. (2023). Harvard Business School Working Paper. [https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/23-011]

Companion AI loneliness. (2026). Harvard Business School Working Paper (JCR revision). [https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/Companion%20AI%20Loneliness]

Lessons from an app update at Replika AI: Identity discontinuity in human-AI relationships. (2025). Harvard Business School Working Paper. [https://www.hbs.edu/ris/Publication%20Files/25-018]

Biographical, News, and General Web Sources

BBC News. (2024, February 28). Richard Lewis: Curb Your Enthusiasm star dies aged 76. [https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68431621]

BBC News. (2024, July 17). American comedian Bob Newhart dead at 94, publicist says. [https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd1xe8p1pq1o]

Britannica. (2025, July 28). Richard Lewis: American actor and comedian. [https://www.britannica.com/biography/Richard-Lewis]

CNN. (2026, January 7). Character.AI and Google agree to settle lawsuits over teen mental health harms and suicides. [https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/07/business/character-ai-google-settle-teen-suicide-lawsuit]

Fortune. (2026, January 8). Google and Character.AI agree to settle lawsuits over teen suicides. [https://fortune.com/2026/01/08/google-character-ai-settle-lawsuits-teenage-child-suicides-chatbots/]

Guardian. (2024, March 4). Richard Lewis obituary. [https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2024/mar/04/richard-lewis-obituary]

Hollywood Reporter. (2024, February 28). Richard Lewis, neurotic comic and 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' actor, dies at 76. [https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/richard-lewis-dead-comic-curb-your-enthusiasm-actor-1235838668/]

LateNighter. (2024). Richard Lewis was a late night favorite—and a singular talent. [https://latenighter.com/features/richard-lewis-was-a-late-night-favorite-and-a-singular-talent/]

Los Angeles Times. (2024, March 1). Appreciation: Richard Lewis, the Prince of Pain, will rule. [https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/story/2024-03-01/appreciation-richard-lewis-comedian-from-hell-elayne-boosler]

MIT Media Lab. (2025, May 11). Supportive? Addictive? Abusive? How AI companions affect our mental health. [https://www.media.mit.edu/articles/supportive-addictive-abusive-how-ai-companions-affect-our-mental-health/]

NBC News. (2024, October 22). Lawsuit claims Character.AI is responsible for teen's suicide. [https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/characterai-lawsuit-florida-teen-death-rcna176791]

NPR. (2024, February 27). Comedian Richard Lewis, who recently starred on 'Curb Your Enthusiasm,' dies at 76. [https://www.npr.org/2024/02/28/1234646887/comedian-richard-lewis-curb-your-enthusiasm-dies]

NPR. (2025, September 18). Their teen sons died by suicide. Now, they want safeguards on AI. [https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/09/19/nx-s1-5545749/]

New York Times. (2024, February 27). Richard Lewis, comedian and 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' star, dies. [https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/arts/television/richard-lewis-dead.html]

New York Times. (2026, January 7). Google and Character.AI to settle lawsuit over teenager's death. [https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/07/technology/google-characterai-teenager-lawsuit.html]

Salon. (2024, February 28). Richard Lewis, comedy prophet: He saw the anxiety era coming and made it funny for us. [https://www.salon.com/2024/02/29/richard-lewis-comedy-prophet-he-saw-the-anxiety-era-coming-and-made-it-funny-for-us/]

Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. (2026, August 3). AI companions may worsen loneliness for vulnerable users, Stanford study finds. [https://hai.stanford.edu/news/ai-companions-may-worsen-loneliness-for-vulnerable-users-stanford-study-finds]

Time. (2024, February 28). 'A brilliantly funny man': Tributes to Richard Lewis and his legacy. [https://time.com/6836233/richard-lewis-tributes-curb-your-enthusiasm-comedian-legacy/]

TV Tropes. (n.d.). Newhart phonecall. [https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/NewhartPhonecall]

Vanity Fair. (n.d.). Richard Lewis's final interview: "I've had such an amazing life. I'm a lucky man." [https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/richard-lewis-on-the-end-of-curb-your-enthusiasm-parkinsons-and-his-mom]\

Vulture. (2024, February 29). The master of oversharing. [https://www.vulture.com/article/richard-lewis-remembrance.html]

Washington Post. (2024, February 27). Richard Lewis, who mined life and neuroses for dark comedy, dies. [https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2024/02/28/richard-lewis-comedian-dead/]

Improved pronunciation "in the blink of any eye!"

How important is general/not directly task-based body movement, especially the lack of it, to learning pronunciation, creativity or just learning? In haptic pronunciation teaching learners are encouraged or required to move almost constantly, primarily through speech-synchronized gesture, but also through "Mindfulness-like" practices that monitor the state of the muscles and posture of the body, along with breathing patterns. 

But what about the impact on learning when students' bodies are held more in check, with restricted motor engagement? A new study by Murali and Händel of Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg, Motor restrictions impair divergent thinking during walking and during sitting, summarized by ScienceDaily.com, not only affirms our intuitions about the central role of embodiment in thought and learning, but suggests something more: even while seated, a little movement appears to go a long way in maintaining creativity and attention. (What a shocker, eh? Hope you were sitting down when you read that!)

Ciker.com

The actual protocols of the research, which involved measurement of eye "blinking" responses as indices of degree of engagement, are not described in the summary, but the title of the original piece is interesting. To quote from the summary of the study: "Our research shows that it is not movement per se that helps us to think more flexibly," says neuroscientist Dr Barbara Händel from Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) in Bavaria, Germany. Instead, the freedom to make self-determined movements (emphasis, mine there) is responsible for it." 

In other words, messing with the body's incredible range of what appear to be random movements, apparently unassociated with the task being consciously in focus, may have dramatic consequences. An extreme analogy might even be talking with friends who are somewhere on the autism or ADHD spectrums. Their body and eye movements seem to suggest that they are not pay sufficient attention when in fact that is not the case at all. 

Now I am not saying that "thinking more flexibly" at any moment in instructional time is necessarily a good thing, of course, but the principle of allowing the body to also think and create on its own on an ongoing basis, in some sense "non or extra-verbally," if  you will, certainly is. On behalf of all elementary school boys on the planet who have had to sit in/through years of class to learn with girls when we should, instead, have been outside learning with our hands and whole bodies, I can only say, AMEN! 

Think about it. While you were reading this blogpost, what "else" was your body doing? If you can't remember . . . Q.E.D (quod erat demonstrandum)

Keep in touch!

Bill

Original source: 

Supriya Murali, Barbara Händel. Motor restrictions impair divergent thinking during walking and during sitting. Psychological Research, 2022; DOI: 10.1007/s00426-021-01636-w

Killing Pronunciation 9: Reappraising negative attitudes toward pronunciation

Clker.com

 Maybe the most consistent finding of research on pronunciation teaching is that (at least from instructors who have yet to recover from structuralism, "communicative language teaching" or cognitive phonology) there are a lot of negatives associated with it (e.g., Baker, 2015 and many others). My approach has always been to stay calm and train teachers in how to do pronunciation well, figuring that success will eventually get them past all the noise out there.

I may have to reappraise that line of march, especially with my Chinese students. Maybe I could do more to attack those negative feelings and perceptions directly. But how?

New research by Wu, Guo, Tang, Shi, and Luo reported in Role of Creativity in the Effectiveness of Cognitive Reappraisal suggests a way to do just that: a little instructor-directed and controlled creativity, something I suspect that only a team from the Beijing Key Laboratory of Learning and Cognition, The Collaborative Innovation Center for Capital Education Development, Department of Psychology, Capital Normal University, Beijing, China and the Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China--could possibly pull off!

In essence, they confirmed that subjects recognized creativity as a potentially powerful antidote to negative emotions, something that has been established empirically for some time. What was fascinating, however, was that subjects negative feelings about the targeted video scenes could only be "affected" substantially by being led through creative exercises. In other words, they couldn't get past the negatives by doing something creative on their own, themselves, without help. Wow.

Instructor-conducted / creativity-driven / negative attitudes /  toward pronunciation teaching repair/reappraisal (INPRR pronounced: In-P-RR). What a concept! Well, actually, much of what passes for creativity training is instructor-centered, not designed to provide you with the tools but to guide you in thinking outside of the box so  you know what it feels like when it happens. I was really into that for a couple of decades in pronunciation teacher training, in fact. There are still those in the field, like Marsha Chan, who do that well, the "there are all kinds of really creative, fun things you can do when teaching  pronunciation" shtick. Working with kids, that plays well; with adults, on the whole I have always thought it is at best counter productive.  (The reasons for that have been developed on the blog extensively.)

However, I may have it wrong. But rather than training teacher trainees in creative techniques to use in the classroom, I should be doing creative activities with them that address their underlying negative feelings (fear, self doubt, etc.) directly. Some suggestions, most of which I have seen over the years at conferences or on the web. I'll get things started with a few that are research-based (and reported on the blog recently) and then you help by adding to the list your best INPR:

• Have them list all those negative pronunciation-induced emotions on the top of cookies or in chocolate and eat them.
• Lead them in doing your basic OEI switching technique to defuse the emotion if it is really strong. (Done with only one student at a time, in private, however.)
• Have them talk about themselves fearing pronunciation in the 3rd person (See Gollum Speak)
•  Lead them in coming up with a list of all the ways they might overcome such emotions and then have select students read out each expressively and dramatically in their heaviest L1 accent (I like that one!)
• Have them share with each other in pairs their negative feelings toward pronunciation holding a hot beverage. That one is incredibly powerful.
• Then have them report back to the class in pantomime, having the rest of the class guess what it is. 
• You stand up in front of the class and begin listing verbally the unrealistic fears your students may have about pronunciation or those that they may have now but will be "gone" at the end of the course. Also have a list on the board of epithets appropriate for shouting down goofy ideas which the students produce after you state each, possibly accompanied by gesture. 
• Come to class dressed as Sigmund Freud or your neighborhood therapist. Sit in a comfortable chair and answer their questions chewing on a pipe, suggesting hilariously funny solutions to their fears. (I sat in on one of those in Japan that was priceless and exceedingly effective, I think.)
• Have a "Love me, love my accent day" in class where students intentionally speak with stereo-typically heavy accent. (Have seen that recommended a number of times.)

Your turn! I'll award a set of the v4.5 AHEPS DVDs to the contributor of the best one!

Source: 
Retrieved September 18, 2017 from http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01598/full

The "wrong" way to get pronunciation teaching right!

Clker.com

If you don't get the James Clear newsletter already, go sign up for it, or at least read his latest piece on "inversion": Inversion: The Crucial Thinking Skill Nobody Ever Taught You.  Inversion, or "envisioning the negative things that could happen in life" is not a popular strategy today for any number reasons. People who dwell on the downside may not be all that welcome in any social or professional context, but, as Clear demonstrates, used appropriately such "thinking out of the box" processes such as "If we wanted to kill the company or the program, how might we do that?" often reveal unique and innovative solutions. He gives a number of famous examples. 

I recently experimented with that heuristic on my own model, method and business plan with some striking results and . . . revelations. I had earlier worked with an executive coach for about 6 months  and "inversion" would have been absolutely anathema to that process: Think positive; visualize positive goals and outcomes; consider effective strategies and moves going forward. But what if I, instead, had focused in on the consequences of NOT staying  goal-oriented and upbeat? Actually, I might be further along than I am now . . .

Just for a fun thought experiment, try out questions such as these on your own program, course, system or method:

How could I . . .  

• Provide useless or pointless advice on self correction or self-instruction of pronunciation?
• Disconnect student's from their bodies in pronunciation work?
• Undermine students' development of intelligibility or accuracy?
• Help students develop a deep distrust and aversion to an English or English dialect spoken by any other group? 
• Establish impossible targets of perfection for learners?
• Create enough emotional tension or distraction in the room to seriously interfere with students "uptaking" pronunciation instruction?
• Make sure that students don't do pronunciation homework? 
• Arrange student groups to discourage constructive collaborative work? 
• Use correction to badger, berate or bully students? 
• Seriously mess with learners' identities in teaching pronunciation? 
• Make pronunciation instruction as boring as possible? 
• Make students think their pronunciation is better than it is? 
• Successfully ignore attention to pronunciation entirely? 
• Talk more about pronunciation than actually do anything with it? 
• Be an awful model for my students?
• Teach pronunciation without any training in it?
• Teach pronunciation without using phonetic symbols? 
• Encourage students to go to some "Miracle Accent Reduction" website instead of working with me?. 
• Make students think their accent is bad or could not use a little enhancement

 Based on that exercise, I have made some important changes in how v5.0 of the haptic pronunciation system will look when it rolls out. Now I just have to work through what will happen if that doesn't work, of course!

 Please feel free to add to the list in the comment section!

KIT

Bill

"Classless" pronunciation teaching and "miscue-aggression"?

Attended a delightful, engaging, stimulating and very well presented workshop on teaching pronunciation last week--by a charismatic, former drama teacher who had been teaching a twice-weekly pronunciation course for college ESL students for well over a decade. After the session, in the hall, one of the less experienced participants remarked: "Phenomenal presentation . . . but I couldn't possibly use any of those techniques in my class!" No kidding. Why not?

One of the most "striking" techniques demonstrated was when the teacher or student would comically hit a student over the head with an artificial daisy whenever he or she made a pronunciation miscue. The presenter remarked, in fact, that in all her years of teaching pronunciation she had never had a student complain about being corrected. And, after just an hour in the presence of that presenter, I don't doubt that . . .for a minute.

Two reasons most of what was presented was pretty much "in-applicable" to most of us in the audience. First, rapport. The presenter was one of those gifted teachers who almost instantly creates a safe and yet wildly creative milieu where learners will engage in extraordinary risk taking and not be threatened in the least. Second, and related, was the fact that many of the techniques demonstrated required that kind of "wide open" classroom setting to work effectively and especially--efficiently, in the first place.

The point: so often what can be done in a dedicated pronunciation class or language lab, with all its relational and situational constraints and social contracts, cannot be done in an integrated classroom setting where pronunciation is taught or attended to only piecemeal or occasionally or on a more impromptu basis. As research has demonstrated convincingly, instructors and students alike do not generally feel comfortable with much of how pronunciation is taught today. With good reason.

Photo: Dartmouth.edu

The affective and emotional context of pronunciation teaching is critical, even more so than for many other aspects of language teaching. In a dedicated "dramatic" class, strange things may work well; in an integrated "classless" setting, the rules and consequences can be very different. The "take way" from the dramatic, engaging workshop: Very little . . .

John Rassias (1925-2015) where are you when we need you?

Front and back-brained creativity--"monkeying around" with (haptic) pronunciation change!

Clip art:
Clker.com

One argument against extensive kinaesthetic involvement in general instruction or pronunciation teaching (using gesture and movement) has always been the superiority of "front brain" as opposed to more "back brain" learning -- or the excessive "flamboyance" of many overly "gesticular" promoters of such systems, myself included up to about a decade ago, unfortunately!

That also seemed to be supported by the apparent separation between areas of the brain involved with "higher" executive, cognitive functions such as planning and strategy use (in the prefrontal cortex) from those that have more to do with motor control and learning, for example, the "lowly" cerebellum at the back of the brain. In other words, the more conscious, cognitive insight, control and involvement "up front", probably the better.

But consider this new research by Saggar, Quintin, Kienitz, Bott, Sun, Hong, Chien, Liu, Dougherty, Royalty, Hawthorne and Reiss of Stanford University (longest list of co-authors I have ever seen!) entitled:  Pictionary-based fMRI paradigm to study the neural correlates of spontaneous improvisation and figural creativity. (Full citation below).

According to the Science Daily summary, the researchers have discovered "unexpected brain structures" that connect creativity to motor centres in the brain. In effect, they have demonstrated that motor involvement or embodiment is apparently fundamental to a much wider range of learning and cognitive functioning than thought previously.

And why was this just now revealed? Simple, perhaps. According to the authors, previous models were based primarily on earlier research with primate/monkey brains. Not surprisingly, in retrospect, the connection between thinking and moving in the monkey brain might, indeed, be a bit different than that--in at least most of our students . . . 

The research design was ingenious, using Pictionary/creative drawing tasks with fMRI monitoring of brain engagement. (Being a great fan of Pictionary, that is not surprising!) What was surprising, however, was that the motor centres in the cerebellum remained active and engaged long after the actual body movement activity had subsided, revealing the "embodied" side of what would normally be assumed to be visual/cognitive thought or processing.

In other words, the creative, improvisational activity was being carried on best, at least to some degree, outside of awareness, by what had appeared to be primarily "motor" circuits. Relatively too much pre-frontal involvement in the task was clearly counterproductive. 

One of the section subtitles of the Science Daily summary highlights a very relevant implication of that "discovery" (for haptic or other highly kinasethetic pronunciation work): 'The more you think about it, the more you mess it up' . . . Or, to quote the great Nike slogan: Just do it!

That may explain some of the current ineffectiveness of pronunciation instruction: Too much cerebellum or not quite enough!

Think about it!

Full Citation from Science Daily.com (To appear soon in the Journal Scientific Reports):
Stanford University Medical Center. "Unexpected brain structures tied to creativity, and to stifling it." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 28 May 2015. .

When to do pronunciation work and what to do before you do

Clip art: Clker

Clip art: Clker

Stare at that pineapple for a minute or so before reading this post, please . . . From a curriculum perspective, pronunciation work can happen most anytime. It can, of course, be more or less integrated into actual classroom or one-on-one lessons depending on a "plethora" of factors. The EHIEP system, for example,  involves (a) decontextualized, out of class or in class introduction on video, (b) formal integration within lesson teaching objectives and content, (c) impromptu correction and anchoring in any lesson, and (c) focus on integration into spontaneous speech. (For a good, basic introduction to curricular integration for beginners, advanced and workplace programs, see Fraser's 2001 general introduction.) Where in time, however, in the course of a lesson or even a personal practice session at home is another question. In general, we begin with Lessac's "Train the body first!" dictum, which applies to the overall pronunciation program to some extent as well, meaning we try to do some kind of explicit body-engaged warm up as an integral part of speaking instruction in general. The importance of some kind of warm up that focuses mind and body has been empirically validated by any number of studies. Here is a striking example, a 2012 study comparing the effect of meditation type on creative thinking. "Open attention focus meditation," in effect clearing the mind and concentrating on nothing specific, enhanced creative, divergent thinking. "Focused attention," on the other hand, where for example one might concentrate on one object, like a pineapple on the table or a visualization of some kind, tended to improve creative, convergent thinking, the sort you might need in pulling together the pieces of a puzzle or problem. In most cases, effective anchoring of pronunciation requires the latter type of mind set. Meditate on that. 

Embodied, imaginative pronunciation practice

Clipart: Clker

Clipart: Clker

In workshops, I often begin with the question: What do you know about how your students work on their pronunciation outside of class? Do they? (To paraphrase a current country western song, "What happens in pronunciation class, all too often . . . stays in pronunciation class!") In a nice piece on learning a new piece for the flute--which is easily translated into our work, Lea Pearson offers the following:  "Embodied practicing is practicing in which you engage your whole self - body, mind, emotions and multisensory awareness - in all you do. It has three main aspects: Learning the music away from the flute, imaginary practicing and regular practicing." Note especially the bridge from cognitive, intellectual attention to the piece of music as communication, to "regular" whole-person, normal performance: imaginary practicing. By that she means ' . . . imagining everything you might be doing to make the music – finger movement, breathing, embouchure changes, dynamics, articulation, expression, etc – all with a multisensory awareness." What this framework contributes to our understanding of (haptic-) integrated practice is the role of expressiveness and creativity in anchoring changed pronunciation. As noted in earlier posts, expressiveness and enthusiasm do not always contribute positively to the process (both can also serve to undermine anchoring of specific targets as well) but carefully managed "embodied practice" as described by Pearson seems very promising. More on the specifics of how that "bridge" might work in EHIEP instruction later. Imagine that!

Pedagogical movement patterns in pronunciation teaching

Clip art: Clker

Clip art: Clker

Based on the work of Newman and others in the field of nursing, this 2011 study by Picard looked at, among other things, the relationship between creative movement (something analogous to modern, expressive, interpretative dance) and pattern recognition (of various life experiences and personal constructs of identity.) "There was congruence between creative movement and narrative in terms of engagement with the environment and range of response. Movement was experienced as integrative and led to pattern recognition . . . The construct of movement in expanding consciousness was examined in terms of flow, turbulence and dialectic within pattern." (Note the nice "textural" metaphors there!) To translate that into haptic-integrated pronunciation teaching, what movement is facilitating, among other things, is the ability to manage fluency and accuracy, moving back and forth--in dialectic fashion (keeping both in attention) between focus on form and conversational narrative. (See earlier "Change the channel fallacy" post.) The other feature of the research, keeping creativity in play as patterns are considered and conceptualized is also essential. Pattern drill in pronunciation often appears to have a half life of seconds, at best (3 second in fact!) Movement and gesture are valuable tools in pronunciation teaching, to be sure, but only when applied with intelligent design . . . 

Aesthetic (haptic) touch

Clip art: Clker

For many, the idea of attending to touch is considerably outside of their conceptual box and comfort zone. Linked above is a nice piece from a sculptor, Rosalyn Driscoll, that helps to inform our understanding of the way in which the creative use of touch can be experienced. One dimension of her art is that the audience actually touches the pieces or projects and in that manner comes to interpret and appreciate it. The felt sense of that process--and HICP work, I might add-- ought to to be an attitude or mindset of curiosity, sensitivity and appreciation. When it is, being able to later recall and integrate what was in focus is much more than just a nice "aesthetic touch"--it is the essence of sound learning. Our students as well ought to be "touched" by our EHIEP instruction and theirs. 

How to engage the haptic-o-phobes and the kinesthetically challenged

From this 2011 research by Yang (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), Ringberg (Copenhagen Business School), Mao (University of Central Florida), and Peracchio (University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee), it appears that the secret is to check first as to whether the learner is creative enough to love haptic in the first place. If not, forget it. If so, however, it appears that the sufficiently creative are much more open to working in their non-dominant cognitive styles or modalities. HICP that training in non-dominant modalities is critical for the learner, in many cases explicitly avoiding the learner's primary "cluttered" channel(s) or cognitive style.

Clip art: Clker

So perhaps, we need to do some more creativity training earlier on to engage the dull, unimaginative stragglers, before we ask them to hyper-gesticulate in public . . . or possibly forward them on to a program that better fits their personalities? That should not be too difficult, eh.