To the Followers of the “Lehman Cult”  Vol.2

To the Followers of the “Lehman Cult”  Vol.2

So, what did you think? For those who read “Part 1”, what was your impression? First, we must clarify a key point: it was *he* (Mr. Bradley Lehman) who unilaterally wrote his own “declaration of termination”, saying, “I have a family, so… Toshi, bye-bye”. (Please refer to this article for details: “To the followers of the ‘Lehman Cult’ Vol.1” https://excelkobo.net/archive/10829)
However, I knew it all along: he would be back soon enough (lol). And just as I predicted, he returned in less than an hour (lol). What’s more, a certain “Rob-what’s-his-name”—a fellow “Lehman Cult” follower—showed up to “back him up”, which emboldened “Master Lehman” to get all fired up (lol).

There is a Japanese saying about someone who “sets a fire themselves and then calls the fire department”. He did the exact opposite: he extinguished a fire himself, only to set it ablaze all over again. It was a truly pathetic spectacle.

Now, the method I used for this “dialogue” with him is one I learned from a Japanese journalist I deeply respect. His name is Katsuichi Honda. He is revered as an absolute icon among Japan’s conscientious liberals. I first encountered him when I was in elementary school and read his famous reportage, “Canadian Eskimos”, which was included in my Japanese language textbook. His later masterpiece, *The Logic of the Killer* (Korosu Gawa no Ronri), was brilliant. I was captivated by his rhetoric. In that book, he engages in a “debate” in a certain publisher’s magazine with a man claiming to be Jewish. The razor-sharp “sword of his pen” utterly shredded his opponent. Reading his writing gave me a sense of indescribable “catharsis”. I wrote an article sharing my thoughts on it at the time, and I would be delighted if you took a look.
“Net Right-Wing Trolls and the ‘Parting Shot'” (Originally written 25 years ago by Toshi)
https://excelkobo.net/archive/10816
https://www.facebook.com/groups/1087954046763597/posts/1443503371208661/

Rob Turner
Bradley Lehman it seems clear that Toshi-san is the only person who really understands these things in the way that he does: he is “outstanding in his field.” As it seems doubtful that he will entertain good faith arguments or evidence that contradicts his agenda, it may be best to save the time and conserve the energy that further discussion would entail. Sometimes the greatest jiu jitsu is to simply not engage. In other words, leave him out standing in his field.

Bradley Lehman
Rob Turner He summarily declared the substantive discussion finished last night, rather abruptly and not inviting me to make any closing statement similar to his.

At this point, I am awaiting any response from him where I posted 7 hours ago (this morning) asking if any of his side of the discussion was written with a chatbot — in effect expecting me without my knowledge or consent to argue the material against an intractable and non-human computer. (It certainly has felt that way to me, in retrospect, as I realized this morning.) But, within the past hour or so, he as page administrator has hidden that frank question by me from his audience, rather than answering it. It says to me that my posting is now “pending admin approval”, which is odd for a discussion where he declared everything to be open.

Readers and I all deserve to know who has been writing his side of the discussion, given that I have been 100% human on my side of it, and assuming in good faith that he also was.

I wish I had known about such jiu jitsu advice as yours 5 days ago, when this discussion started on the other group.

Bradley Lehman
Rob Turner Facebook just now showed me a Japanese group where he posted some part of this vendetta 5 days ago, but I wasn’t there to offer any kind of defense against the misleading accusations. He can be “left out standing” in that field.

Rob Turner
Bradley Lehman sometimes no defense is really necessary, especially when it will simply be a complete waste of effort.

Bradley Lehman
Rob Turner Hey, you might enjoy this. I have been rereading Sauveur’s 1697 and 1701 this evening, going back through my 2022 stuff, and seeing again what Devie said about his temperaments. Sauveur said in 1701 that the ordinary musicians use the 55-division (1/6 comma), but he himself was going around trying get harpsichord builders and other folks to promote 43 (1/5). And he had one from 1697 where you go with all your normal naturals first (F-C-G-D-A-E-B) in 1/5, and then you simply put all the sharps and flats halfway on each, with 2 semi-wolves not too bad at B-F# and Bb-F. How would that sharp-splitting sound with lipping or angling things on your flutes, and basing it on 1/5 rather than 1/6?

(Not that you would have to match everything, but playing with accompaniment on a harpsichord set that way.)
I am a big fan of 1/5 myself.
Here is Devie.
[Some kind of image]

Rob Turner
Bradley Lehman it’s just a question of where you place the notes, how you make them fit in each chord/against the bass. Traverso is flexible that way.

Bradley Lehman
Rob Turner Cool. And here is Rudolf Rasch explaining some of Sauveur’s wildest microtonal stuff from 1697. You have your 43-division naturals from F, etc. And then, you have your single, double, or triple flats or sharps in the score by which side or the stem the flag is on. And THEN, with dots on either side, you can adjust everything further in increments of 1/7 of a 43rd step within the octave. That’s splitting the octave into 301, more than a century before “cents”. But THEN, he also splits all of those into 10 each, so 3010 steps in the octave.

Good luck to keeping track of the 1/7th pitch bends and dots, with a mind not already blitzed by the flags. I’m glad I just play harpsichord and press the keys I have set up.
[Some kind of image]

Bradley Lehman
Rob Turner Sing your plainchant with microtones here in 1701.
[Some kind of image]

Bradley Lehman
Rob Turner And then your 7 sizes of flutes in 1/5 comma, in 1701.
[Some kind of image]

Bradley Lehman
Rob Turner It’s fun to share this stuff with a real human expert early-musician!

Rob Turner
Bradley Lehman it would be fun to play together again sometime!

Bradley Lehman
Rob Turner What was that, 27 years ago?

Rob Turner
Bradley Lehman something like that — maybe a little less. I moved to IN in 2002.

Bradley Lehman
Rob Turner Yeah, one of those times we got back down the servants’ stairs to the kitchen and they hadn’t saved any food plates for musicians, so they hastily tried to soothe us with pizza delivery. That was not very elegant.

Rob Turner
Bradley Lehman oh, yes, there are those times that make it clear that we’re “only servants” — on the other hand sometimes the full-time servants have the attitude that “we’re in this together.” For instance I remember the once-in-a-lifetime treat when a butler made sure that, once the host and guests had moved to the dining room, we musicians got to serve ourselves real Caspian Sea beluga caviar …

—————-

Bradley Lehman
4 Sometime after 6:00pm, in my time zone, a new person independently joined the discussion on one of the older sub-threads. It was Rob Turner, professional traverso player. We have not seen one another for at least 25 years, when he lived about 75 miles from me rather than 500 miles. We had played together when he lived here. We have kept in touch on Messenger some, mostly to discuss his CDs (I have them) and other points of music or national politics. He is the world’s top expert on a glass crystal flute that had belonged to one of our presidents. Anyway, we had never discussed anything about you or this discussion of my Bach-tuning work.

Rob tagged me in his advice that I perhaps shouldn’t have tried to explain the research to you (Toshi), because you clearly were not open to receiving any such correction or enlightenment about it. His tagging alerted me to go read his paragraph of advice there. I saw this at about 7:00. First, I went to see if you had answered any of my questions or my follow-up. No. And it was worse than that: either you (as the admin) or Facebook’s own bots had thrown my question into “pending admin approval” status, where only you get to decide whether your public on the thread sees it or not. (It is still showing that grayed-out status today, and you still have not answered.) This felt like censorship to me.

So, in my response to my friend Rob, I remarked about the abrupt end of the discussion by you, and I remarked that I had asked you if you are a bot. I remarked to him that it was all hidden away and pending approval, only releasable by you (Toshi).

I’ll reproduce all of that discussion here, as snapshots, and number them so Facebook and you cannot lose or misrepresent the sequence (as your digest does).

Catching up with friend Rob, I showed him that I have been re-reading the work of Joseph Sauveur from 1697 and 1701, the sources cited as substantial parts of my arguments in both my 2005 and 2022 published articles. Sauveur is one of the principal witnesses to ordinary musicians of the time playing in sixth-comma and fifth-comma. I described one of Sauveur’s 1697 temperaments to Rob: fifth-comma in all the naturals (a keyboard temperament starting on F), and then compromising the sharps and flats. I asked Rob’s expert opinion of playing traverso with an accompaniment that would be tuned that way. We discussed flute, and some more Sauveur. We went on to reminisce a bit about old times.

The point is: Rob showed up on his own, he is not in any alleged “cult”, and he observed independently that you (Toshi) are apparently not open to learning here. I have taken Rob’s advice of not arguing the tuning material with you anymore, because you indeed are not open to it.
And then, at about midnight my time, you posted this new digest where you have again pulled my words out of context (against my expressed request), and assembled them into a narrative which makes little chronological sense and misrepresents what I said.

Showing you again a very important sentence from last week: “There is no orderly discussion possible on Facebook because it is not designed to be such a forum.” Your digest doesn’t represent a real-time discussion. It is you and your word-processing software having fun.

And here we are. You still have not answered the questions about using a bot to experiment on me without my consent, or the questions about responsibility to your own words — on your blog and on your groups. Your senses of propriety and protocol are not good. You are still not listening to me saying that you are misusing and misrepresenting my words. The platform itself has clearly-stated restrictions against pretending to be what one is not, as part of the standards that it enforces to protect everyone. And you need to take those seriously. Some intellectual-property rights could apply here, as well.

Bradley Lehman
(Rob/Bradley discussion Monday evening 9/28 part 1)
[Some kind of image]

Bradley Lehman
2 Anyway, the substantive discussion continued for several more days, where you kept refusing to accept evidence and explanations that I was providing in good faith.

On Sunday evening (per my time zone), you said some things that I felt I had to respond to immediately, even though I had family members to my house for a visit. You declared summarily that the discussion was over, and that you had supposedly won it, because I had never been able to change your mind. You also completely threw away the value of the hour of music that I was giving you to listen to, for free, where you had asked to hear what this Bach temperament sounds like in practice. You were, ONCE AGAIN, MOVING THE GOALPOSTS and refusing whatever I offered to your own requests. Sunday evening I wasted my time yet again in those moments, quickly typing out again a summary of much of the evidence and the reasoning that I had presented. (Don’t both people in a discussion get opportunity to make a closing statement, or even to concur when the discussion is over? As I perceived it, it was an unfair power play by you.)

You have misrepresented the chronology of that in your new digest here. But let’s continue.
I woke up during Sunday night with a bad feeling: that perhaps the whole discussion (suddenly declared ended) had been unfair to me and a trap in another way. I had put in most of a week answering everything in good faith that I was talking with another human. What if some of the “Toshi” side of the discussion was actually written by a chatbot computer, not merely doing translation but also suggesting or crafting some things to say back to me? In effect, it threw me into an undisclosed experiment that I had never consented to: arguing a defense of my published work against a COMPUTER that has no moral responsibilites to accuracy or truth. I decided to ask you about it, to find out the truth of it. I mulled over that, and I eventually got back to sleep after about 2 hours.

Monday morning, yesterday, I got up and did some professional work. I then wrote out my question to you, and posted it on the thread at about 11am my time. Having the feeling that something might happen to it, I took snapshots of it at about noon yesterday, to preserve it. I will reproduce that here, because it is NOT currently displayed on that thread (even though you quoted it as part of your new text digest here). It’s the part where you have newly accused me of deleting it myself, but I have not. It is still sitting there waiting for YOUR approval as admin of that forum.
[Snapshot of my 11am question, and the way it now appears grayed out as “pending admin approval” where someone is censoring it from your readers.]

Bradley Lehman
My 11am question yesterday, which members have been unable to see because either admin Toshi or Facebook itself have put it into “pending” gray status.
[Some kind of image]

Bradley Lehman
3 My question from 11am reminds you that I had expressly requested at the beginning not to reproduce the discussion. Please get that point where your behavior disrespects my request and disregards my dignity.

And I said there: “That includes: don’t plug my words into a robot (reproducing them into the robot’s interface) to have it help decide what to say back. The forum presented itself as a discussion between two 100% human men, not between one 100% man and an adversarial robot. I did not consent, and never would have consented, to such a thing where my task is to ‘persuade’ a robot, not a person who can hear music. TOSHI: As a human man, what can you say to refute or confirm this hypothesis that a large part of the “Toshi” side of the discussion was, in fact, done by a computer program rather than by 100% thinking from a human man? And if you did use a chatbot or robot, what is your responsibility as a human to stand by everything it has helped you to say?”

From noon, I set everything aside. I went to do some errands and some more professional work. At 5:15pm I went to look if you had yet answered any part of my posted question. It was a very important question of protocol about that discussion. Your readers and I really do deserve to know if your side of the proceedings has been using computer-generated advice.

There was no answer from you on that. (There still is not, today.)

So, at 5:30pm yesterday, I posted a follow-up observation and I took a snapshot of it for preservation. That’s here. I observed the lack of your response, and I pointed out that the platform itself has strict restrictions against inauthentic behaviors. I supplied the link from the platform’s own help section for you to study. I remarked also that part of my feeling about improper AI usage comes from the AI-generated title of the thread itself. I included a snapshot of that.

And I did not discuss my questions to you (are you partly a bot? aren’t there responsibilities to words?) with anyone. From 11am to this second question at 5:30pm yesterday, I was giving you opportunity to offer a dignified and true response. But nothing.
[Snapshot of that follow-up observation.]

Bradley Lehman
My 5:30pm follow-up.
[Some kind of image]

Bradley Lehman
1 Hi Toshi,
I’d like to respond to this new digest of yours, because your posting of it makes things less clear rather than more clear. I don’t know whether this anti-chronological mush comes from honest errors in your editing of it, or whether you have jumbled it in some perhaps intentionally misleading way. But, I’d like to highlight what was really said, in the sequence that it was said, because that context is important.

The protocol of respecting a person’s words and a person’s explicitly stated wishes is important, and I feel that you have breached that; and you are still doing it.

The “thread” in question was your Facebook posting on the “Bach and his Time” group, where you are the admin. It is the posting where you alleged that there is a “frenzy” of some “Lehman cult”, and where you insisted that our private Messenger discussion be taken in public. You were obviously baiting me to explain the tuning principles further, to see what you could get out of me in that. You complained about my first posting there, saying that you wanted me to number my paragraphs (a newly made-up rule by you). I replied that this isn’t like 18th century German books where paragraphs really are numbered. My next sentence is very important: “This is Facebook chatter, and not publication, and not for any reproduction outside this immediate thread.”

Read that again. “This is Facebook chatter, and not publication, and not for any reproduction outside this immediate thread.”

That immediate thread. That discussion of your false perception that some “cult” exists. That discussion where you kept saying that you reject evidence in my published work on your questions about temperament. That discussion where I looked up resources for you, showed them to you, and explained how keyboard tuning works. That discussion where you copied out my words, probably stuck them into one of your AI interfaces for analysis, and decided what you would say next to keep the discussion going. That discussion that was presumably conducted by two humans, but where one of those humans (you) might have been using an AI chatbot for some part of it. For clarity: that’s what I mean by keeping things in the context of that thread. That thread, in sequence, in chronological sequence of two humans exchanging ideas.

Your digest here (this new one) omits the fact and all the snapshots where I showed you 7 screenshots from my web FAQ, and 2 pages from my 2005 articles, pertinent ones where your new questions had already been answered 20 years ago. You have persisted in disregarding all such snapshots as evidence. Is that because you can’t actually read them (a language barrier?), or because you wanted to find out first what a computer would tell you that they say, or to have a computer advise you how to respond, or that they just don’t fit into whatever editing you are doing (pulling the evidence out of context)?

In any case, you have refused to accept that evidence. You tried to force me not to express the material with “URLs or PDFs” or snapshots. I replied that a person who starts a discussion (you) doesn’t get to dictate or restrict what written evidence his adversary brings to support his position. I’d say (today) that this is even more important in a discussion where the accuser (that’s you) is alleging in a caustic way that the defender (that’s me) had done something wrong in published work. I as the defender should get to SHOW that published work, and explain why it’s not faulty. And we’ll set aside your caustic tone in the ways you misrepresent me, for the moment. We’ll also set aside the way you insult everyone who has taken my work seriously, for the moment.
I showed you a snapshot from your own blog where you have distorted Bach’s drawing into a circle. I explained to you in detail why it is wrong and misleading to manipulate source evidence in such a way. Your editing software or your chatbot, making this new digest, just dismisses that snapshot as “some kind of image” in a way where any new readers of this digest would miss the point that was being made there.

Bradley Lehman
[Toshi’s distortion of Bach’s work into a circle, changing the source, before proposing to say that something is wrong with my work on it.] [Some kind of image]

Bradley Lehman
The best part of your obsessive digest is that place where I recommended 6 excellent CDs (all by people other than me) where this tuning fits into their expert musicianship. There are many others beyond those 6, as well. Those CDs can be listened to by humans, but probably not yet by AI fake humans.

I do my written work for humans who read, who play instruments, who listen to their instruments, and who then draw their own intelligent conclusions what to do, from any other experience and clues of their choosing. And I play music for humans who show up wanting to hear something beautiful.

Bradley Lehman
Here’s the hour of music (all tuned this way and played by me) that I posted in the other thread, for anyone who wants to hear what it really sounds like. Enjoy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2woFLXeGRbg…
Lent into Easter 2020 – Bradley Lehman (part 1 of 7)
YOUTUBE.COM
Lent into Easter 2020 – Bradley Lehman (part 1 of 7)
Lent into Easter 2020 – Bradley Lehman (part 1 of 7)

Bradley Lehman
Also thrown into review (hidden from members) by either the admin or by the platform, here on this thread:
[Some kind of image]返信する

Bradley Lehman
Once again, the platform itself has turned the sequence into hash. But, the proper way to read my comments is to set it to display “all comments” (not only what it deems “most relevant” by its algorithms), and then: The one about CDs and beauty, and then parts 1-2-3-4 each having snapshots illustrating them.
Cheerio!

———–

The Slapstick Comedy of “Master Lehman” and His Disciple Rob

Barely an hour after his dramatic exit declaration (“I have a family, so… bye-bye”), Dr. Bradley Lehman crept back into the thread under the cover of night. This time, he brought along a loyal follower named “Rob” to act as his emotional shield. What followed on the timeline of “Bach and his Time” was an absolute circus of intellectual evasion and mutual consolation.

Unable to face my rigorous structural critiques, Lehman resorted to a pathetic coping mechanism: accusing my writing of being generated by an AI chatbot. He desperately tried to convince his disciple that he was the victim of a non-human trap, simply because his academic pride could not stomach being defeated by a human interlocutor.

Worse still, instead of answering my core question—why his model consensus radically violates the 18th-century common sense of starting temperaments from C—Lehman completely fled the thesis. He began bombarding his companion with irrelevant, esoteric snapshots of 1701 microtonal treatises just to flaunt his academic authority.

The comedy reached its peak when the two historical “experts” entirely abandoned J.S. Bach and spent the rest of the night reminiscing about pizza deliveries from 27 years ago and boasting about a once-in-a-lifetime treat of Caspian Sea beluga caviar given to them by a butler.

While over 800 early music enthusiasts stood watching, waiting for a serious scientific defense, the “Savior of Bach’s Tuning” chose instead to escape into a private ego-stroking session about caviar. This is the shallow reality of the Lehman Cult. Read the verbatim transcript below and judge their intellectual integrity for yourselves:

———–

Epilogue

On the Liberation of Mind Control: De-programming the Lehman Cult

This time, I have unmasked a con artist for all to see. As I observed the recent emotional, frantic back-and-forth from the supporters of Dr. Bradley Lehman, a sobering realization dawned on me: the walls of text, the reflexive censorship, and the blind obedience they exhibit are not the behaviors of academic discourse. They are the classic symptoms of a cult mechanism.

Lehman’s convoluted, anachronistic formulas function not as historical theories, but as a form of auditory sorcery—beguiling well-meaning musicians and enthusiasts into believing that he has magically manifested as the sole “Savior” of Bach’s lost intentions. Seeing this, I cannot help but wish, from the bottom of my heart, for his “followers” to break free from this intellectual cage, to shatter the spell, and to reclaim their own healthy, independent musical reasoning.

Please do not mistake my mission here as a matter of personal “likes or dislikes”, nor as a petty desire for “attention”. I say this with the utmost gravity because I myself almost fell into his trap. When he first began bombarding me with his endless streams of PDFs and outdated URLs years ago, I treated them with earnest respect. I sat down and read them diligently.

But one day, a foundational, irrepressible question pierced through the fog: “Is any of this actually true?”.

The moment I trusted my own ears—the physical resonance of the intervals that I had spent years shaping as a flauto traverso player—the elaborate mathematical house of cards collapsed. I realized the profound tragedy of this setup: this man is completely chained to the printed page. He looks at diagrams, he counts decimals, but does he actually listen to the physical music?

My final goal in unleashing these critiques across the global early music forums is not to humiliate individuals. It is an act of rescue. It is to show the followers that when their “guru” is cornered by simple, unyielding acoustic facts, his only defense is to repeat his 20-year-old dogmas like a mantra and run behind group moderators to censor the truth.

Wake up. Put away the inverted scrolls and the sterile digital calculations. Go back to the keyboard, trust your own ears, listen to the breathing of the triads, and step out of the cage into the living, dangerous, and beautiful reality of the Baroque universe.

Mr. Lehmann, who was lectured by his own son for “staring at the monitor all the time lately,” continues to diligently send me “long messages” on Facebook almost every night—even now that all the contests have been decided (lol).

———–

P.S.
The Midnight Meltdown: Dr. Lehman’s Intractable One-Man Show

Following a private nostalgia session, Dr. Bradley Lehman’s psychological state spiraled into a panic, resulting in a late-night frantic bombardment of text on the timeline. Readers can find the full verbatim text in the referenced materials.

His late-night response reflected profound frustration and confusion regarding moderation systems, alongside personal admissions of lost sleep and legalistic appeals concerning protocol and rights.

片山俊幸
Hello Dr. Lehman. I have just manually rescued your comments from Facebook’s automatic “Spam Filter”. It seems the platform’s AI flagged your frantic late-night multi-postings as inauthentic bot-like behavior. Please rest assured, I do not censor you; your midnight meltdown is now fully visible to our 800+ audience. Feel free to keep shadowboxing. Cheers!

———–

Just a while ago, when I opened the Facebook admin dashboard, I was surprised to find that yet another late-night comment from Mr. Lehman had been flagged as “spam” by Facebook’s automated system and was sitting in the “pending approval” queue.

The content was a real gem. Having woken up in the middle of the night, he had worked himself into a genuine panic, claiming, “I fed Toshi’s blog URL into ChatGPT, and it determined there was an 88% probability the text was written by AI! Toshi is an AI ‘fake human’!”

Taking pity on him, I decided to manually “rescue” the comment from the spam folder and make it public.

I invite you all to take a look—and perhaps chuckle—at this perfect punchline (backed by irrefutable visual evidence): the fact that Mr. Lehman’s own writing—in which he was trying to escape reality by insisting “The other guy is an AI (robot)!”—was the very thing Facebook’s AI system flagged as “suspicious, bot-like abnormal behavior”, treating him like a spammer.

Bradley Lehman
5 One other thing. I have said here that I’ve felt like I have been arguing against a computer, not only a human, and that it feels unfair. How is there a way to assess that? Well, how about asking an AI to judge if something else was done by AI? How about Toshi’s own blog?So, this new experiment can be done by anybody for your own satisfaction. Go to any chatbot of your choice, and put in a prompt such as:”Analyze the web page https://excelkobo.net/archive/10603 . Estimate the likelihood that most of it was drafted by an AI chatbot, not a human. Show the evidence and your reasoning for that estimate.”And then, read where it goes through stylistic analysis and corroborative evidence, and comes up with an estimate and an explanation. I tried it just now with a public session of ChatGPT, no login or anything. It said that (by its estimation) there is a Toshi human bringing some of the basic ideas, but then an 88% likelihood that he has used AI to write the prose and fashion some of the argumentative points. It also points out that the blog says Toshi himself is primarily an interface programmer, as part of the circumstantial evidence.Try this 2-minute experiment for yourself, and see what it says.My own web site is, incidentally, 0% AI. Every character in it is personally thought out and typed by me; not any machine telling me what I ought to say. Same with the articles and their research, 0% AI: months going through the material until it is ready. I believe that human control of these things is worthwhile. And I don’t enjoy reading AI spew used by other people as if they wrote it, and as if they were responsible for the effects of “their own” ghost-written words to human readers. Thinking must be one’s own, as a human!

Bradley Lehman
To myself as a reader, it feels like most of the blog page at https://excelkobo.net/archive/10603 was probably written by an AI chatbot, going only partly from human Toshi’s ideas. Is that why Toshi (the human) does not stand by his own words posted there or in the discussions? That a robot wrote substantial points of it, without being held responsible for some of the words and phrases being csustic and false accusations? Beyond some translation from Japanese prompts into suspiciously lofty English prose, what did an agentic AI actually write in forming its conclusions and its accusations?Furthermore, is it an AI (not entirely a human) also posting excerpts into Facebook groups to get engagement, not merely a human repeating his material manually?In the discussion on the 2 Facebook forums, and in all of the private questioning this past week, I have been 100% a human. All the reading, thinking, consulting my written sources, taking snapshots, and writing my responses has been 100% my human work, knowing the material and not consulting an AI. The only AI intervention was:– Facebook itself automatically putting a spell-checker onto my typing.– On Saturday, I got help from a Google Translate translation of Emile Jobin’s 2005 French article, which I read side by side with the original to be sure I understood again all of his native-French linguistic points that I read 21 years ago in French.I absolutely did not use any AI in deciding what to say to “Toshi”, or even how to say it.And I assumed through all these discussions that I was talking with a 100% human man on the “Toshi” side. That would be a fair discussion.It occurred to me during the night today, waking up many hours too early: what if my conversation on the 2 Facebook forums and in the private Messenger chat has been NOT with a 100% human, but instead, mostly with a chatbot (an agentic AI)? Is “Toshi” or his bot really taking my words from the discussion, and having the bot help to decide what to say to me next? Is it really a bot that is stringing me along and perpetually moving the goalposts, refusing to accept any of my answers, to see how long it can make me do work while it pretends on its side to be a human?Is the whole discussion, in fact, a setup of a false situation where one side (Toshi’s) is partly or wholly a fake human? Let’s be clear: for my own side of the discussions, I did not consent to any such experiment, or any such entrapment set up without my knowledge.That would explain such things as: Why are none of my snapshots from existing materials admitted to be any part of the evidence? Why must the paragraphs be numbered for someone’s convenience? Why does the “Toshi” side not learn from anything that was in my FAQ or my published articles for more than 20 years? Why is there an insistence on using only new text, which would be convenient to paste into a chatbot window?I got back to sleep, eventually, after thinking through those ideas. It was stressful to consider those possibilities and their ramifications. It wasted another several hours of my life.Toshi’s blog page cited here even says at the right side that the human is a software developer of user interfaces.And I recalled what I said at the beginning. “This is Facebook chatter, and not publication, and not for any reproduction outside this immediate thread.” That includes: don’t plug my words into a robot (reproducing them into the robot’s interface) to have it help decide what to say back. The forum presented itself as a discussion between two 100% human men, not between one 100% man and an adversarial robot. I did not consent, and never would have consented, to such a thing where my task is to “persuade” a robot, not a person who can hear music.TOSHI: As a human man, what can you say to confirm or refute this hypothesis that a large part of the “Toshi” side of the discussion was, in fact, done by a computer program rather than by 100% thinking from a human man?And if you did use a chatbot or robot, what is your responsibility as a human to stand by everything it has helped you to say?