The Parrot in the Machine | James Gleick | The New York Review of Books
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The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want
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The Line: AI and the Future of Personhood
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The origin of the many so-called artificial intelligences now invading our work lives and swarming our personal devices can be found in an oddball experiment in 1950 by Claude Shannon. Shannon is known now as the creator of information theory, but then he was an obscure mathematician at the Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York’s West Village. Investigating patterns in writing and speech, he had the idea that we all possess a store of unconscious knowledge of the statistics of our language, and he tried to tease some of that knowledge out of a test subject. The subject conveniently at hand was his wife, Betty.<br>Nowadays a scientist can investigate the statistics of language—probabilistic correlations among words and phrases—by feeding quantities of text into computers. Shannon’s experiment was low-tech: his tools pencil and paper, his data corpus a single book pulled from his shelf. It happened to be a collection of detective stories. He chose a passage at random and asked Betty to guess the first letter.<br>“T,” she said. Correct! Next: “H.” Next: “E.” Correct again. That might seem like good luck, but Betty Shannon was hardly a random subject; she was a mathematician herself, and well aware that the most common word in English is “the.” After that, she guessed wrong three times in a row. Each time, Claude corrected her, and they proceeded in this way until she generated the whole short passage:
The room was not very light. A small oblong reading lamp on the desk shed glow on polished wood but less on the shabby red carpet.1
Tallying the results with his pencil, experimenter Shannon reckoned that subject Shannon had guessed correctly 69 percent of the time, a measure of her familiarity with the words, idioms, and clichés of the language.<br>As I write this, my up-to-date word processor keeps displaying guesses of what I intend to type next. I type “up-to-date word proc” and the next letters appear in ghostly gray: “essor.” AI has crept into the works. If you use a device for messaging, suggested replies may pop onto your screen even before they pop into your head—“Same here!”; “I see it differently.”—so that you can express yourself without thinking too hard.<br>These and the other AIs are prediction machines, presented as benevolent helpmates. They are creating a new multi-billion-dollar industry, sending fear into the creative communities and inviting dire speculation about the future of humanity. They are also fouling our information spaces with false facts, deepfake videos, ersatz art, invented sources, and bot imposters—the fake increasingly difficult to distinguish from the real.<br>Artificial intelligence has a seventy-year history as a term of art, but its new incarnation struck like a tsunami in November 2022 when a start-up company called OpenAI, founded with a billion dollars from an assortment of Silicon Valley grandees and tech bros, released into the wild a “chatbot” called ChatGPT. Within five days, a million people had chatted with the bot. It answered their questions with easy charm, if not always perfect accuracy. It generated essays, poems, and recipes on command. Two months later, ChatGPT had 100 million users. It was Aladdin’s genie, granting unlimited wishes. Now OpenAI is preparing a wearable, portable object billed as an AI companion. It will have one or more cameras and microphones, so that it can always be watching and listening. You might wear it around your neck, a tiny albatross.<br>“ChatGPT feels different,” wrote Kevin Roose in The New York Times.
Smarter. Weirder. More flexible. It can write jokes (some of which are actually funny), working computer code and college-level essays. It can also guess at medical diagnoses, create text-based Harry Potter games and explain scientific concepts at multiple levels of difficulty.
Some claimed that it had a sense of humor. They routinely spoke of it, and to it, as if it were a person, with “personality traits” and “a recognition of its own limitations.” It was said to display “modesty” and “humility.” Sometimes it was “circumspect”; sometimes it was “contrite.” The New Yorker “interviewed” it. (Q: “Some weather we’re having. What are...