Chat GPT
A very early MM discussion featured a conversation with Nick Bostrom, Oxford philosopher, on the subject of artificial intelligence (AI) as he maintained, “Artificial Intelligence can and very possibly will take over the universe, pushing humans into second place, if they still have any place at all” (The Guardian 6/12/16).
Don’t look now but the advent of Chat GPT (an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text) is now knocking on the door as it presumes its way into the world of poetry. Does it have our attention now?
The path to this point is well known and the subject of some previous MM sessions. There was, of course, the so-called Turing Test -- challenging a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behavior to be equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human.
Philosophers of artificial intelligence over the succeeding generations got caught up in their own underwear trying to frame such questions as what is even meant by human intelligence i.e. what is the difference between consciousness and the simulation of consciousness.
Subsequent high-wire projects started to triangulate on those answers. What Jeopardy fans, for instance, could forget how reigning human champs Ken and Brad were trounced in 2011 by IBM Watson in 2011 with that final clue (William Wilkinson’s “An Account Of The Principalities Of Wallachia And Moldavia” inspired this author’s most famous novel, the (winning) question being: Who Is Bram Stoker?) Were intelligence measured by the depth of worldly research, deep analytics, and lightning speed, AI would seem to win game, set, match.
More telling, though, was what Ken Jennings added to his correct answer: “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.” That gratuitous comment spoke volumes about the Faustian bargain we’re making with technological advancement.
First, though, could artificial intelligence ever have caught the humor in that cultural (Simpsons) reference or have captured poet Mary Oliver’s celebration of nature or, for that matter, anything else reflective of an inner life? Whether poetry might represent the last refuge from the relentless march of artificial intelligence is front and center in our discussion piece Can AI Write Authentic Poetry?
Spoiler alert: yes poetry may be such a refuge so long as one accepts the difference between human consciousness and its simulation. What may be unsettling to many is that such a difference is becoming vanishingly small. We last discussed that phenomenon early this year in the context of prose, not poetry, with the publication of a book by a Norwegian photojournalist that promised to tell the truth about the source of so many fake news stories that have flooded social media sites.
The punchline is that the contents of that entire book, from the interviews to the news stories to the script to the haunting pictures, had themselves been completely made-up/doctored by an AI-powered computer. No one detected the fakery for months, the truth finally revealed by the “author” himself, his underlying point having been made (MM 1/24/22 Brave New (Fake) World).
Short of poetry, speculation abounds in terms of the implications of this AI-powered GPT Chat, whether for good or evil (Chat GPT Could Render Google Obsolete) as it replaces, even supersedes, the human element. There will be a time, not too far in the future, when one of these very MM intros might be artificially composed.
A free dessert to the first one (i.e. human) who spots it.