I begin with a portrait of Idris Elba as John Luther. (I would watch the earlier BBC series before attempting the recent film, Luther : The Fallen Sun.) The series welcomes an abundance of psychopaths, which is an appropriate inspiration for this weeks subject: hallucinations. We begin with a piece written by Tyler Cowen…
Cowen equates ChatGPT with intelligence…
“Besides, what kind of civilization is it that turns away from the challenge of dealing with more. . . intelligence? That has not the self-confidence to confidently confront a big dose of more intelligence?
The jury is still out on the ‘big dose’ we may receive from A.I., but intelligence is likely not the gift we are going to receive. Cowen also mentions the printing press, that favourite of world changing technologies used as an example to shame critics when the two technologies are profoundly different —-calling Marshall McLuhan!
Another series interlude here, Ray Donovan. Liev Schreiber plays the lead character Ray Donovan, a fixer and cleaner for celebrities and the least damaged son of the completely amoral Mickey Donovan. The image of Masako from Rashomon connects with the shifting point of view of truth as Ray becomes more enmeshed in politic fixing as the series progresses. Shifting truth is another apt theme for the next part of the story.
In February, Tyler Cowen published a blog post, “Who was the most important critic of the printing press in the 17th century?” He quoted passages from the English philosopher and statesman, Francis Bacon’s The Advancement of Learning (1605) expressing his criticism of the printing press. The problem is Bacon never said this, comments on the blog post suggested the source was likely ChatGPT. Cowen deleted the post and hasn’t commented on the phantom quotes. Of course if you Google ‘critics of the printing press’ Bacon’s false quotes now misplace him in history.
My final image insert is Gary Oldman and Kristin Scott Thomas in the incredibly well written series, Slow Horses. Oldman’s Jackson Lamb is as brilliant as he is rude, slovenly, and likely drunk. This final image celebrates some of the great wordplay in the series, as the MI5 agents at Slough House are all sanctioned for some kind of ill and are saddled (sorry) with the nickname Slow Horses. Word play leads us to the strangest phenomenon of our new Chat pals.
We now enter the hall of mirrors and distortions of ChatGPT. It seems that LLM’s (Large Language Models) have this odd quirk of adding plausible falsehoods into the generated content. Nothing to see here, just a ‘hallucination’ and in the engineered pantomime of caring the A.I. does say it’s sorry.
John Vervaecke, a University of Toronto professor of cognitive science and psychology suggests that increased ‘intelligence’ includes an increased capacity for self-deception…” and “how do we expect a human trained ‘brain’ is going to avoid or reflect upon the constant human problems in thinking?”
The accelerationists focus on the how and what of LLM’s, sorry that us humans need to ask why and where will this take us…we are not turning back, we are turning on the lights in the black box.