Talking to dead people
Have you ever played with a Ouija board? Maybe you’ve seen it in scary movies. It’s the spirit board which allows the living to connect with the spirits of the past. Some even wrote books dictated (so they say) through the Ouija - by dead authors.
If this sounds a little bit far-fetched, just think about this: we’ve entered a new era where something very much like the Ouija board game is getting very popular.
Today it is hard to find a website where you are not greeted by a chatbot - which is the offspring of the infamous Clippy by Microsoft: the friendly but annoying paperclip who would make suggestions that most people ignored. (BTW, Microsoft recently threatened to bring it back. You never know...).
Chatbots seem overrated. Under the false premise of better customer support, you waste your valuable time to learn how to describe your problem to badly trained software branded as an Advanced AI. This AI obfuscates with cheerful messages like 'How can I help you, mate?' The only improvement compared to an automated voice system is that you don't have to wait to hear what pressing '5' on your touchpad gets you.
At least you know that you are dealing with bad software and your expectations are set from the beginning.
Then we have the well-funded heavyweights like OpenAI: “Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” A lofty goal. The most publicized outcome of this research is GPT3 which stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3. This is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text.
(As a side note: The work is so open that its 9-member board decides what's good for humanity. OpenAI changed from non-profit to for-profit and licensed the GPT3 to Microsoft. The model is not available to examine or learn from it.)
How does GPT3 work? You can train the model with a body of text and the model is then able to respond, prompted by a few words, with a cohesive answer. The key point here is that it doesn't come up with anything new. It is just repeating what was uploaded, perhaps in a different way.
You might ask 'How could I use technology like this?' Welcome to Project December, created by Jason Rohrer. This American programmer created a simple interface which allows you to upload an example of someone’s conversation. After a moment of computer processing, you can start a conversation with that person.
And that's exactly what Joshua did. After his girlfriend Jessica died, he uploaded emails and Facebook messages and then he started having conversations with her.
What happened in the end? The illusion of having a real conversation wore out. There was nothing new, only a modification of the past.
The part of thinking involved with imagination and inventing new things is still the domain of humans. Systems like GPT3 can only create the illusion of intelligence and produce at best fake news. It’s just a better version of a Ouija board, telling us what we want to hear. The kind of creativity required to spark innovation at new companies still can’t be outsourced to Clippy or its descendants. The heavy lifting is left for us.
And that's the recurrent pattern.