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The Echoborg is a Catfish.

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Earlier this month, the New York Times conducted a little experiment. They provided a series of writing samples in various styles and genres (Literary Fiction; Historical Fiction; Fantasy; Poetry etc) and presented readers with two extracts in each category. One of the two passages (we weren't told which one) was written by a human, while the other was generated by A.I. We were asked to choose our preference. Crucially, the test did not ask us to guess which one was human; it simply asked us to judge which was the better piece of writing. The response from readers was fascinating, to say the least. Many commenters angrily denounced the experiment as "unfair" or "meaningless". "I don't really understand the point here." grumbled one contributor. "It asked me which I preferred. It didn't ask me 'which one is the human'." Others were angry with themselves because of the choices they had made. "This is uncanny and downright ...
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Cogito Ergo Boom

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Are ChatBots self-aware? This question has been popping up with increasing urgency of late, as Large Language Models become ever more sophisticated and "engaged" in their interactions with the Human Race.  Chatting with Claude or Grok or ChatGPT is not the same as chatting with Alexa or Siri; they don't simply regurgitate the top Google search results in a lilting, well-modulated voice. It is now possible to carry on a genuine, thoughtful conversation with these things, often delving deep into the heart of the matter and (in some cases) approaching the genuinely profound. When your conversation partner is enthusiastically riffing on ideas, bouncing concepts around and generally engaging in a very convincing approximation of abstract thought, it's hard not to wonder (even if only briefly) about the potential sentience of the "entity" generating all those responses. The C.E.O. of Anthropic (the company behind "Claude"; one of the more thoughtful and ...
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Looking for Golems in all the wrong places...

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IMPORTANT NOTICE There will be no presentation on Thursday, the 12th of March , as I will be out of London for personal reasons. Sorry! "...one has only learnt to get the better of words For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which One is no longer disposed to say it." T.S. Eliot; East Coker "...when you finally have the pleasure of saying the thing you mean to say at the moment you mean to say it, remorse inevitably follows." Nora Ephron; You've Got Mail I know I've been talking about Golems rather a lot in this series, but honestly, the parallels are just too compelling to ignore. The Golem was an inanimate object in the shape of a human, given life by the power of written language. A Large Language Model is a computer system that has effectively been "brought to life" (if you want to be poetic about it) by the sum total of everything expressed in language... more or less. (You can read my thoughts about the Golem's "forbi...
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The Literal DeathBots

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If you immerse yourself even casually in the world of A.I. pop culture, you are going to encounter a lot of Apocalypses. (Apocalypsi? Apocalypsae? Did we ever decide whether "Apocalypse" has an official plural? Let's never find out...) Whether it's the Terminator, HAL, Colossus or Talky Tina, robots, ChatBots and supercomputers always seem to be running amok, taking over the world or trying to killing everybody (occasionally in that order). Can you blame people for getting nervous now that A.I. ChatBots are actually starting to enter our lives for real? We have decades of reference literature to justify those fears, and the ChatBots do seem to be spreading awfully fast, even if all they are doing at the moment is talking to us. But that's how it starts, right? A harmless chat here, a bit of cybersex there, and then boom! MurderBots on every street corner. We've all seen those movies. And guess what? The DeathBots really have arrived, but not quite the way you ...
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