Like all of us, I keep encountering the results of generative artificial intelligence. Color me unimpressed.
AI is an engineer’s idea of “knowledge,” namely, piles of facts. Its novelty is only that it sweeps up among the “facts,” the opinions expressed by the average writer in the pile. So its product sounds like an article by a fourth-rate journalist.
Technically speaking, AI works by reading, say, every edition of Folha since 1921 and then using the corpus to predict what the next word will be, to respond to a question or a task. That’s all. The word “respond” is used here loosely. AI is not a human, and therefore, its choice of the next word doesn’t include suppositions about other minds or the understanding of other people’s intentions in asking the question. It doesn’t “understand” anything. It doesn’t think, at any rate, if thinking involves more than knowing facts helpful to predicting the next word, such as that in Portuguese “o, a, os, as” will be followed by a definite noun, or that Deirdre often talks about “humanomics,” or that Folha is unusually likely to mention the word “economics,” at any rate compared with the average Portuguese novel. If you ask AI to write a Deirdre Column for the newspaper, it will read everything she’s written for Folha, and compile 375 words of very boring stuff, wholly unoriginal, with of course no new ideas at all, but mentioning quite often “humanomics” and “economics” and even “the.”
My Google search has taken to beginning always with an AI result. It’s irritating. I’ll be looking for a sensible summary, for example, of accurate facts and sensible opinions about English medieval agriculture, because I’m currently writing a big book about its strange system of “open fields.” I already know more than 99.99 percent of scholars about the system, having worked on the book for half a century. But I want to acknowledge and respond to what others think they know.
I want to know what humans think. Wikipedia is much better. It is a machine that does “understand.” I can for example detect the politics of the writers. The politics turns out to matter for the science, even about peasants long dead. Real history. Interesting.
Weekly column in Folha de São Paulo, Brazil
Translated into Portuguese for the newspaper.
The truth. I read tens of student essays written in response to prompts about the economics of some topic every week. I am able two or three sentences in to recognize an Ai generated essay without fail. Period, end of story, the top, the bottom, and both sides.