March of machines – a contest of author vs ChatGPT
My daily interactions with the web, and probably yours, are increasingly interrupted – subtly and sometimes baldly – by the creep of artificial intelligence into any attempt to use human intelligence.
Automatic software updates mean that “Co-pilot” now appears when I touch anything built in the dark coding warehouses at Microsoft. “Google Lens” appears often, but not always, in the address bar in Chrome. While lenses can correct vision, they can also distort. I can choose not to look at them, I guess, for the moment at least.
Suggestions for the completion of phrases and sentences, however, are harder to ignore. They are often precisely what I was about to write, even though I’ve only hit the first three letters of the first word of the phrase. And yet …
… the phrases and words the machine offers are sometimes wrong, not the ones I had in mind. Close, but (as my father and I suppose a lot of other fathers used to say), “no cigar.” When the machine gives me a prompt I could just hit “tab” to accept it. But I’m learning to hesitate. Have I thought my way into a cliché? Was the machine designed to push me into one?
(And Word has just been kind enough to recognize that the “e” in “cliché” needed an acute accent. Thanks, Word. I guess. It’s easier than seeking out “Character Map,” as I’ve had to many times before.)
And then suddenly it stops working. And starts again. And again. This is an uncomfortably uncanny technology. Not quite human, but almost.
There’s a fascinating piece in The New York Times – audio and text – a talk between Curtis Sittenfeld and Susannah Meadows. Sittenfeld is a novelist; Meadows an editor of the newspaper’s opinion website and columns. After discussing their experiences with AI, they come to the heart – or heartlessness – of the challenge: Sittenfeld and ChatGPT face off against each other using the same writing prompt. They have been tasked, by Meadows with contributions from readers, to produce a story of no more than a thousand words, with these elements: “lust, kissing, flip-flops, regret and middle age.”
You now have the opportunity to work out – or maybe just guess – which writer or “writer” wrote which story. Give it a go. The link here should let you bypass the NYT paywall. By the end you’ll learn not only who or what wrote which, but why the human reader – Meadows – chose the one she did.
Did either think to ask ChatGPT to choose which story it thought that it had written? How might it explain its reason for choosing?
What are the increasingly prevalent and different “marches of the machines”?