“Give a man the reputation of an early riser,” said Mark Twain, “and that man can sleep ’til noon.”
How does the reputation of anyone look, under scrutiny of more than one source? The current, most powerful leader of the so-called free world has staunch supporters. And rabid detractors; if you’re game enough to be one. Is he the most divisive US President of all time? There have certainly been a few – it goes with the territory, unless you’re George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower or JFK.
It’s interesting to note that as a Founding Father, Washington never actually became one; possibly because of infertility from the undiagnosed Klinefelter’s syndrome from which it appears he suffered. It would certainly account for his impressive height: reportedly 6′ 2” at a time when the average for a man was 5′ 6”. His well documented dental woes could also be attributed to the syndrome. Taurodontism is a symptom; being the genetic enlargement of dental pulp that predisposes premature cavities. Washington assuredly suffered from that; having lost all but one of his teeth between the ages of 24 and 57. With the capital of the United States named after him, and honoured in numerous other ways, Washington is so idealised in the American consciousness that blurring his failings and contradictions is necessary in keeping his sharp reputation.
It’s a strategy we’ll apply often, and willingly.
Either for social approval and acceptance; or to maintain our right to be right. Both of which have monstrously morphed into much more than the passionate dinner party debates of times all but forgotten. Inebriated, stoned or sober, they remained civilised, being that they were face-to-face with personal reputations to uphold. You certainly didn’t want to be off the invitation list because of repeatedly unruly behaviour and conduct boorishly unbecoming – both of which the digital world and social media seem to largely applaud.
It’s a feedback loop that algorithms favour.
In the exploitation of human psychology that brings financial fabulousness to the underwhelmingly few and undeservedly powerful, content that triggers strong emotional response optimises engagement – and ergo, commercial benefit. The real-world harm is overlooked. The spectacular spreading of misinformation and out-and-out lies; falling public trust; and a prevailing attitude of damaging attitudes and behaviours that impact health and wellbeing. We are paying an exorbitantly high price for the free use of AI in all its duplicitous forms. Globally, communally, physically, mentally and spiritually there is little escape from its fallout. Much like the current US president’s antics – who, by the way, 300 political scientists voted as the most polarising POTUS of all time.
His master stroke is his ability to maintain a reputation among millions as a man of rare honesty, despite his credibility catastrophes; whether strategic or impulsive. He’s successfully obfuscated the difference between politics and entertainment, and harnessed the potency of social media like Oppenheimer and the atom.
It’s more than man against machine. The quintessentiall dilemma, the philosophical detonator; the competition that ostensibly began with the Luddites and Swing Riots of the early 19th century. In 1968 Stanley Kubrick had us feel the gripping fear of Hal not opening the pod door. By 1997 IBM’s real life supercomputer Deep Blue was famously set against grandmaster Garry Kasparov. Having beaten the machine the year before, the IBM team created AI that could process 200 million optional chess moves a second. Over the match, Deep Blue won by one game.
Fifteen years later, IBM showcased its early example of natural language processing in Watson. This AI iteration was pitted against the two best players of Jeopardy – Brad Rutter and Ken Jennings. By the end, through its ability to decipher the wordy clues and diffuse topics Watson had won $US1 million – split between two charities.
Rather than a final answer, Jennings instead wrote, “I, for one, welcome our new computer overlords.”
It’s a changing hue and texture in the world we’re creating, that’s equally creating a new perception of us as humans. Generative AI has, in an unnervingly short time, regurgitated more information than is quantifiable, and continues to hone its fluency. Its capacity absolutely dwarfs the 32 volumes and 44 million words that took Encyclopedia Brittanica 244 years to collect.
In 2020, globally fewer than 116 million people used AI on a daily basis. Within five years that number has expanded like an ex-Ozempic user to more than 838 million.
In Australia, more than half the adult population admit to using AI on a regular basis, despite only 33% actually trusting what it says.
It’s a bizarre mumpsimus – an unlikely word for AI to throw up, particularly in relation to itself. Given the algorithms that will be created with everyone finding out what it means, it will no doubt soon start using it with some kind of abandon, if it doesn’t hallucinate first.
On the occasion of coming across a hallucinating human who claims to hold any amount of knowledge – whether it be ordinary or something more – the level of doubt and mistrust is automatically high. Even if we’re not sure whether what is being said is actually true or not, we’re aware of the possibility that it’s completely made up.
Not so much with AI.
We have become so enamoured with the idea and the reputation of AI’s unfathomable brilliance we’ve rapidly forgotten that Facebook was filled with similar promises in 2006. It seems the result of the short memory we’ve developed from incessant scrolling and virtual reality addiction. We conflate criticism with attack and innovation with progress.
What has it churn out such mundane dental content, is that using any type of conversational AI large language model will take you down the most popular path.
It will produce very similar answers, regardless of the differences in the questions posed, and the variety of included nuance. AI concludes that the links it makes are valid and encouraging, and makes that the anchor for the original query. From there, it doesn’t deviate; it just circles around and around, spinning out facts that may or may not be relative, with accuracy reduced by 25%. There is no capacity for knowledge – just data.
Human writers are much more discerning. Their talent lies in the ability to orchestrate word rhythms and harmonise curious strings of logic arising from the deep flow, or tightrope, of the thinking process. Content is more interesting because humans are; and every writer has a piece of themselves in the pieces they write.
Whichever way you cut it, AI is a sterile imitation, and here we are in a loopy loop imitating its soullessness.
With numbers ruling everything, even music – the very language of the soul – is being beaten into boring submission. Vapid tunes and meaningless lyrics appeal to Spotify algorithms, so that’s where songwriting leans. Algorithms have the reputation of reflecting preferences based on user behaviours, and it’s simply not true. Yet that’s what it tells us is true. And it tells us so often, and lets us argue not at all, that we forget to not believe it. Then all of a sudden it’s true.
In the ’70s, some bet their reputation on everyone having a personal jetpack within 50 years, and a work/life balance massively weighted toward the latter. And no matter how well French spy Pierre Boulle expressed in his book, or Heston and McDowell on screen, logic dictated the impossibility of a planet being dominated by apes.
How absolutely wrong we were.