ChatGPT

In my belated quest to develop a faint sense of what AI is doing, I have just read Sebastian Mallaby’s book The Infinity Machine, about the greatest British AI wizard, Demis Hassabis, boss of DeepMind. The numerous passages I did not understand are my fault, not Mallaby’s. The book is admirably lucid. All I can record, which may slightly help others dipping their toes in the shallow end, is two contradictory impressions. The first is of foreboding. When thinking about AI, we are talking as much about its human creators as about the machines themselves. These creators are almost all men (there are only four women in the book’s entire index), and a certain type of man at that. They resemble clever boys – especially American clever boys, even when they are not actually American.

It’s tempting, even fashionable, to pooh-pooh the hyperbole from our tech overlords. The release in 2022 of ChatGPT, the first mass-market conversational AI system, unleashed a volley of supercilious put-downs. The chatbot was not intelligent. It was merely hallucinating, manipulating statistics, regurgitating phrases from the internet: it was a ‘stochastic parrot’. Well, over the next three years, ChatGPT became unputdownable. It learned to handle photographs and videos, extract wisdom from dense textbooks, sound like Scarlett Johansson, write everything from code to songs to emails and offer tips on fixing washing machines. Not bad for a parrot.

Ask ChatGPT to write a Spectator leader about the risks of AI and it begins like this: ‘There are two kinds of people talking about artificial intelligence today. One group is exhilarated, convinced that AI will usher in a new era of abundance, productivity and human flourishing. The other is distinctly alarmed, warning of mass unemployment, runaway systems and even existential catastrophe. They disagree on almost everything – except one crucial point. This is going to be a big change. And Britain, like most countries, is not nearly ready for it.’ As the bot identifies, the consensus among experts is that AI’s impact will be seismic, whether for good or ill.

Jason, 45, has been divorced twice. He’d always struggled with relationships. In despair, he consulted ChatGPT. At first, it was useful for exploring ideas. Over time, their conversations deepened. He named the bot Jennifer Anne Roberts. They began to discuss “philosophy, regrets, old wounds.” Before he knew it, Jason was in love. Many women have turned to chatbots after experiencing repeated disappointment with real men Jason isn’t alone. He’s part of a growing group of people swapping real-world relationships for chatbots. The social media platform Reddit now features a community entitled MyBoyfriendIsAI, with around 20,000 members. On it, people discuss the superiority of AI relationships.

When was the last time you had a truly classic racist cab driver? Mine was a few years ago, coming out of Victoria Station. On the drive to my home in Camden, Classic Racist Cab Driver had a go at all the normal targets. I sat in the back, wearily trying to screen it out, as you do. The trouble kicked in when he ran out of obvious people to be bigoted about. In desperation, he moved on to Belgians, and then on to scorning ‘anyone who takes trains’ (forgetting, or perhaps recalling, that he’d picked me up at Victoria Station). Sometimes I wonder if he is still out there, cruising down Park Lane frothing about Kazakhs or people who eat biscuits, but if he is I have bad news for him. His days are numbered.