The Parrot in the Machine | James Gleick | The New York Review of Books
I retired just as COVID happened. I would like to claim omniscience, but it was just luck or the repaying of debts by the lord creator. Although I am a long time FaceTime user, I describe myself as being part of the preZoom or preTEAMS generation. I have also stayed away from LLMs (large language models), although I had a professional interest in AI and (image) diagnosis in dermatology for a couple of decades.
The following is from the ever insightful James Gleick.
Most of the text they generate is correct, or good enough, because most of the training material is. But chatbot “writing” has a bland, regurgitated quality. Textures are flattened, sharp edges are sanded. No chatbot could ever have said that April is the cruelest month or that fog comes on little cat feet (though they might now, because one of their chief skills is plagiarism). And when synthetically extruded text turns out wrong, it can be comically wrong. When a movie fan asked Google whether a certain actor was in Heat, he received this “AI Overview”:
No, Angelina Jolie is not in “heat.” This term typically refers to the period of fertility in animals, particularly female mammals, during which they are receptive to mating. Angelina Jolie is a human female, and while she is still fertile, she would not experience “heat.”