Bob's blog - the realm of threalm

The Turing Test: if you can speak to a computer and not know that you weren't speaking to a human, the computer can be said to be artificially intelligent...  ChatGPT passes this test.  Thank you techradar for pointing this out to me recently. And now Elon " AI stresses me out " Musk and a thousand others have signed a public letter calling for a " pause " in AI's headlong development due to " risks to society " . " Powerful AI systems should be developed only once we are confident that their effects will be positive and their risks will be manageable ," said the letter issued by the Future of Life Institute . Just how such a "pause" could be implemented and what king of regulatory framework could be created to realistically enforce it is not at all clear. The US congress? The European AI Act? The UN general assembly? A voluntary industry code? These all sound rather speculatively ineffectual against such a rampant  unleashed j...

William Fear has published an insightful piece in The Critic this week entitled " Orwell, Camus and truth " (Hat tip again to ALDaily). The article tells the story of a missed moment in history when two of the 20th century's great writers might have met. And the anecdote is full of irony, verisimilitude and pathos as we onlookers speculate on what might have been had these two great friends ever actually met.  Orwell sat and waited, and waited, for Camus to arrive. He never turned up: he was laid up with an exacerbation of tuberculosis. They would never get the chance to meet again, and Orwell would die five years later, having lost his own battle with the same disease For friends they were according to Camus, though they never did meet or correspond, as far as William Fear can determine. What they shared was a deep seated need to pursue the unknowable truth and the wisdom to know that the essence of truth was that it was unknowable. Both of these writers took the view th...

ALDaily , that inestimably worthy arts aggregator website, pointed me overnight to this fascinating article in Intelligencer, " You Are Not a Parrot " by Elizabeth Weil.  The article poured me down a rabbit hole into a whirlwind of speculation and intrigue about linguistics and computational learning. It enters and addresses areas of computer science well outside my comfort zone, as it explores with more rigor than I knew existed the growing conflict between Art and AI.   I have been sporadically pondering some of this stuff in the poetic shallows here from time to time .  It is slightly giddying to find out that this subject might have some real heft, depth and contemporary relevance. Even Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds is now expressing doubts about the benefits of technology Elizabeth Weil's article is largely about an impressive academic at the University of Washington, Emily M. Bender , and her actions in linguistics studies to attempt to challen...

This quote is from another intriguing piece entitled " On the Need to Touch Grass " in the City Journal on 3 March by Lee Siegel.  He says: Robots do not possess and will never possess sensory memory. Welcome to the age of robots. And in this assertion, he provides me with  one more piece of ammo, notwithstanding the current GPSchat tsunami, with which to press my claim that AI can't actually cut it in poetry.  One of the essences of poetry is the cut through of association from the abstractions of mere word jumbles in the moment when the poem touches chords of sensory meaning in a reader or listener. Sure a code can auto-write a passable word salad poem by borrowing from existing creations in its data set, given a few parameters, but to hit a common or contrasting sensory nerve in a human audience mostly requires actual experience of that feeling. I don't completely dismiss the possibility that such a nerve can still be touched by accident or by random generation, bu...