Are you a stochastic parrot?

Indian Summer: A History of the Original American Motorcycle, a documentary I made back in 1993 was the first full-length movie ever edited entirely on Adobe Premier. In fact the company flew me out to their Cupertino headquarters for a week to do the final cut on site, so they could see how their software was actually being used by the peasantry and to fix any bugs I found with the software literally in real time.

To give you an idea of where computers were at back then, I had bought a 9 Gb external hard drive to allow me to even begin to be able to make the movie, in low-res files that contained about 10 minutes of screen time each, that I stitched together later at Adobe in high-res on their massive mainframe. That "little" 9 Gb hard drive cost me $3,000 which was a huge amount of money back then, and was the size of a 4-slice toaster. Every clip, which could be no more than a minute long, had to be meticulously edited in separate layers, and then when finished, rendered, which literally took all night.

After the movie was completed, and I sold out all 2,500 VHS copies, I was invited by Adobe to give a speech at a conference they were sponsoring in New York City where I was living at the time. I forget where the venue was, but I told my story to a huge, packed auditorium, and at the after party I met many early geeky digital film adopters from Hollywood and pioneering musicians and celebrities there including Joe Jackson. He was a great guy and looked sharp!

The next day I went to a round table discussion on the future of computing, hosted by Esther Dyson, one of the founders of Silicon Valley, and often called "the most influential woman in all the computer world". She told the story of what it was like growing up with her very famous physicist father, Freeman, and her mathematician mother, Verena Huber. She fell in love with computers after graduating from Harvard, moving to California in 1982, and working for Rosen Research. She eventually bought the company and renamed it EDventure Holdings, which she sold much later to CNET in 2004 for gajillions I'm sure.

Anyway, the point is that she told a story about having a conversation with her notoriously brilliant but irascible and contrary father way back when she and all her colleagues in California were so excited about the possibilities of computers and how they were going to change the world. She said he was unimpressed and told her something that I still remember verbatim to this day: 

"Computation does not imply judgement."

I came across an interview in the Financial Times two weekends ago entitled "The emperor has no clothes" with a computational linguist and vocal sceptic of artificial intelligence named Emily Bender. Her outspoken and very public lambastings of Sam Altman and the other young masters of the tech universe reminded me of Dyson's harrumphing dad.

She was promoting her book, The AI Con, where she argues that since OpenAI launched its wildly-popular ChatGPT in 2022, AI companies have "received tens of billions of dollars in funding by promising scientific breakthroughs, material abundance, and a new chapter in human civilization. AI will 'discover new knowledge' because 'we imagine there is a mind behind the text.'" She says this is all rubbish and wishful thinking, and that "the understanding is all on our end."

Her mission these days is to deflate AI, which she will only refer to in air quotes, and says that from now on it should be called by its real name: "automation." She says the gee-whiz chatbots and snazzy image-generating tools created by OpenAI and its rivals are nothing more than "stochastic parrots," a term she coined in a 2021 paper, accumulators and regurgitators "haphazardly stitching together sequences of linguistic forms (they) have observed in (their) vast training data, according to probabilistic information about how they combine, without reference to meaning."

She also describes artificial intelligence as a "hyper-intelligent octopus eavesdropping on human conversations" picking up the statistical patterns and rhythms, but with little hope of understanding real meaning, context, or intent. Or of being able to refer to anything outside of what it has heard, and eventually facing a complete accuracy collapse beyond certain complexities.

I then read a letter to the Financial Times editor last Sunday that addresses the points brought up in the article and describes the allure of chatbots as "automated sycophants, telling people what they want to hear." The writer then goes on to describe how Harry Potter, while on his desperate search for tangible evidence of his parentage comes upon the Mirror of Erised, which shows him his parents very vividly. He continually returns to it and gazes upon them longingly, even though his friends keep warning him that it's just a cruel illusion.

Luckily Professor Dumbledore rescues Harry by telling him that although the mirror's origin and reason for creation is obscured by time, it has evolved to show us "the most desperate desire of our hearts." He then explains how it has destroyed many people who "have wasted away before it, not knowing if what they have seen is real, or even possible."

The letter author's wise conclusion is also mine: In our current world, no matter how switched on and sophisticated we users may feel when interacting with AI, very few of us have a real-world Dumbledore to tell us that the emperor has no clothes. We have to learn how to believe our own eyes (how about opening them first!) and to be able to think and act for ourselves.