Artificial Intelligence: Enough with the Hype Already

There is nothing intelligent about artificial intelligence. The clue is in the name: artificial. At best, AI mimics intelligence. As such, it fools the more simple minded into believing that AI is a brainiac whereas, in reality, AI is merely good at crunching big data to distil trends and source possibilities.

Of late, I’ve tried to deploy AI in an attempt to translate one of my books. It would be a monumental understatement to conclude that it failed rather miserably at the task. AI is singularly unable to grasp or comprehend to subtleties of language. It takes texts quite literally, much as a child might or a one-dimensional mind would. If one thing has become clear, it is that AI isn’t smart or even remotely intelligent.

This comes as no surprise. AI isn’t aware of what it is doing. It lacks a sense of comprehension (and purpose). Context and situational awareness are alien concepts. The technology may excel in composing business correspondence or sales pitches using meaningless rhetoric and standard phrases peppered with trendy ‘business speak’; it is at a loss when faced with something resembling literary substance.

One may train AI by feeding it thousands of classic works of literature – from Brönte and Dickens to Wolfe and Fitzgerald – it still would not know what to do with that. Have it absorb the great works of philosophy, history, and modern fiction – feed it the Historians’ History of the World, the complete Loeb Classical Library, the full Britannica, the Harvard Classics, and all the Penguins and Pelicans ever published – and it still would be clueless, if not dumb as a post.

AI might, perhaps, ‘know’ that Seneca was a stoic and Hobsbawn a Marxist. It might also weave together sentences and paragraphs serving up details about stoics and Marxists. But ask it to interpret philosophy and history, surmise its relevance in a given context and it will begin proffering a series of lies, half-truths, obscure visions, and psychedelic-like hallucinations.

AI is being designed and perfected by engineers. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but engineers are, regrettably, not usually well versed – or at all versed – in the liberal arts. Their universe is based on constants and absolutes. Much like one wouldn’t entrust the design and construction of a bridge or spacecraft to a philosopher, one shouldn’t entrust an engineer with the codification of human life, existence, awareness, consciousness, and – indeed – intelligence.

Moreover, the entire concept of human intelligence remains shrouded in mystery. We – humanity – are still at a loss to define it, much less explain it. We may recognise intelligence when faced with a being said to possess such a quality, but often mistake intelligence for knowledge. An encyclopaedia is very knowledgeable, but not necessarily intelligent.

AI’s rather clueless defenders, the simple-minded souls mentioned earlier, argue rather passionately that the technology is still in its infancy and likely to improve by leaps and bounds before long. They predict an exponential increase in AI’s capabilities.

TikTok

TikTok, that repository of human silliness, is said to be largely powered by AI. The technology is being deployed to discover what will generate the most views, clicks, likes, or whatever. Thus, AI helps savvy TikTok users monetise their own irrelevance. Good on them, by the way. As the American satirist HL Mencken already noted in 1926: Nobody ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence of the [American] people.

Mr Mencken has been amply vindicated. The media, mainstream, social, or otherwise, is awash with trivialities generated by people with more money than taste or sense. And now, some AI fanboys want us to believe that solid reporting, essay writing, and literature – in fact, the entire liberal arts universe – is destined to end up on the scrap heap of useless or pointless human endeavours.

Music, sculpture, painting, architecture, and poetry – the five arts – are purportedly better done by AI. From people easily impressed by mindless waffle and random shapes, those that do not recognise art when it, literally, slaps them in their clueless face, artificial intelligence draws drooling ohs and ahs. Going out on a limb here, but this is not unlike the Germans of the 1930s and 1940s banning all creative, non-standard, and daring or provocative art, insisting that art must faithfully reflect the ideals of society and be comprehensible to all. Then again, it wouldn’t be the first time that AI celebrates Nazis.

Without consciousness or awareness, AI brazenly steals and appropriates the work of humans in an attempt – doomed from the get-go – to find meaning, context, and understanding. Doomed because AI is but a machine not unlike the one that devoured Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times. However, this machine is not driven by cogs and wheels but by trillions of semiconductors. The effect is, however, the same: it tries – unwittingly of course for wit it does not possess – to crush the human spirit.

Conceived and designed by bèta minds, AI is, however, quite good at unearthing trends in, and forging combinations out of, big data. When faced with millions, if not billions or even trillions, of datapoints the human mind simply boggles. AI runs through such data sets in seconds flat and presents factual insights not discovered before. This has countless useful applications in engineering and medicine. That number-crunching prowess may even help solve complex global issues such as, say, climate change or social inequality. AI can probably also run economies fairly efficiently. Those are all good things.

But, AI cannot now or ever be counted upon to replace human creativity in whatever art form. For that, it would need actual intelligence, not just knowledge. Anyone who thinks differently: good for you but do try to think for yourself instead of running with the pack.

Cover photo: Charlie Chaplin being devoured by a machine in Modern Times.