A two-part post, but they’re sort-of linked.
I expect many readers will be familar with the Turing Test which in contemporary life has resulted in regular experiments where researchers try to trap chatbots into betraying that they are not human.
Even crude machines that make no claims to being human-like will freak out and malfunction with boring regularity, pleading “there is a surprising item in the baggage area” and so on.
At the moment the OpenAI ChatGPT has been attracting quite a lot of attention and you could give it a try via this website:
…interacts in a conversational way. The dialogue format makes it possible for ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.
I had a crack at it a week or so ago and got bored pretty soon, especially by the repeated verbose phrases and mealy-mouthed ‘wokeness’ of the model.
Others have taken a more combative approach, such as Mark Bisone:
( If the narrativee about the obsessive mathematician seems familiar that’s because it is the plot of the film ⨅ )
The soundtrack of that film was by Clint Mansell who also composed the soundtrack for the film that’s the subject of part two of this post.
In The Earth is a really fascinating look at a different kind of ‘arftificial’ intelligence: the possibility that a place, or non-mammalian organisms, have intelligence and can be communicated with. In the film this is referred to as the mycorhiza (sp?) which is the mass of filaments under the ground, manifesting above the surface as mushrooms. This lives in symbiosis with the forest trees and other plants.
The film was made just after the first covid lockdown and includes lockdown as a theme of the film, though in this case the disease that prompts lockdown is not covid but something else, a fictional outbreak that is poorly understood.
I read somewhere that if giraffes start grazing on acacia trees they send out a chemical signal that induces nearby trees to send a bitter alkali up from the roots to the leaves. (The roots of the trees are intertwined and may constitute a single organism.) When the giraffes have polished off the first victim and browse to the next tree they find the leaves are unappetising. So they might go and eat some other tree instead.
The film plays around with these sorts of ideas and even hints that maybe the disease has vegetable origins and was nature acting in self-defence.
Anyway, I won’t spoil the film for anyone who wants to give it a try. I really liked it.
