Most everything I’ve read from Vice is either unremarkable or ridiculous nonsense, but that doesn’t mean their writers can have moments of clarity. From “I Had An AI Chatbot Write My Eulogy. It Was Very Weird” (emphasis mine):
Machine learning tools like Stable Diffusion and OpenAI’s ChatGPT have been breathlessly covered by the press in recent months, with some giddily claiming they will do everything from replacing teachers and artists to creating hit pop songs with the press of a button. In a recent column, the New York Times published the full transcript of a conversation with Bing Chat, a new chatbot based on Microsoft’s much-derided search engine. The article uncritically describes the chatbot as “advanced artificial intelligence” and quotes it saying that it “wants to be alive,” but doesn’t provide any context on how these automated systems actually work.
In reality, these tools are not artificial or intelligent—they are simply repeating words and concepts back to us, based on statistical predictions from data that was created and labeled by humans. Since they’re often good at producing believable text that feels like it was written by humans, I wanted to see how these bots fare when asked to intervene in more serious matters, like death.
….
This really drove home for me the most flawed and misunderstood aspect of these tools: They do not “understand” anything. They are simply parroting things back to us based on statistical predictions derived from massive troves of internet data. I wasn’t reading my own eulogy—I was reading a machine-mediated abstraction of what a “eulogy” is, combining my inputs with digital echoes and reflections of what came before. This decoherence is what I imagine celebrated animator Hayao Miyazaki was getting at when he famously described an AI-generated animation as “an insult to life itself.”
She’s right. AI, particularly a chat bot, is interesting and fun to play around with, but they are no more “intelligent” than whatever programming is behind them, whatever input is given them, and whatever semi-randomized answers they generate during a conversation. AI chatbots don’t “want to be alive” because they communicate as such. They simply produce understandable output, like any device with an interface.
That’s not to be reductionist, but AI software is just that: complicated and highly logical—probably some of the most complicated software around—but no more self-aware than a Speak & Spell, and no closer to being human than a scarecrow.