Wrestling for Truth with ChatGPT

“This discovery of yours [the advent of the written word] will create forgetfulness in the learner’s souls. They will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.” — In Phaedrus by Plato (ca. 370 B.C.)

From time immemorial, the self-appointed prognosticators of the world have greeted each innovation and technological advancement with grave warnings of doom. The written word, the printing press, the locomotive, the telegraph, the personal computer — the list goes on and on — were all seen as harbingers of cultural impoverishment, the loss of jobs, the corruption of this or that element of society, or even the end of civilization itself. Does the advent of artificial intelligence (AI) portend the same outpouring of fear-over-nothing? Or is there something different about this new technology and its implications for mankind that should concern us and put us on our guard?

If you have seen AI-generated “art” (created by a few sentences of text input into a computer program by a human user), you know that it can at first beguile with a sensuous atmosphere, a richly saturated color palette, and an exceptional level of detail. But under closer examination, it grows vapid and fails to cohere. It seems to consist of half-remembered visual bits and pieces created by different hands (i.e., the past work of human artists), imperfectly cobbled together in a way that is ultimately not persuasive, and sometimes perverse. Once you look at the details — four-fingered hands, two-legged furniture, plants without stems that emerge from walls, windows and architectural supports that confuse structure with embellishment — you realize that AI-created art is off-kilter. It might be different if the output exhibited an artistry and creativity comparable to a Magritte or Dali. But, as Meghan Houser writes in The New Atlantis, AI creations are “a Cubist portrait of the things we have already said and made, that by combining our facets becomes either passing or passing strange.”

There is something more insidious going on when AI image generators like Google’s Gemini refuse to populate invented historical images with races appropriate to time and place. The Washington Examiner reports that in several notable instances from earlier this year, white men were nowhere to be found when Gemini was asked to envision the American Founding Fathers. Another image even represented Nazis as ahistorically diverse. (Google understandably apologized for the latter instance but, curiously, not for the former.) In February Elon Musk publicly criticized Gemini on X (formerly Twitter), appealing to a high-ranking Google executive to correct the problem. Musk expressed doubt that “Google’s woke bureaucratic blob would *allow* him to fix it. Unless those who caused this are exited from Google, nothing will change, except to make the bias less obvious and more pernicious.” Musk is onto something here. But the reality is that AI repurposes the images and content it scrapes from the Internet, and it should come as no surprise that the Internet has arguably far more left-leaning than conservative content. So, the bias does not even need to be conscious.