It could be a poem.<\/p>\n
Yesterday a friend sent me a short text and a question about whether “my” writer had written it. He was asking about a writer I admire a lot — wrote in a genre all his own for almost half a century. I’ve translated his work, and in better moments actually read it closely — which is probably more demanding. \u00a0Anyway, \u00a0I read this text through, and despite the sprinkling of familiar terms, the answer was “no”. Regrettably, I succumbed to some weird sense of obligation, something like the “due diligence” of a decent person and half-trained academic: I asked my chatbot.<\/p>\n
My chatbot said “yes” (another poem!).\u00a0 It gave a familiar publication title as the source, declining to mention any page numbers. And I looked at the source, even though I already knew better.\u00a0 I fell for it!<\/p>\n
Of course “it” wasn’t lying. It can’t. It’s a bot. It can’t hallucinate, it can’t dance. It does what it’s told to do. And it will make stuff up if it’s been told to do it.<\/p>\n
A confession: I have been pouring scorn on those submissive souls who treat a chatbot as a friend, a confidant — invest their trust in it and suffer terrible disappointments as a result. They let this astonishing technology beat them up. I herewith offer my apologies for having been unsympathetic — briefly, I hope — \u00a0but also a stern warning based on experience: don’t mistake your own disappointments for lies.<\/em> Disappointments are HUMAN, and so are lies, however logical they are and however authoritative they may sound. Don’t forget that in the chat, you <\/em>are the human, and don’t forget to cherish that. It’s a wonderful thing!<\/p>\n .<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It could be a poem. Yesterday a friend sent me a short text and a question about whether “my” writer had written it. He was asking about a writer I admire a lot —...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":3132,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"bgseo_title":"AI Can't Lie and that makes it inhuman","bgseo_description":"It's a little story about a chatbot that couldn't locate a quotation but couldn't admit it. The moral is that lying is human, and AI can't lie. ","bgseo_robots_index":"index","bgseo_robots_follow":"follow","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[580,343,247],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-ai","category-reading","category-writing"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3131"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3137,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3131\/revisions\/3137"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}