Pull back firmly
A neighbor approached me last week about the possibilities for using A.I. in support of political campaigns. No way would I let it anywhere near campaign communications. Humans are not savvy enough not to include stock imagery from foreign sources in political ads. You’d let A.I. do it? Or generate audio that might pronounce Nevada Ne-VAH-duh?
The neighbor asked Bard to list “North Carolina state representatives who voted to overturn the governor’s veto on abortion bill.” What Bard came back with after a blazing fast search of the Net was a blazing hot mess. With a few more seconds I, Human, grabbed the accurate list at the source here. Perhaps “voted to overturn the governor’s veto on abortion bill” is too vague. Which governor? Which override? Which abortion bill? (SB 20, 2023-2024 Session).
I’m reminded of an old Isaac Asimov short story, “Risk.” Briefly:
Gerald Black, the etherics engineer responsible for causing the NS-2 model to “get lost” in the previous story, is watching the next stage of hyperspace testing. Hyper Base has developed an expensive prototype spaceship with a built-in hyperdrive, called Parsec, which is expected to travel out to Sirius and return.
When the countdown ends, however, the ship doesn’t leave and nobody knows why. Black is selected to board the ship and determine what went wrong and prevent the hyperdrive from activating before they lose their prototype hyperdrive ship.
They’d placed a robot at the controls for the risky test flight. Its instructions? “Seize the bar with a firm grip. Pull it towards you firmly. Firmly! Maintain your hold until the control board informs you that you have passed through hyperspace twice.”
Black explains what went wrong, “The robot was told to pull back the control bar firmly. Firmly. The word was repeated, strengthened, emphasized. So the robot did what it was told. It pulled it back firmly. There was only one trouble. He was easily ten times stronger than the ordinary human being for whom the control bar was designed.” It bent the control bar and wrecked the attached circuitry. What does firmly mean to a robot?
“Had they said, ‘apply a pull of fifty-five pounds,’ all would have been well,” Black explained. Asimov recognized in 1955 that how you pose the question to a machine matters. A lot.
This fascination with A.I. is going to get worse before it gets better:
When a 60 Minutes staffer got a call that appeared to be from correspondent Sharyn Alfonsi, she picked up.
A voice on the other end, generated by artificial intelligence to mimic Alfonsi’s voice, asked for some help. Clips from television had been used to clone Alfonsi’s voice. It took about five minutes.
“Elizabeth, sorry, I need my passport number because the Ukraine trip is on,” the fake Alfonsi said. “Can you read that out to me?”
The staffer did.