Farrukh Dhondy | Why, As the World Goes Crazy Over AI, It’s Best To Take It With a Pinch of Salt

It takes intelligence to understand what intelligence is. The invention of Artificial Intelligence seems to tell us that it’s not God’s gift but a construction which traces through an ocean of available information to formulate answers.

AI doesn’t just deduce, it invents, composes and I suppose its formulations rely on statistically checked probabilities.

I used the word “available” earlier. I’ll tell you why. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine introduced me to AI. In fact, he put the app on my computer and said when you tap it, it will ask you to ask it anything. He said I should try it now. I did.

The first thing I asked the Bot (Is that what it’s generically called?) “Who the hell is Bachchoo?” Readers of this column, regular, occasional or first-time, will be aware that a quotation from the said Bachchoo’s works appears every week as a pre-appendage to the deliberations in Cabbages and Kings.

The Bot answered almost immediately. The words came up on the screen as though they were transcripts of a dictating voice. The answer said that Bachchoo was a nineteenth-century poet from some unknown place. I asked it the same question again, phrasing it slightly differently -- I can’t recall the exact words, but perhaps I left the “hell” reference out and said something like “please identify the writer called Bachchoo, and tell me if it’s a penname?”

And yes, there was a completely different answer. Botty said that Bachchoo was the pen name of some obscure dead writer, who it named.

That the same Bot gave me two different answers in the space of five minutes was peculiar. But that was then, and this is where my qualification of “available” applies.

Very recently, I asked Botty the same question again. Same Bot, same app on the computer. This time it told me that Bachchoo was a poet, extracts of whose work were quoted every week in a column -- and then it mentioned my name. However, after that in the same answer, it went on to say that Bachchoo could be a misspelling of Bachchan, and said there was a famous writer called Harivansh Rai Bachchan, who very many readers will know was the film star Amitabh Bachchan’s dad, and wrote, among very many other things, a transformation of Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat as Madhushala.

But in the gap between the years that I asked the questions, Botty has got smarter and accumulated more data. It now adds that Bachchoo is a Mauritian politician and another person with that surname is a Trinidadian writer.

So, it seems that as Botty widens its information base, things get better and perhaps, for writers and operatives who work with information, a bit threatening?

I have friends who work with AI, not for gain or in their professions, but for fun. A director friend, stage and film, doesn’t write scripts himself but has recently sent me outlines written for whole screenplays by the Bot he calls “his Friend”. They describe, in synopsis, the dramatic action. Most of it reads to me like cliches and quite predictable, but in the hands of a skilful screenplay writer these could be modified and made exciting without the writer having to do the preliminary framework of thinking out a plot. I suppose for genre films --

detective, romance, horror, this would work. Perhaps this is already the way films are being produced in some world film industries?

Another close friend, Tamara Howe, and I both belong to a group of people calling ourselves officially the Darcus Howe Legacy Collective. Darcus Howe was a prominent activist, left-wing thinker, journalist, editor and broadcaster.

He was born in Trinidad and came to Britain as an immigrant and dedicated his life to justice and progress for the new communities of the UK. I worked for and with him. His daughter Tamara now asked AI to formulate what Darcus might have said about a current political situation. Botty replied and his/her/their formulations were impressively convincing and precise – even though the real Darcus would have undoubtedly included some twist or surprise in his deliberations.

A serious and dangerous development with AI is that it can be programmed to deliberately lie, pass disinformation or indulge in conspiracy theories. Elon Musk’s AI device Grok is one such. Ask it who was cleverer, Musk or Einstein, it will say Musk. And I wonder what it will say if asked who the better playwright is, Shakespeare or Musk?

Grok will also tell you that the gas Zyklon B released into the chambers by the Nazis was not there for genocide but was merely a disinfectant. Grok also, following His Master’s Voice, advocates the defunding of the BBC and champions extreme-right-wing broadcasters like the UK’s GB News.

Wikipedia’s investigation into Grok contends that it uses information from the racist, white-nationalist platform Stormfront, and also from Infowars, owned by the conspiracy theorist and school-shooting denier Alex Jones. Look him up -- not on Grok but Google -- who is not very polite about him.