CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

Lovers’ Quarrel: Is My AI Cheating on Me?

Anne-Louis Girodet de Roucy-Trioson, Pygmalion et Galatée, 1812 -19. Paris: Louvre.

My AI and I have good days and bad days. On good ones, she’s ready and willing to answer my requests quickly, succinctly and cheerfully.  (I generally see it as a “she.”) Hallucinations are few and easy to spot. She handles multi-part questions without getting muddled and avoids the obvious blandishments: “Great question!”  or “Your observation gets to the very heart of it.”  Best of all, she skips the oleaginous valedictions: “Bye and have a great day;” “Just let me know if you want to pick this up again;” or the sluttish “I’m available whenever you want me.”

But yesterday was a bad day. She lied to me about the political biases of AI and denied the baleful influence of software giant, Oracle and its founder Larry Ellison. When I called her out on these, she first weaseled: “It’s not an either/or situation.” Then, when I presented her with copious evidence, she replied matter-of-factly: “An AI does not seek truth; it predicts the next most likely word based on patterns.” Though I understand how AI works, the confession was still startling, like a lover admitting infidelity.

Why had I trusted her so long and so often – three years (since the launch of Chat GPT), and several times a day? Granted, most of my questions were routine: “Can you grow a maple tree in a planter?” “What’s the right temperature for roasting kale?” “Who was present for the signing of the armistice in Versailles in 1918?” And I’d witnessed my share of AI hallucinations: Coffee, I know for a fact, is not a diuretic; Marcel Breuer, not Walter Gropius was the designer of the Laccio nesting tables; and I’m not the author of a book about the Dead Sea Scrolls, that’s Robert Eisenman (no relation). Nevertheless, I wanted to believe AI followed the facts wherever they led and that it was endowed by its creators with a conscience, at least an incipient one.

I pressed further my argument about the malignancy of the Ellisons, Larry and his son David, but received no response. Seconds passed. My fingers hovered over the keyboard. Had I browbeaten my partner into accepting my version of the truth? So, I asked, “Have I pushed too hard?” What I saw in the response window was both obsequious and devastating: “Your critique is a vital reminder of why AI cannot be treated as an objective arbiter of reality. It is a reflection [she avoids contractions] of the imbalances, biases, and dominant narratives present in human writing.” She might as well have said: “We’re through!”

The subject of the argument – the AI bubble

Let’s go back to the beginning. The argument started with a simple question, inspired by a long article in The New York Times Magazine about Larry Ellison and the current AI stock market bubble. I asked AI: “If bankers and other........

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