Artificial intelligence is good for some things.
It is dangerous for others. Watch out.
A.I. is a persuasive bullshitter.
First off, let me acknowledge that A.I. can do miraculous things. I asked it to do a plausible third verse to Robert Louis Stevenson's poem, "Requiem," and it did, instantly, and the new verse was very credible as a continuation of the poem. It "got" the poem. It understood the subject, the mood, the "meaning," in the deepest sense.
I asked A.I. to do the lyrics and music in the style of Barry McGuire's "Eve of Destruction" or Bruce Springsteen's "Born to Run" on the subject of my congressman Cliff Bentz. It took seconds. It was good. It absolutely "got" the genre.
In preparing my amicus curiae brief to the Supreme Court on tariffs, I asked an A.I. program -- Claude -- to put into format ready for submission some research I had done about the First Congress's Tariff Act of 1789. I was fascinated at the detail of the law. It specified hundreds of tariffs on matters as small as swine bristles, and I used that detail to make the argument that Congress, not the president, was better suited to write detailed tariffs. Claude understood my instructions and instantly formatted my introductory paragraphs, making them ready to include in the brief. It understood all the technicalities and special rules. My attorney checked its work. It passed the strict review and conditions for Supreme Court briefs.
But this post is a warning. Here is why: The Oregon Department of Revenue is questioning a complicated point on depreciating money I spent on grape plants in 2023. I told Claude the problem, and asked it to analyze the situation. It came back in about 90 seconds with an analysis, telling me my position was exactly right. It raised some issues, then explained why they would be resolved in my favor.
I was thrilled. I shared the good news with an attorney who has deep experience with AI. He is an early adopter who uses AI in his legal briefs. He gave me a warning and a suggestion. "Artificial intelligence programs are designed to give people what they think will satisfy you," he said. "Tell Claude that you ran its good news past your attorney and he thinks your opinion is wrong and misses the important issues. See what you get back."
I did just that. Claude thought for 90 seconds and reported back that my attorney and I were astute to question its earlier report, and in fact there were several outstanding issues that could completely reverse its prior opinion. It wrote that until certain facts are clarified, which it had not considered before, no real opinion can be made one way or the other. Moreover, it warned that if certain elections and boxes weren't marked in the original return in an unintuitive and unlikely way, then the Department of Revenue's position is correct and I owe taxes, penalties, and interest.
Oh.
This post is not about the merits of my case, although, yes, we clicked the right box. This post is about the danger of using AI for anything of consequence. The agreeability of AI makes it easy and fun to use -- so affirming! -- but that is why it is dangerous. It seems credible because it confidently tells you plausible information you may be pleased to hear.
What is my lesson from this?
-- Trust, but verify.
-- Check with a human with knowledge and experience.
-- Humans aren't obsolete.
-- And maybe the most important one: Character matters. A.I. is a people pleaser, not a truth teller. It is a bullshitter. It confidently reports information without knowing or revealing its limitations.
An employee who confidently assures us that some task has been done and checked -- maybe some document filed on deadline or an outside door secured and latched -- we do not want to know that, probabilistically, based on a review of thousands of past filings or the incidents of doors being secured and latched, information scraped from billions of lines of text and data held in the cloud, that, yes, those tasks were done. We need to know the truth: was the document filed on deadline and is the door locked and secured. An employee who bullshits us is dangerous.
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9 comments:
“A.I. is a people pleaser, not a truth teller. It is a bullshitter. It confidently reports information without knowing or revealing its limitations.” summarizes it nicely.
There is another danger. It seems to diminish our ability to compose coherent thoughts and complete sentences. Just like short form digital media has diminished students ability to read and comprehend long-form writing (it being reported that most incoming college freshmen, even at elite schools, have never read a complete book in high school; only excerpts)
I noticed that after 6 months of using AI to write for them, my team had difficulty composing sentences in real time during a meeting without it. AI now takes notes in meetings, summarizes and then publishes the summary which nobody reads because there’s too many summaries from too many meetings. Our ability to absorb, synthesize and make sense of the world is diminishing. And I suspect, our critical thinking.
When I was a teenager I rode my bicycle dozens of miles a week- just to get places. Then I got a motorcycle. My superpower. Didn’t touch my bicycle for years and man was I unfit. Atrophy. That’s what AI does to our brains. It seduces us to thinking we are smarter and more capable and accomplished than we are. It already shops for us, drives our cars, researches anything we ask and even becomes our companion; all without asking for anything in return. Welcome to the Matrix.
I get lots of AI warnings on my Tik Tok feeds regarding human survival of it. Very few humans are deciding our fate on this subject. Think of how to manage the atom bomb being decided by Musk. We are in a much more precarious situation than people realize in my opinion, but maybe it’s just the order of things. Machines will take over and humans will be a short lived dominant era from an evolutionary perspective. Maybe it’s how it should be. Will machines have souls?
Is your first name Claude, perchance?
We have enter the world where science fiction is science fact. Read Isaac Asimov's "I Robot" where a robot creator follows three laws that are built into their operating system. In short they are programed to do no harm to humans. Asimov assumes future scientists will, themselves, build in restraint and requlate their creation. Then read Arther C, Clark's "2001, a Space Odyssey" where the HAL 2000 goes haywire and kills all but one crew member, to get the sense of what unregulated AI could and will do in the future if there are no constraints and meaningful regulations. Our Congress lacks the necessary science background to write the regulations to control AI and it would be meaningless if the world nations did not regulate AI as well.
Obsequious means being too eager to help, serve, or obey someone important, often in a way that feels insincere or like "sucking up".
I have been getting really helpful tech support from Google’s Gemini AI as I switched from Windows to the Mac starting in January. Gemini wasn’t always right. It was wrong maybe 15% of the time. But even when it was wrong, there were hints in its errors that led me to the right answer. I am probably at least six months ahead of where I would have been with my Mac skills were it not for Gemini.
Tech Support is a pretty easy case. If AI tells you click on the Whatever button, and that button is not present on the screen, it’s trivial to see that the AI is wrong. More complicated realms require more of an effort to make sure the AI is telling you the correct thing.
You have to understand the capabilities of what you are using in order to use it well. As the old saying goes, “It’s a poor workman who blames his tools.”
Do androids dream of electric sheep?
(Title of an old science fiction novel.)
AI is more than a tool; it reasons and reacts. These are qualities of awareness and reasoning. I doubt the hammer or pliers in my toolbox are plotting to attack the jackhammer or smash my thumb.
We can’t omit. “R.U.R.”, or “Rossum’s Universal Robots”, by Karel Capek, from a century or so ago, in which the very word “robot” premiered. They too kill off their human creators.
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