How I learned to stop worrying and have fun with AI

THIS SPRING, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, advertised a new model of ChatGPT by showcasing its ability to write fiction.

- By Leif Weatherby

Mr. Altman had prompted the bot to write a story about grief, in the style of “metafiction” (a self-reflexive genre in which the narrator weaves personal details into the story). It duly generated a winding tale that compares grieving a dead loved one to the loss function, technical jargon for a bit of the math that makes modern artificial intelligence (AI) systems work. Mr. Altman crowed about the passage, implying that such a complex genre, one associated with pretentious literary types, could be written only by a really intelligent agent.

I’m a professor of literature, and I think the story is a solid illustration of the genre. I don’t know that it’s great literature, or that ChatGPT is about to take over literary publishing. I certainly don’t think it proves that ChatGPT is intelligent; it just shows that it is an expert imitator of style.

More broadly, I think we’re having the wrong debates about AI altogether. In a recent article for The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper called AI a “scam,” an animatronic simulation of intelligence. This claim went against not just Mr. Altman, but also many tech journalists and data wonks who think Silicon Valley’s narrative that we are close to real machine intelligence is plausible. The linguist Emily Bender and the sociologist Alex Hanna think that AI is a “con,” and Dr. Bender describes it as a set of tricks that produces “synthetic text” rather than human meaning.

These critiques do little to explain AI’s popularity. They miss the fact that humans love to play games with language, not just use it to test intelligence. What Mr. Altman inadvertently showed us is that what is really driving the hype and widespread use of large language models like ChatGPT is that they are fun. AI is a form of entertainment.