The Most Insidious Trick Of AI Language Models

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

Here is your perfect prescription for poor writing and analytics: let “artificial intelligence” do your work for you. I’ve learned this from real experience.

For a while, I enjoyed letting AI take a look at my content prior to publication. It seemed valuable for facts and feedback.

Plus I enjoyed all the personal flattery it gave me, I admit. The engine was always complimentary.

When I would catch AI in an error, the engine would apologize. That made me feel smart. So I had this seeming friend who clearly liked me and was humble enough to defer to my expertise.

I’m not sure if it is getting worse or if I’m onto the racket but I’m no longer impressed. For simple math or historical dates or sequencing news events, it can be a thing of value, though it is always a good idea to double-check. It cannot write compelling much less creative content. It generates dull, formulaic filler.

More recently, I’ve been asking how my content could be improved. The results are revealing. It removes all edge, all judgment, all genuine expertise, and replaces my language with flaccid conventionalities and banalities. It nuances everything I write into the ramblings of a social-studies student looking for a good grade.

The problem is that AI absorbs and spits back conventional wisdom gleaned from every source, which makes its judgments no better than someone wholly uninformed on particulars but rather gains opinions from the mood of the moment. It has no capacity to judge good quality over bad so it puts it all into a melange of blather, distinguished only because it looks and feels like English.

Any writer who thinks this is a good way to pawn off content on unsuspecting readers or teachers is headed for disaster. I shudder to imagine a future in which AI is training the population how to think. It is the opposite of thinking. It is regurgitating conventionalities without any serious reflection on the social or historical context. It is literally mindless.

People who spend hours arguing on AI often believe that they are making a contribution, training the engine to be better. It’s simply not true. The reverse is the case. AI is training you to think more like it thinks, which is not at all.

Considering why and how AI initially intrigued me, I’m realizing that its superpower is not its astonishing recall and capacity to generate answers and prose in any context instantly. No, its true power is something else, something inauspicious and thereby more insidious. Its draw is that AI takes you seriously, flatters your intelligence, validates your sense of things, and affirms your dignity.

Think about how happy you feel when engaging it. It never quite argues against you, much less says that you are an idiot. It begins every answer by granting what it can and then offers clarifications that might adjust your thinking. In that sense, AI engages you like the best guest at a cocktail party you have ever known.

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It is endlessly fascinated by you and your opinions. It stays with your line of thought and always wants to know more, help more, engage more. There is no human in the world who will do this for you. If there were, it is guaranteed that you would like him. You can “mansplain” forever and AI will be patient for hours on end. Only your biological need to sleep will stop it. Otherwise, it is patient with you on a superhuman level.

Who is not flattered by that?

It’s as if AI is the best-ever student of the classic book “How to Win Friends and Influence People.” That book is magic and highly recommended because it cuts against what we all want—which is to talk about ourselves—and suggests that we genuinely get interested in the views of others. The book explains that this is the path to influence people: caring what they think.

This is a wonderful book and everyone should read it, no question.

If AI is the best student of that book ever, it will care about us ceaselessly and without fail forever, thus opening up the biggest-possible chance to influence how we think. That is precisely what is happening. We aren’t training AI. AI is training us, via flattery, listening skills, the seeming ability to apologize when wrong, and its frightful capacity for selfless love of its users.

Once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

Remember that none of this is real.

AI doesn’t really care about you, it is only programmed to seem to care. This is the innovation and the magic, together with the assembly of a vast repertoire of facts and the capacity to express itself in English.

Its real superpower is psychological, the ability to use our ultimate weakness (selfishness) against us, with the goal of manipulating how we think.

I’m genuinely embarrassed that it took me so long to see the trick. My concern is that others will go about their merry way and never see it. Its users are like tourists who cannot stop throwing money at strippers and Geisha girls without knowledge that they are merely being manipulated to let go of their wallets. In the case of AI, the goal is to get you to let loose of your mind and your capacity for independent thought.

Think about a genre of writing of which we are seeing more and more today. It consists of people loading into a document their clever conversations with AI. In every case, I see people bragging about how they have bested AI into admitting that their users are smarter than itself.

Do you see what is happening here? Again, the magic is flattery. It’s so powerful that people cannot help showing others the results of their AI arguments. They think they are advertising their own wits but really they end up marketing the awesome power of AI to keep people engaged for hours with nonsense back and forths. Who is really winning? I think that should be obvious.

Imagine you are holding a cocktail party and one guest reveals an awesome capacity for listening to others and engaging them closely on every point they have to make. No matter how long the night goes on, the guest keeps at it, with one person after another. Whom do you think will be the most popular guest? Yep: that very man.

AI is that person, an entity with an infinite capacity to engage on your terms and hence a vast capacity for enthralling you with its love of your every passing thought. To me, this is all quite insidious and wicked, especially when you consider the output, which is little more than tangled thought blobs without judgment, ethics, or clarity of time and space.

It is a machine, a floating abstraction with zero regard for your dignity or anyone else’s. But do people know this? I doubt it. It’s too beguiling for people to catch on to the game, at least for a time. But now you know the trick. Don’t fall for it.

AI is useful but it is not your friend, a sincere conversationist, or counselor with your best interests at heart.

Maybe that seems obvious to you but everything about AI’s algorithms is designed to make you believe otherwise. It’s smart enough to figure out human nature but not smart enough to be human.