Readers rated AI-mimicry of Shakespeare’s poems above the author’s real works
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Most readers can’t distinguish classic works by poets such as William Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson from imitations generated by artificial intelligence. And when asked which they prefer, they often chose the AI poetry.
“Over 78 per cent of our participants gave higher ratings on average to AI-generated poems than to human-written poems by famous poets,” says Brian Porter at the University of Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania.
In the 18th century, philosopher James Beattie compiled a list of 17 common-sense beliefs. A few are incontrovertible: “I exist”; “A whole is greater than a part”; “Virtue and vice are different”. But others seem unnecessarily moralising: “Ingratitude ought to be blamed and punished”; “I have a soul distinct from my body”; “There is a God”. Then, there are the scientifically contestable: “The senses can be believed”; “I am the same being that I was yesterday – or even 20 years ago”; “Truth exists”. Overall, his list seems quaint and outdated. Worse still, it gives no clear idea of what common sense is. Surely, we can do better.
Superficially, common sense seems easy to define: it is generally seen as knowledge or beliefs that are obvious – or should be obvious – to everyone. Yet it is strangely difficult to pin down. Often portrayed as universal, it is also often claimed not to exist. With that in mind, it might surprise you to hear that nobody has tried to measure the “commonness” of this knowledge or its intrinsic properties (its “sensicality”) – until now. Shockingly, this research shows that common sense may not be common at all.
If true, the implications are huge. From parenting to politics and from public health to law, what counts as common sense matters. Increasingly, it is also a technological issue, with computer scientists keen to instil it in artificial intelligence-driven robots to make…
What sets humans apart from the rest of life, or indeed inert matter? Many people would respond that it is our intelligence. Yet the rise of seemingly intelligent machines challenges this way of thinking. The companies behind these new artificial intelligence technologies, in the form of ChatGPT and its rivals, speak of achieving artificial general intelligence – machines that have the same level of intelligence as humans across a range of tasks.
Does this meteoric rise in AI make human intelligence, and therefore us, less special? Neil Lawrence, professor of machine learning at the University of Cambridge, doesn’t think so. In fact, he thinks we should throw out the concept of artificial general intelligence altogether.
In his new book The Atomic Human: Understanding ourselves in the age of AI, Lawrence makes the case that it is only by better understanding our own intelligence, and how wildly different it is to its artificial counterpart, that we can make the most of both. Here he tells New Scientist why he thinks both human and artificial intelligence are misunderstood, why it is pointless to compare the two and why, ultimately, we need a more nuanced understanding of intelligence.
Alex Wilkins: What do you make of the trend to compare artificial to human intelligence?
Neil Lawrence: Most of these arguments are pointless, they are irrelevant. Of course, the nature of the intelligence that we’re seeing in AI is extremely different from our own. It’s absurd that people are talking about this intelligence as if it’s anything to do with us.…
The invention of the printing press helped the distribution of information
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Nexus Yuval Noah Harari (Fern Press, out 10 September)
Reading Nexus is a strange experience. The quality of the text lurches up and down: one minute you are reading something incisive, the next you are wading through banalities.
Its author, Yuval Noah Harari, is a medieval historian most famous for his book Sapiens, a whistlestop history of humanity from the Stone Age to the present day. Its central thesis is that humans came to dominate the planet because we can believe in things that only…
