Jaron Lanier more or less invented virtual reality, grew up in tents and a wacky dome construction in the desert and plays classical music like a virtuoso. Many know him as a “tech critic” (what a job!) from the very beginning, he has written bestsellers about the negative effects of the Silicon Valley monopolies. So far, so well known. This interview with Laniers Guardian about the latest AI models is worth reading, not only because it warns of fake news and other inconveniences from chatbots – that’s more to be expected. I find one positive aspect that Lanier discovers in the Large Language Models remarkable: They leave the well-trodden paths on which the Internet meanwhile sends us back and forth.
So could the new chatbots challenge this? “Right. That’s my point. If you go to a chatbot and say: ‘Please can you summarise the state of the London tube?’ you’ll get different answers each time. And then you have to choose.” This programmed-in randomness, he says, is progress. “All of a sudden this idea of trying to make the computer seem humanlike has gone far enough in this iteration that we might have naturally outgrown this illusion of the monolithic truth of the internet or AI. It means there is a bit more choice and discernment and humanity back with the person who’s interacting with the thing.”
Lanier probably wants the truth here to be understood more in the technical sense than in the sense of content: Depending on the situation, there is one (or more?) ideal interaction for every person, an ideal output, and they can deliver the varied answers of the chatbots (which of course have to be checked would be how much such outputs really differ). Lanier’s idea: striving for the ultimate, very best solution to a problem is a mistake, instead it requires variance. He explains this with a well-loved example:
For Lanier, the classic example of restricted choice is Wikipedia … “Wikipedia is run by super-nice people who are my friends. But the thing is it’s like one encyclopedia. Some of us might remember when on paper there was both an Encyclopedia Britannica and Encyclopedia Americana and they provided different perspectives. The notion of having the perfect encyclopedia is just weird.”
Then let Chat-GPT invent a new encyclopedia.