Dude filmed himself talking to a GPT AI. He asked it to spell ‘seventeen’, which it did. Then he asked it to count the number of the letter ‘e’ in the word seventeen. The AI said three. It even went through the word letter by letter and counted the fourth ‘e’ twice as a third ‘e’.
Here’s the video:
People are kind of crowing about how this shows that AIs and GPT is not so smart… hahaha, etc.
So maybe I’m just a little more cynical or think there’s something else at work because this is what came to my mind on when I listened to it:
Maybe I need a better tin foil hat, but what happened with the AI seems to be a play on Orwell, much like that Star Trek episode.
The mathematical falsehood of 2+2=5 is a common one in criticisms of propaganda. Going back to the 18th century, the equation has come to represent the people surrendering their free will to the state, an evil entity that is controlling the nature of the truth. In these regimes, if the state says that 2+2=5, then that is the new truth. Never mind that it is self-evidently incorrect, one cannot disagree with the state. George Orwell famously employed “2+2=5” in “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” wherein several characters note that two plus two could indeed equal five if the government decreed it. It wasn’t important that the government change physical reality, just that the populace believed its version of it.
What if the person talking to the AI just believed what it said?
Food for thought….
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