(2023-02-20) Sinker Use Your Illusion

Dan Sinker: Use Your Illusion. It's March 11, 1918. Eva Carrière sits in a corner of a darkened room, mostly obscured by thick black curtains on three sides. The front is curtained too, but she can open and close those

Eva Carrière was a spirit medium with an extraordinary claim. Instead of simply speaking with the dead, she spewed liquid—some called it ectoplasm, others "spirit foam"—that had faces suspended in it

Microsoft announced their Bing bot to much fanfare, beating Google to the punch on a similar announcement and kicking off what many tech pundits say is a new battle for artificial-intelligence-assisted search.

So what's the trick? The Bing bot is based on the same technology that drives ChatGPT, namely a type of machine learning model known as a Generative Pre-trained Transformer

When it all comes together just right, it's hard not to have a sense that you're working with something more than a simple computer program. It's a great trick

The problem is that this is a hard trick and the longer you interact with a chatbot, the more difficult it is to maintain the illusion

The Bing AI isn't sentient any more than Eva Carrière truly spewed forth spirit foam containing faces from the beyond. Like Carrière's ectoplasm, GPT AIs are an elaborate illusion.