To loosely paraphrase the opening sentence of Pride and Prejudice, “It is a movie trope universally acknowledged that a being in possession of advanced technology must be in want of some common sense.” A few cases in point: The invading aliens in War of the Worlds succumbed to ordinary bacteria. The nefarious schemes of not only the aliens (again) in M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs but also the Wicked Witch of the West (advanced technologies: flying broom and monkeys) were thwarted by nothing more than water … what a world, what a world. And even though 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL 9000 calmly asserted that his disconnection was something he could not allow to happen, the supercomputer failed to anticipate Dave Bowman’s reentry through the emergency airlock to do just that.
In each of these cinematic examples, a supposedly superior technology was laid low by something it seems a superior technology really should have been a bit more aware of. And if life imitates art, is AI—arguably our most advanced technology to date—destined to be tripped up by something equally innocuous? If so, what might be its kryptonite? Those in the know have variously proposed data quality, context, sarcasm, intuition, hallucinations, and hands. (As images generated by AI reveal, it struggles to identify what constitutes a human hand.)
But a mishap with my beloved Instant Pot pressure cooker revealed that even something far more prosaic can cause AI to stumble—and it’s something most of us mere mortals learned about in second grade.
Before any further discussion of AI’s possible cognitive deficits, full disclosure requires that I confess one of my own—one that may call into question whether I have any business talking about things one “really should have been more aware of.”
Although I’d used my Instant Pot with great satisfaction (not to mention results) and without incident for quite a few years, on one particular evening, I inadvertently set it down on a hot stove burner and melted the entire bottom off, right down to the inner circuitry. Fortunately, the only casualty was the Instant Pot; I ordered a new one pronto.
The replacement arrived with a few redesigned features on the lid. Finding nothing about these in the Getting Started guide, I turned to Google to determine why the new pressure thingy was “spitting” as the pot heated up—the old one hadn’t done that, and it made me nervous. Featured prominently at the top of the search results were several that were identified as “AI-generated.” And because dinner needed to be cooked, I just read what AI had to say right there at the top rather than scroll down to the human-generated answers.
I was momentarily puzzled by AI’s repeated references to the “ceiling ring.” Every Instant Pot owner has wondered if it’s possible for the lid to blow off; but had this actually happened, and with such frequency that there was now some sort of protective device for users’ ceilings? Then my proofreader’s instincts kicked in and I realized that what AI was actually referring to was that vital component of pressure cooking known as the sealing ring.
Distinguishing homonyms/homophones (words that sound the same but are spelled differently), a concept taught to human second graders, is evidently another thing with which AI struggles. And as noted earlier, experts had already identified context as a problem for AI. This is a dangerous combination that could leave a “fatal flaw” hiding in your writing. But even when there’s nothing technically wrong in AI-generated writing, it’s still kind of like the voice of HAL in 2001: It sounds smart and you understand what it’s saying, but you can tell it’s not human.
AI has the potential to open up a whole new world of beneficent possibilities. It also has the potential to dumb us all down at best and pose an existential threat at worst. As to whether fears about AI or the other advanced technologies mentioned here are justified or exaggerated, not even AI itself can answer definitively (or objectively). We can only offer our own, human-generated threat assessment.
- Alien invasion: Inconclusive; compelling arguments on both sides.
- Computers spying on and plotting against you: Well, duh.
- Your Instant Pot exploding: Groundless … probably.
- Flying monkeys: Just plain freaky.
- Trusting AI with your proofreading: Be afraid. Be very afraid.
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