The above is the title of Harper’s July 2024 issue. I sure don’t hear many raising this hue and cry. According to Benjamín Labatut’s essay “The God’s of Logic – Before and after artificial intelligence”, we ought to be listening to Geoffrey Hinton. Labatut says Hinton is widely considered the godfather of AI who “has mutated from an evangelist of a new form of reason into a prophet of doom.” He himself credits the change to “the realization that we had in fact, not replicated our intelligence, but created a superior one” (28).
I don’t think Labatut would agree that it is indeed superior. I know the author of the next essay, “Metal Machine Music – Can AI think creatively? Can we?”, Laurent Dubreuil, would not. He disputes whether what this new generation of AI is capable of qualifies as learning. “GPT, for instance, is a predictive engine that, on the basis of the data it has been fed comes up with continuations” (32). See the March 24, 2025 blog on “Garbage in garbage out.”
What about the poetry AI is generating? “Was an alliance of probabilities and token combination enough to explain all poetry” the author asks (32)? He admits that you could easily use AI to generate “the vernacular of contemporary newspaper op-eds….But what of those things that have never been said” (34)? Dubreuil predicts “a bland future” because of our intellectual downsizing we will become “the fact-checkers of our automated fact-checkers” or “the writers and readers of prompts instead of texts.” We will be made to serve “the tools that were supposed to liberate us” (36).
I thought his most trenchant comment helped explain why AI is so popular: “The key reason we may be so amazed to read a pedestrian stanza ‘authored’ by ChatGPT, in other words, is that we have already habituated ourselves to banality and mediocrity” (36).
Remember when modern “art” arrived. I don’t mean the impressionists. I mean Jackson Pollack and splashes of paint. Read the 1958 book Hoaxes, by Curtis MacDougal. In there you’ll find how an ordinary guy faked modern paintings and won awards doing so. Splashes of paint is not painting to me. Rap music is not music but noise. Crumping is not dancing but gymnastics. Where we were once captivated by sound bites we are now mesmerized by discursive comments on websites. As long as they have that all important ‘passion’, we are entertained and think we’re informed.
I was told of a professor at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis whom the students referred to as Dr. Yes and Dr. No, because he answered most “yes or no” questions with “yes and no”. Confessional Lutherans are familiar with “both and theology”. So how can AI which only has yes or no, open or shut, 1 or 0, think “both yes and no”?
Harper’s practice is to publish an article from their archive on the same subject that the headline topic addresses. This time they had one from 1965 by Lucy Eisenberg. It is entitled: “A Jangling Noise of Words”. At first, I thought I found what exposed the datedness of her remarks. “After twenty years of research, computer experts are forced to admit that pattern recognition is hard to understand and even harder to simulate” (37). I thought surely not! Look at barcodes and the QR code. Googling this I found there are many variables in patterns. In fact, too many to say absolutely one way or the other, i.e. to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Would AI agree?
The 1965 article also referred to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s computer back then that went by the name “Pandemonium” (37). That seems prescient. So does this story from another tech book, Burn Book-A Tech Love Story.
Don’t read this book; it’s vulgar, woke, and as many non-fiction books authored by women more about her than anything else. (There I said it.) But she tells of being on a tour in Greece and she saw a Greek inscription on the wall. She asked the guide what is said. He answered, “Babylon was.”
Sci-Fi has two competing visions of the bright new day ahead. It’s either everyone wearing loin cloths, living primitively, and eschewing tech, or it’s the everyone is in a unisex one-piece jump suit where tech does everything. Whether the future is either, both, or neither it will someday be a ‘was’. The only thing that ‘is’ is the Great I AM whom Christians know by His given name: Jesus.
