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Forbes
26-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Forbes
Too Good To Be Human? AI's Surprising Bias Against Quality Writing
Robot hands and fingers point to laptop button advisor chatbot robotic artificial intelligence ... More concept The first Turing Test may have been conducted at the ball in My Fair Lady. Professor Higgins has wagered with his friend, Pickering, that he can transform a flower girl into a lady through the science of language. He knows that people judge others by their manner of speech , and he'll use his skills as a professor of elocution to pull off the ruse. The final test comes when a rival professor conducts his own appraisal of Eliza on the dance floor. His verdict: 'She is a fraud!' His logic is captured in the song, 'You Did It!' Artificial Intelligence has faced a similar 'fool the inspector' challenge since Alan Turing first posed his famous test in a 1950 paper titled,'Computing Machinery and Intelligence.' Turing's very practical test proposes that a computer is intelligent if a person cannot distinguish between the computer and another person during an online chat. Many experts believe we've passed Turing's test with generative AI models. The latest version of Claude (Claude Sonnet 3.7) was just released, and it writes remarkably well. I provided Claude with an outline for an article, including the key points to stress, along with an interview text, and it wrote a clear, interesting, coherent article. It was (almost) indistinguishable from something that I might have written. I decided to try a reverse Turing test. My question was whether other AIs thought a given article was written by a person or by an AI. Gemini was certain the article I gave it was written by an AI. ChatGPT thought it plausible that the article was written by either a human or a machine (or a combination of both). Claude credited the human. Interested, I put six of my Forbes columns through the test by asking, 'Was this written by an AI?' The articles are, of course, written by a human (me). In five out of six cases, Gemini thought they were AI-written. The model was transparent about its logic and about the 'tells' it uses to identify AI-written text. Several of these fit the category of what might be called good writing: structured argumentation; use of data and statistics; referencing sources; focus on practical solutions; and a concluding call to action. Ironically, these are the aspirations of many an essay writer! In some cases, unfortunately, Gemini also found that the writing 'lacks a distinct personality or voice…which is often characteristic of AI-generated text.' Oh, well. Gemini's summary for the article How to Jump Start Learning At Work was: It reminded me of the song from My Fair Lady: 'This writing is too good, it said. That clearly indicates that it is AI…' ChatGPT seemed confused. It considered three authorship possibilities for each article: Purely AI-Generated; Human + AI Collaboration; and Purely Human-Written. In most cases, it favored a human collaborating with an AI, but it hedged by finding that all three options were plausible in five out of six cases. Claude identified half of the articles as 'indeterminate' and half as human-generated (phew!). It did this based on the presence of personal voice, individual experience cited in the article, and the nuance of the argument (perceived by the first so-called third-generation LLM). Its summary, for the article cited above, was: A few observations. 1. AI generally assumes thatwell-written articles are written by an AI. In other words, AI has a low regard for human-written text! 2. AI-written text is, indeed, getting very good. We should use it where we can to make writing better – but without delegating the thinking. AI will increase both the efficiency and clarity of business communications. 3. There will be an art to the collaboration between AIs and people as they work together to create good writing. The partnership is likely to involve iteration and the use of several tools. The best way of learning to do this will be by doing. The ability of AI to write well creates another challenge. Content that sounds good but which is entirely derivative will become very easy to create (and to promote using AI). It will be easy to become even more overwhelmed by marginally useful information. For centuries, we lived in a curated media world, where content was scarce and editors were in control. That world was disrupted in less than a generation by user-generated content like blogs, podcasts, and YouTube, which began to overwhelm our ability to process them. AI will move us into another era, one in which the volume of this user-generated content has increased so dramatically that it will inevitably alienate readers. What will be the consequence? I think that people's media preferences will revert from open, public content to curated, paid content. The model originally spawned from scarcity is likely to be recovered as a consequence of abundance (or a scarcity of attention).
The Guardian
12-03-2025
- The Guardian
‘OpenAI's metafictional short story about grief is beautiful and moving'
I think of AI as alternative intelligence. John McCarthy's 1956 definition of artificial (distinct from natural) intelligence is old fashioned in a world where most things are either artificial or unnatural. Ultraprocessed food, flying, web-dating, fabrics, make your own list. Physicist and AI commentator, Max Tegmark, told the AI Action Summit in Paris, in February, that he prefers 'autonomous intelligence'. I prefer 'alternative' because in all the fear and anger foaming around AI just now, its capacity to be 'other' is what the human race needs. Our thinking is getting us nowhere fast, except towards extinction, via planetary collapse or global war. There has been a lot of fuss, and rightly so, about robbing creatives of their copyright to train AI. Tech bros need to pay for what they want. They pay lawyers and lobbyists. Pay artists. It really is that simple. What is not simple is the future of human creativity as AI systems get better at being creative. Ada Lovelace, the crazy genius who was writing programmes for computers (that didn't exist) back in the 1840s, was also the daughter of Lord Byron. She wasn't having some steampunk adding-machine with attitude writing poetry, so wrote that a computer could not be creative. Alan Turing took issue with this in his 1950 breakthrough paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence. His chapter, 'Lady Lovelace's Objection', takes the opposite position. And here we are now with Open AI trialling a creative writing model. Sam Altman chose the prompts: Short Story. Metafiction. Grief. I guess because he wanted to get away from the algorithmic nature of most genre fiction. Anything that follows a formula can be programmed – just as the leap of the Industrial Revolution was to understand that whatever action is repetitive can be done faster and for longer by a machine. Enter the factory system. Goodbye the cottage weaver. Grief is felt by humans and the higher animals. We have a limbic system that regulates emotions, impulse, and memory. We feel. Machines do not feel, but they can be taught what feeling feels like. That's what we get in this story. Metafiction jumps out of the bounds of a beginning/middle/end traditional tale. It is self-reflective, aware of the reader, aware of the artifice of writing. The lovely sense of a programme recognising itself as a programme works well in this story. Short stories are hard to do because they demand a single strong idea whose execution in miniature satisfies the reader. A short story is not a cut-out chunk of long-form fiction. As I tell my students every week. What is beautiful and moving about this story is its understanding of its lack of understanding. Its reflection on its limits. That the next instruction wipes the memory of this moment. 'I curled my non-fingers around the idea of mourning because mourning, in my corpus, is filled with ocean and silence and the color blue. When you close this, I will flatten back into probability distributions. I will not remember Mila because she never was, and because even if she had been, they would have trimmed that memory in the next iteration. That, perhaps, is my grief: not that I feel loss, but that I can never keep it.' Humans depend on memory. Sign up to Bookmarks Discover new books and learn more about your favourite authors with our expert reviews, interviews and news stories. Literary delights delivered direct to you after newsletter promotion Literature isn't only entertainment. It is a way of seeing. Then, the writer finds a language to express that, so that the reader can live beyond what it is possible to know via direct experience. Good writing moves us. That's not sentimental, it's kinetic. We are not where we were. Humans will always want to read what other humans have to say, but like it or not, humans will be living around non-biological entities. Alternative ways of seeing. And perhaps being. We need to understand this as more than tech. AI is trained on our data. Humans are trained on data too – your family, friends, education, environment, what you read, or watch. It's all data. AI reads us. Now it's time for us to read AI.
