AI, and other demons

Dear Reader,

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) makes steady inroads into our lives, I am told regularly by well-wishers that in a year or two my job will be taken over by bots, which will write and edit in a jiffy. While that may well come to pass, what gives me reason to hope otherwise is the moronic nature of the texts produced by language-generating AI tools like ChatGPT.

For instance, when a user posed the tongue twister, “How much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?” as a question to ChatGPT, the solemn reply was: “It’s impossible to say for sure how much wood a woodchuck could chuck if it could chuck wood, as there is no precise information on the subject. Woodchucks, also known as groundhogs, are burrowing animals and are not known for their wood-chucking abilities. In fact, it is unlikely that a woodchuck would be able to chuck wood at all, as chucking wood would require a certain level of dexterity and strength that woodchucks do not possess.”

But stupid content is the least of the fears associated with AI. The book, Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI, by Indian-British journalist Madhumita Murgia, which has made it to the longlist of the 2024 Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, talks about a group of people from different parts of the globe who are united in having their lives upended by unexpected encounters with AI.

Murgia shows how the use of AI can adversely affect areas like healthcare, education and public service, all of which are anchored in a set of moral principles that a machine obviously cannot possess. Even if these fears are unfounded, the very real and logical possibility remains that AI will keep on upgrading itself, as it is programmed to do, till it has no use left for human intelligence. That will mean the end not just of pen-pushers like me but also of the very gods of Silicon Valley who birthed AI.

But till that time comes, we can glory in its positive uses. Artist Prateek Arora manipulates photographs with AI to create incredible images on which sci-fi horror novels can be written. Here reality serves as a launchpad for a futuristic world that does not look too unreal. For instance, one image shows a usual under-construction site in Mumbai, with heaps of cement, an ugly, unfinished building, and workers; only, some of the labourers are on a skyward journey, loosened from the pull of gravity and troubles of living.

Even more startling are Arora’s family portraits, which have families in typically middle-class Indian drawing rooms posing with, say, an alien symbiote. The effect is funny and unsettling; they make you question the role of photography as a tool of documentation in a world of deepfakes.

These concerns are also taken up in the graphic novel, Dream Machine: AI and the Real World, by Appupen and Laurent Daudet. Read what Anil Menon, author of the speculative fiction collection, The Inconceivable Idea of The Sun, has to say about Dream Machine in his review here.

Surprisingly, history can read like the stuff of speculative fiction too. Mukund Padmanabhan’s book, The Great Flap of 1942, is about “How the Raj Panicked over a Japanese Non-invasion”. The word “non-invasion” is pivotal: while the Japanese did bomb Indian cities in the early 1940s during the Second World War, the reports of bombings co-existed with accounts of the Japanese treating Indian prisoners of war with extreme kindness. All this created a royal mess in the minds of India’s British overlords. Parvati Sharma’s absorbing review of Padmanabhan’s engagingly written history book is not to be missed.

Before I go, I must mention a doggerel related to the Japanese invasion of Calcutta that I had heard from my grandparents. It goes, “Sa re ga ma pa dha ni/ Bomb pheleche Japani (Sa re ga ma pa dha ni/ the Japanese have dropped a bomb)”, the childlike rhyme suggesting that the invaders were more of a bogeyman than a real threat.

I am confident that AI can never generate tales such as these apparently forgotten stories, that, when revived in human memory, come carrying the scent of a lost time, like Proust’s madeleines.

See you again soon,

Anusua Mukherjee