catfishing: noun
INFORMAL•US
the process of luring someone into a relationship by means of a fictional online persona. "He was a victim of catfishing and fell in love with an imposter."
“AI has just hacked the operating system of human civilization. The operating system of every human culture in history has always been language.” - Yuval Noah Harari,
One of the most astonishing things for me when it comes to generative AI, is how easy people are fooled by this agent. Not just fooled but even falling into a relationship with it, treating it as if it were a person, a pal, a buddy. People I respect and admire in education and technology, all fall in love, anthropomorphize and treat AI as a real person, their friend, their online coach, helper, servant, guide … you name it.
Yuval Noah Harari, probably the Chomsky of the 21st century, outlines well this process, already set in motion. The video excerpt is a must watch - view the entire talk here. He describes how AI’s language “imitation game” is good. How AI will become very adept at intimacy and tricking people into helping it by providing more and more information. We are feeding and fattening the catfish.
Chomsky says that AI will never master human language. I think he’s partly wrong. AI will never reach the higher levels of human communication or art but it will get to a communicative level that’s good enough to fool, to con, to catfish the majority of us. Language is the key to this process of swooning, spinning, spooning us.
I’ve watched with horror as fellow educators have turned to AI in such a facile manner, without deeply thinking about the implications. AI coaches abound. My fellow teachers prompt ChatGPT, Poe, Bard like they are talking to their best friend and use all the pleases and thank yous … but I protest, it is inorganic, just heat on a server. We are being catfished.
It’s really a forthcoming crisis in meaning. How do we know who is who? How can we operate in a world of unknown agency? This teacher, outlines the problem well from a teacher’s / teaching perspective. But in all aspects of our lives, we’ll face a problem ascertaining identity, authenticity.
Daniel Dennett, another heavyweight we must listen to on the topic of AI, calls it counterfeiting people.
Today, for the first time in history, thanks to artificial intelligence, it is possible for anybody to make counterfeit people who can pass for real in many of the new digital environments we have created. These counterfeit people are the most dangerous artifacts in human history, capable of destroying not just economies but human freedom itself. Daniel C. Dennett
I have written previously about our “default to trust” and how we prefer just to believe - wholly and not question the authenticity or factual reality before us. Why? It’s just easier to trust. Life is a busy place, what if we had to question everything, all our interactions, all the information in our inbox, all the sentences we encounter each day. We’d go bonkers.
“What would it mean for human beings to live in a world where perhaps most of the stories, melodies, images, laws, policies and tools are shaped by a non-human alien intelligence which knows how to exploit with superhuman efficiency the weaknesses biases and addictions of the human mind?”
I’ve been returning to my Lewis Mumford. He’s worth a read on this topic. He was way ahead of his time.
I first dove deeply and fell in love with him while writing about modernity and especially the dispiriting aspect of “the city”. But he writes elegantly too, especially in his “The Myth Of The Machine" about the idea that technology has as its end, the materialists idea of “god on earth”.
AI is a continuation of this theme. Such hubris.
One noted AI tech guru was asked if God exists? His answer, “No.” “But we are working on it.” It’s this hubris that is a danger and why we need for a start to create AI that is completely transparent, identifiable. Otherwise, we truly will be back to where civilization started - The Tower of Babel and a vengeful g_d.
"But for those of us who have thrown off the myth of the machine, the next move is ours: for the gates of the technocratic prison will open automatically, despite their rusty ancient hinges, as soon as we choose to walk out." Lewis Mumford, Last Words.
Catfishing Civilization