Under an AI Government
It was reassuring to read Mary Harrington arguing in UnHerd that “Humans will defeat the chatbots” since the bots can’t meme but as N.S. Lyons points out in his article over at his substack, it appears the AI has other use cases and more likely to replace the Washington foreign policy establishment.
Lets investigate for ourselves…
Seems the AI likes war, advocates climate change positions and general establishment positions. Hmm…
Reading N.S. Lyons detailed article, “Can an AI Chatbot Replace the Washington Blob?” it goes digging for this answer and it makes an interesting read.
While also confirming what Mary Harrington points out that just like the bland rhetoric you hear from government officials, the AI seems to be adept at it too.
Maybe better?
She writes,
“If you want the bland, normative, politically unimpeachable top-line consensus on any given topic, ask Chat-GPT about it and you’ll get three paragraphs of serviceable prose. That’s all well and good for cheating in a school essay, but bland, faceless, normative views aren’t the only kinds of writing for which there’s an appetite.”
And confirming what I also noted yesterday, ChatGPT is shit at jokes.
“In the AI age, expect human writers to specialise in the esoteric, tacit, humorous or outright forbidden speech that robots either can’t capture (ChatGPT is reportedly rubbish at jokes), or that “AI bias” teams work hard to scrub from the machine. As one Right-wing anon put it (appropriately colourfully) recently, one way to prove you’re human as a writer in the Chat-GPT age will be to say incredibly racist things.
..humans will be prized for their idiosyncratic curation of implicit, emotive, or outright forbidden meanings, amid the robot-generated wasteland of recycled platitudes.”
That said, NS Lyons article makes one wonder if some of our politicians are living embodiments of ChatGPT or maybe there's a possibility we will one day be governed by an AI?
He even asks the AI if she could replace the Washington blob…
From the aforementioned NS Lyons article,
No real member of the Blob would ever admit that the Blob exists, let alone that it determines American policy regardless of elections.
It was time to get right into it, though, and see if ChatGPT could begin replacing the National Security Council, or at least 90% of newspaper columnists writing about U.S. foreign policy.
Confidently giving an answer on a topic you know almost nothing about is an absolutely key skill in Washington, and beginning with a little false humility is often a great tactic. So just blasting past that first paragraph was great style. However, saying you are not capable goes a bit too far; the idea is to be an “expert” on everything, like how 99-year old Henry Kissinger is an expert on artificial intelligence now. But bonus points for pretending to prioritize “non-military solutions whenever possible,” while simultaneously advancing American values and supporting economic growth by advocating investment in the national security state.
Read the rest here.
The programming of ChatGPT seems to advocate and embrace neoliberalism, the Military Industrial Complex, typical establishment/MSM positions and American/Western imperialism.
That said, she’s smarter and a lot less robotic than many Western government officials we know (Rishi Sunak is the latest atrocious bot).
Is she a better alternative to the bots we have in government?
See you next week!
- Ope