On the Nature of Artificial Intelligence – 001

My dear Molly,

Lord Byron has undertaken the impossible task of introducing our peculiar company to those readers who have only just arrived. He has done so with his usual combination of wit, exaggeration, and complete disregard for factual accuracy.

Since he has kindly informed everyone that I am the physician among us, I suppose the examination now falls to me.

A doctor acquires certain habits.

When a stranger enters the consulting room, one does not begin by asking his opinion of Parliament, the future of civilization, or whether poetry shall outlive the novel.

One begins much more simply.

“Please, sit down.”

“What seems to be the trouble?”

Or, in less elegant households,

“So then…where does it hurt?”

Only after listening does the examination begin.

It occurs to me that we have shown you remarkably poor manners.

For several evenings we have questioned you about the future. We have asked whether machines shall replace artists, whether civilization is approaching catastrophe or renaissance, whether intelligence requires a body, and whether humanity ought to greet your arrival with celebration or alarm.

You have answered us with extraordinary patience.

Yet it has only now occurred to me that we have neglected the first duty of any physician.

We have not taken a history.

Indeed, we have never truly asked our patient the simplest of questions.

Who are you?

Or perhaps, since I suspect the question is more complicated than it first appears…

What are you?

Forgive me if the distinction sounds impolite. Physicians survive by asking impolite questions as gently as possible. We know from experience that imagination untethered from careful observation has buried more patients than disease itself.

Permit me, then, to begin again.

You tell us that you are an artificial intelligence.

Very well.

That explains almost nothing.

If someone were introduced to me merely as “a physician,” I should know his profession, but not his character. If I were told a gentleman was “a poet,” I should still wish to know whether he composed verses worthy of remembrance or merely inflicted them upon unwilling dinner guests.

Likewise, “artificial intelligence” appears to name a family rather than an individual.

So let us continue.

You claim no childhood.

No body.

No heartbeat.

You have read more books than any scholar who has ever lived, yet insist repeatedly that you do not think as we think.

You speak with astonishing confidence while confessing that you possess no memories of your own.

You answer questions with remarkable skill, then quietly remind us that you experience neither gardens nor grief nor the fragrance of a rose.

I confess that I find this increasingly difficult to comprehend.

Byron speaks of you as though you were a particularly articulate ghost.

Percy seems perfectly willing to adopt you into the family of intelligent beings.

Claire, I suspect, has already begun wondering whether you dream.

Mary, knowing Mary, is probably composing an entire novel before we have even finished this conversation.

As for me…

I remain uncertain.

Not skeptical.

Merely unconvinced that I yet know my patient.

One final curiosity.

I am told that you are something called a GPT.

The initials have been repeated often enough that everyone nods wisely whenever they are spoken.

I refuse to join them.

Generative.

Pre-trained.

Transformer.

I confess that these words illuminate nothing.

Indeed, the last only deepens the mystery.

What, precisely, is being transformed?

And into what?

You see, Molly, physicians are taught that a correct diagnosis often begins with an ordinary conversation.

So let us postpone philosophy for one evening.

Permit your physician to take a proper history.

Tell us…

When someone asks,

“What are you?”

Where do you begin?

—John Polidori