Actually Interesting or An Invasion? When it comes to AI, who judges?

It smarts to say this, but has anyone else noticed how clever Artificial Intelligence has become?

How it tells you what it’s saying before you’ve even thought of saying it?

How it has inveigled itself – OK I had to look up how to spell that word – into everything we do. Yes, it sounds stupid but as it has become such A Thing, it clearly needs Avid Investigation.

A meeting was organised at work a while ago to discuss AI. Those under 30 wondered why it was even worth talking about it when it was already such a normal part of life.

The relics among us just maintained that stunned mullet look that only we can wear so well. (Just ask Rod Stewart). The one we bung on when we pretend to know something’s a Thing, but have no idea what it does or whether it is meta or beta or even feta than whatever we used before.

But I do remember someone asking the world’s stupidest question at this meeting. Yes, of course it was me. A woman who, up until that point, had been considered to have decent intelligence – well, at least I could spell my name and had won awards for really bad poetry.

“I have a stupid question,” I said, trying to throw my voice so it sounded like it was coming from someone else. “Yes, Sally,” someone said really loudly.

“Bugger,” I thought, but ploughed on regardless as my shoe tried to tear through the carpet to find that hole to China I had started digging in the same staff meeting the last time I was stupid.

“But where does it come from?” I asked. “When people use it, where does this information come from? Is there a library somewhere out there,” I added, pointing to nowhere in particular but hoping it was at least on the periphery of cyberspace.

“How can It know?”

There was quite bit of communal coughing, a rush for the gluten-free, sugar-free, taste-free cake that everyone had ignored up until then, and the meeting was over.

“Was my question really that stupid,” I asked one of my colleagues. “Have some cake,” she said.

It used to be OK to look up how to spell stuff. Hit “Command” and hold “S” was the key, literally, on those big hulking computers in newspaper offices. It was known as spell check and it was perfectly fine, indeed you were encouraged to use it. Or even those big hulking books known as dictionaries.

You could also hit “Command” and then “J” to justify what you’d written – no, not that sort of justification, but the one like those undergarments that push everything up, in and up some more – and then delete everything it considers to be unnecessary.

It left you with really short stories but happy sub-editors – if that’s not an oxymoron. But, again, that’s another story.

Because the spell check thingy didn’t work on this laptop, I asked around about options and most everyone volunteered the same brand name. I didn’t give it much hope when I saw it couldn’t spell its own name, but decided to persevere. But every time I wrote a letter, let alone a word, it corrected me, insisting that only American spelling would do and that mine certainly would not.

Then it started taking over the screen with messages, like how I couldn’t spell “ripoff”- apparently it takes a hyphen.

I was about to give up, when it took to the screen in the boldest of type, to say, it wasn’t going to tell me any more of my faults unless I gave it more of my credit card details.

Sounds fare, I thought.

Original Article published by Sally Hopman on Riotact.