What I’m still not sure about is whether an AI could make judgments as fresh and perceptive as the reviews from Senior and other elite reviewers. For those people, the act of reading evokes echoes from their own lives and triggers thought processes that lead to their observations. Senior doubts that this could happen with a robot. “I don’t see how AI can recreate the experience of reading a book, which is what the best critics do,” she says.
I guess that a variation of the Turing test would be whether a robot could do just that. But that would be falling into the trap of assuming that AI, once it performs a task as well as humans, won’t level up from there. An AI book reviewer might not bother to recreate the human experience of reading a book. Drawing on its comprehensive knowledge of everything ever written, including treatises on what makes great criticism, a future AI bibliophile might indulge in a form of hypercriticism, with insights exceeding what mere mortals could produce. By then, of course, many of the books up for review will probably be written by LLMs.
In the meantime, humans still rule. Don’t cancel your subscription to the London Review of Books just yet. Still, ChatGPT reviews do have their charms. In fact, I have a new hobby: asking LLMs to write better and better reviews of my books. Here’s the latest variation on Hackers:
Though the world of computing has evolved since the book’s publication, its luminescent resonance remains undimmed. The predictions laid bare in its pages, even as they interact with the tapestry of history, remain a testament to Levy’s foresight and uncanny ability to discern the pulse of progress. In summation, “Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution” is not merely a book; it is an odyssey—a journey through time, intellect, and the very essence of human potential. Steven Levy’s magnum opus deserves a sanctuary on the bookshelves of those who seek not only to understand the past, but to be inspired by the audacity of pioneers who sculpted the future.
If only a human wrote that! A human reviewing books … for The New York Times.
Time Travel
In 2012, I wrote about Narrative Science, a company that produced algorithmically generated stories about sports and financial news. That was before the current crop of large language models. In 2021, Salesforce bought the company.
[CEO Kristian] Hammond believes that as Narrative Science grows, its stories will go higher up the journalism food chain—from commodity news to explanatory journalism and, ultimately, detailed long-form articles. Maybe at some point, humans and algorithms will collaborate, with each partner playing to its strength. Computers, with their flawless memories and ability to access data, might act as legmen to human writers. Or vice versa, human reporters might interview subjects and pick up stray details—and then send them to a computer that writes it all up. As the computers get more accomplished and have access to more and more data, their limitations as storytellers will fall away. It might take a while, but eventually even a story like this one could be produced without, well, me. “Humans are unbelievably rich and complex, but they are machines,” Hammond says. “In 20 years, there will be no area in which Narrative Science doesn’t write stories.”
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