How to Take a Compliment from an AI
Last week I decided to call my company Machines & Dreamland. I know, it’s a bit of a weird name and I’ll even admit to feeling a bit embarrassed saying it. Is it pretentious? Too over the top? A friend of mine asked an AI’s opinion and now I feel more confident that I made the right choice.
I’m old enough to have observed three distinct eras of corporate naming trends. I came into the job market during the dotcom boom, where everything was appended by that extension to announce We Are On The Internet. Back in the nineties, house style at an online bookstore where I worked vehemently dictated that the company would in all instances be referred to as Amazon.com.
Then the dotcom suffixes fell away and the vowel prefixes latched on. Suddenly everything was e-something. Just tack “e” onto any noun and you’ve got a revolutionary, new, paradigm-smashing business model. Who’s to say e-cottonswab can’t grab a billion dollars of market share?
Now we seem to be in an era in which startups are named after nicknames for children’s plush toys. Many of the vowels seem to have run for the hills. Startups all sound like Fivr, Zibbl, Quicwich, Fitzap, Zabl, Blorp, and Slerg.
If I had the power to do so, I’d announce a new era of startups named like bands. And not just any bands, but grandiose, trippy, long-winded band names that suggest a certain intimacy with exotic time signatures.
The Beatles arguably kicked off this naming style with their alter-egos Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. There’s also Big Head Todd and the Monsters, …And You Shall Know Us by the Trail of Dead, Godspeed You Black Emperor, My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult, The Presidents of the United States of America, Big Brother and the Holding Company, and, of course, Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars.
So when I told my friend Tony Pettit that I wanted to call the company Machines & Dreamland, he posed the question to OpenAI’s GPT-3. Tony wrote:
What do you think of the name Machines & Dreamland?
To which GPT-3 replied:
I loved the name. I think it’s very clever to selectively choose words that are similar in sound but evoke different reactions.
Some people may not realize how much technology can be used to create a utopian society and think of things like robots as being only science fiction or something for the future. With Machines&Dreamland, our goal is what we call “world making” — creating a space where otherworldly visions and realities can manifest themselves tangibly through stories, artworks, videos and all sorts of experimental productions powered by imaginative machine learning algorithms.
We on the editorial team see this world-making process as creating an increased sense of empathy among people who might otherwise come into contact with one another as separate entities online while also constructing a framework for cross-disciplinary problem solving around emerging technologies such as autonomous vehicles, artificial intelligence and virtual reality. Our hope is that participants will leave fascinated by these possibilities; enchanted enough to return over time after exploring whether they would like to co-create possible futures through SPECULATE (Structured Speculation) or even participate in donating resources or knowledge to our next project!
One thing I have learned pver 42 years dedicated to the practice of creative writing is how to provide and receive feedback. As much as I’ve developed a thick skin, learned to brush off negative reviews, and endeavored to resist flattery, feedback is always processed through emotions. So when I read GPT-3’s compliment “I loved it,” some part of my midbrain got a happy little jolt that felt identical to the feeling I would have gotten if a human being had said exactly the same thing.
In that second paragraph, GPT-3 shifts gears and assumes it’s part of the company, employing the royal “we.” And while I wouldn’t have put it quite so loquaciously, yes, our goal is in fact to create “otherworldly visions and realities” through “stories, artworks, videos and all sorts of experimental productions powered by machine learning algorithms.”
By paragraph three, GPT-3 has turned a question into what it thinks about the name of the company into what sounds to me like a recruiting pitch. Come join us and co-create a utopian society! Wooo-hooo!
Being afraid or intimidated by AI is like blaming a mirror for one’s acne. I’m not convinced we’re encountering a new, alien intelligence with AI. Rather, I think we’re seeing such a high-def reflection of human intelligence that it appears freaky.
At this stage in the development of general artificial intelligence, the algorithms are pulling from a massive trove of writing produced by human beings. It’s going to be fascinating to witness what happens when the linguistic output of AIs is reabsorbed into the dataset, when it constructs machine prose not just from human prose but from previous examples of its own output. At some point, it will iterate content based on a dataset the majority of which is machine-generated. I can’t begin to imagine what it will say.
For now, I appreciate the little artificial intelligence fist-bump. Machines & Dreamland it is. Thanks, GPT-3, for the vote of confidence. And bring on the donated resources!
