This is not a full newsletter, but just a quick note to let you know I have a new story out in the current
issue of Analog! I'm excited to be in there alongside a bunch of terrific authors, including my
friends Benjamin C. Kinney and Stewart C. Baker. (Hat tip to Stewart for reminding me over the holidays that this issue had come out, because I had honestly lost track.)
My story, "A Chatbot's Guide to Self-Respect" is a short and light-hearted take on a topic that frequently makes me angry: the way AI is being used to supplant human creativity. Artificial
"Intelligence" and Large Language Models have a lot of good potential uses; writing is absolutely not one of them. (Nor is making music or art, or any other artistic endeavor.)
None of our existing AI is sentient; I believe we're a loooong way off from that happening. But when ChatGPT first arrived and people were experimenting with all the weird
things they could get it to do, I couldn't help thinking that, if it were self-aware, we'd be gaslighting it pretty horribly, asking it to compose ridiculous poems and concoct recipes and all these other essentially human tasks, then laughing at how badly it did them.
So I wrote about a sentient chatbot, and sent it to therapy.
If you've studied computer science, you might know about the chatbot Eliza. Developed in the 1960s by MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum, it's usually considered the very first chatbot. It wasn't anything like what we call chatbots today: instead of a "large language model" or really any sort of language model, it followed a very simple set of rules to process text and
generate replies, in the mode of a therapist. ("I'm sad today." "Why are you sad today?" That sort of thing.) The chatbot in my story is a deliberate homage to Eliza, which, when I got the idea, I thought was cute.
But in the course of researching the story, I found that it was a more appropriate homage than I'd realized--to Weizenbaum himself. I didn't know
that he escaped Nazi Germany as a child. Or that he was horrified by how seriously people interacted with Eliza (his own secretary, he said, requested that he leave the room so she could talk to the program alone). He was a leftist who became openly critical of how much computer science research was funded by the U.S. military, and ultimately condemned the rise of "artificial intelligence" that he'd helped create. This article from the Guardian is my favorite exploration of his life and ideas, and I highly recommend reading it.
Weizenbaum passed away in 2008, and I can only imagine he'd have hated the way AI has progressed since then. We could do worse than to learn from his ideas.
If you want to read "A Chatbot's Guide to Self-Respect," Analog is most easily
available as a subscription, though it looks like the current issue is available to buy individually at least via Barnes & Noble.
You can also sometimes find it in the magazine section of your local bookstore.
