“Genius Group welcomes new Chief AI Officer, Alan Turning” reads the bluetick X post announcing that a listed company is ’appointing’ an AI to its C-Suite. The video, screenshot above, shows a yassified Alan Turning looking more like that guy who is in all your favorite shows.
There are a few things to unpack here. First, yes all the outrage - and the publicity stunt has invited mainly outrage - is justified. This is a pretty gross way to appropriate a dead man’s image. The Turning Trust and The Turing Institute have a strong case if they want to get the whole project scrubbed from the internet.
Data Scientist Colin Fraser did a smart dive into the mechanics of the Turing stunt, and I’m being generous with the phrase mechanics. It’s essentially a custom GPT given the following instruction, “As a Chief AI Officer, you will now play a character and respond as that character (you will never break character). Your name is Alan Turing”. This is what college students get told on day one of their summer job at a living museum. The deserved criticsm of the idea obscures just how half-assed the execution is. Just, you know, be Alan Turning was the essential message given to an LLM.
This leads us to a video from tech reviewer Marques Brownlee that did big numbers this week. Brownlee identifies a trend of companies releasing half-baked versions of products, “to win a ‘race’ and then continuing to build them after charging full price”.
He cites the well-documented problems with the Tesla Cybertruck and underwhelming phone releases before calling out AI as “the apex of this horrible trend”. The viral clip is taken from a longer, also viral, review of the Rabbit R1. The Rabbit got lots of hype back in January for a product that just sounded like an app, but had a Steve Jobs-esque keynote announcement video, heavy use of the term “AI-powered” and an immediate selling out of pre-orders. The video review title, ‘Barely Reviewable’, tells you all need to know about the product.
The half-baked Turning stunt and the half-baked product launch are two sides of the same coin. There is big money swilling around AI but also a widely held view that an AI bubble will soon burst. There is also a well-shared theory that this will be like the dot-com bubble of 2000. After years of hype a short, sharp financial contraction will be unpleasant, but it won’t kill the central idea that AI is here to stay. For AI in 2024, see the Internet in 2000. It’s the same news cycle but with more Donald Trump and less Limp Biskit.
That’s more or less what I expect to happen too. But that doesn’t mean harm won’t be done. People will lose their jobs. Money for transformative, ethical AI research will disappear. The failures, some spectacular and very public, will fuel the understandable misapprehension that AI was a mirage, that the emperor was wearing nothing. That’s fine when dunking on X blue ticks who use a dead genius to hype their company. But it’s less helpful when governments are already behind on legislating for the massive changes coming to our working lives because of AI.
When I started this newsletter it was, in part, because this stage of AI development reminded me of how we spoke about the internet in the 90s. It felt like we had a full decade of nerdy guys explaining in excited tones how transformative this would be before broadband and social media made the whole thing seem tangible to those of us who hadn’t been paying as much attention. Now I get to be one of those nerdy guys!
Except it was harder in the 90s to take a scammy angle. We weren’t all potential content creators or potential startup founders. Even the worst early internet ideas had some level of know-how behind them.
Now there are ill-conceived AI-powered stunts everywhere, the Turing thing and the Rabbit release were just the stars of this particular week. But someone taking the time to ethically craft AI personas of some of history’s greatest thinkers could be gifting a great tool to educators worldwide. The scathing reviews of the Rabbit R1 come mainly from people who know there is a transformative AI-powered tool, or tools, within our grasp, it’s just that no one has quite landed on one yet.
To put it another way, if we had another chance to craft the Internet again how would we do it? What campaigning or policy could have delivered us a better utility? There is a chance of a do-over, if we don’t get disillusioned by the ghoulish stunts and the do-nothing products.
Small Bits #1: The Power of Bad Art
This image went viral this week because how could it not go viral? It’s mainly doctored, Trump’s expression, Melania’s face in the painting, and the guy presenting it. But the original photo isn’t that different. And it’s much better because it’s real and Donald Trump genuinely stood there with that painting of his wife in hand. We tend to focus on the inability of AI to make great art. But it’s worth remembering AI can also not make truly bad art like humans.
Small bits #2 Google and AI summaries
Google is experimenting with an AI overview feature in which many of the answers contain publisher content without crediting the publisher. That’s it, that’s the small bit.
Small bits #3: JFK and automation discourse
I see plenty of AI-related analogies about the Industrial Revolution but this image, shared by AI expert Harry Law, from Kennedy’s 1960 Presidential campaign led me down an automation discourse rabbit hole (as I said, now I’m one of those nerdy guys) that brought me to this quote from JFK:
”In West Virginia, there is more coal mined than ever before in our history, and in that same county more men and women wait every month for a surplus food package from the Government, composed of a few pounds of rice, some grain, and this summer the Department of Agriculture has announced they are going to add lard. That is what automation means in West Virginia, and it could mean the same across the United States, unless we recognize that machines should provide a better life for people and not a life of desperation for men who are 45 years and 50, and who can't find a job. In the last 5 years in the auto industry in this State you have lost, because of automation, 10,000 jobs, and this has been a matter of indifference to the Federal Government”.
Have a nice week.