What’s AI got to do with it?

artificial intelligence – natural stupidity
artificial flowers – natural incense – sensible intel

Hey, Friend,

It’s been a while. A while ago – in January, precisely – I wrote this line. What’s AI got to do with it? Tina Turner was still alive and the writers of Hollywood were writing and not striking to protect themselves also from the likes of ChatGPT. I like ChatGPT, like I like gadgets. And I like to think about these things. So, what’s AI got to do with it? And what is ‘it’? Oh, and what is AI? ‘it’ is easy. For me. ‘it’ is language and learning a language. For language and learning, AI and I crossed paths. So what’s AI got to do with that? With language and learning?

In 1948, the English mathematician Alan Turing wrote an essay envisaging how computers could demonstrate their intelligence and made a list of five. “(i) Various games, for example, chess, noughts and crosses, bridge, poker; (ii) The learning of languages; (iii) Translation of languages; (iv) Cryptography; (v) Mathematics.” I am not sure whether Alan Turing, who is often called the father of Artificial Intelligence, meant with learning of languages that the computer would learn or the computer would be intelligent enough to help all of us learn another language. The latter – using computers in different ways to help learn a language – has interested me for many years. It still does. Fascinating! A number-crunching machine deals with language. That’s intelligence. Artificial intelligence. AI. And AI is so much bigger than just language and learning. Different branches in research. Research on intelligent machines – think robots and self-driving cars – on perception – think face recognition and telling a ball from a person’s head –  on problem solving – think chess playing and building a schedule for an entire university – on machine learning – think … Oh wait, this has to do with language – the large language models – which means it warrants its own post. And so does the one area that fronts language: natural language processing. Natural? To a computer scientist, programming languages must have felt more familiar, so they didn’t feel a need to add an adjective, they used ‘natural’ instead for our languages. But that’s a whole other post. Later.

Back to Alan Turing. He mentions language in three of five: learning of languages, translation of languages, and cryptography. Cryptography. Cracking the code. The code of the Enigma machine. Alan Turing was part of this British effort during World War II. The German wehrmacht, navy, and air force used this complex mechanical and electric cipher device for their secret communication. Alan Turing and the cryptoanalysts, math geeks, crossword puzzlers, and secretaries working at Bletchley Park near London, cracked the code of the Enigma machine. Almost everyone kept quiet about it for 50 years. Didn’t even call a friend. After that war and with the beginning of the Cold War, the Americans wanted machines to translate Russian texts quickly, and the Soviets pointed their machines at English. Machine translation. Artificial intelligence. And some computer scientists believed that translating a language was like cracking a secret code. Breaking the Russian code. But you can’t break a language. They realized that soon. You couldn’t use math to read Pushkin’s poetry, Tolstoi’s novels, or – in those days – the KGB reports and instructions. Now you can. With ChatGPT. It just uses math to write you a text. Translate a text. Fake a text. Many people find ChatGPT too long; they call it AI. That’s not wrong, but it’s not right either. Yes, the intelligent machines, the perception and problem solving are AI. ChatGPT is one example of a small, small area of AI. Generative AI. It generates. It’s the AI that can produce texts, images, audio, and other synthetic data. Synthetic. Like a nylon shirt.

And now I am digressing. So, let’s stop here and come back to reading text, writing text, understanding text. Soon. I hope. I have not been the most regular. With writing. This blog. Maybe I should get tech help. From ChatGPT. But that would be synthetic.