Faith in the Machine
EXPLORING THE INTERSECTION OF AI AND HUMANITY
Tim Burton’s 1990 film Edward Scissorhands tells the story of an elderly Inventor, who upon inspecting his elaborate cookie-making machines, steps away unsatisfied with his work. He picks up a heart-shaped cookie, holds it in front of his man-shaped machine, and offers a defeated sigh. He doesn’t have a companion with a heart like his, so he sets out to create one.
Edward has a ghostly complexion, wild hair, and due to the premature death of his creator, a set of razor-sharp scissor blades in place of hands. After the Inventor’s death, he looked for companionship in a suburban community downhill from his cobweb-infested mansion. Despite his good manners, gentle spirit, and sense of humor, he was an outcast. Almost a human, but not quite.
Sounds like it could be a story from 2023, doesn’t it? The past few years have shown an increase in loneliness, depression, anxiety, mental health disorders, and more. A glance at the news headlines reveals that humans are more connected yet more isolated than ever before. Since we can’t find the human interactions that we crave, we try to find satisfaction in the machine. Instead of Edward, the name is ChatGPT.
Developed by the U.S. company OpenAI, ChatGPT is a form of artificial intelligence (AI) that is trained to follow human prompts and provide detailed responses to queries.1 It allows users to request information on specific topics and respond in a conversation-like format. ChatGPT was released to the public in 2022 and within the first five days, it is estimated that more than a million people accessed it. After two months, that number increased to 100 million monthly active users.
Similar to a human, ChatGPT can answer questions and carry on a conversation with whoever’s on the other side of the screen. It has capacities for human-like expression, but to be effective, it needs to be trained and prompted by a human through a process known as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF).2 The machine may be able to change and adapt its algorithms to provide a different response, but it can’t do it on its own. Neither could Edward.
AI may be able to reduce errors and make perfect analytical decisions based on data, but it can’t determine what is right, true, or ethical.
At one point in the film, Edward was listening to the Inventor read books on etiquette and poetry. By the end of the scene, he learned when it was proper to laugh, and cracked a forced, awkward-looking smile. He had to be taught by a human what was proper, funny, ethical, and what was not.
Similarly, AI may be able to reduce errors and make perfect analytical decisions based on data, but it can’t determine what is right, true, or ethical. It has a vast knowledge base, but it’s limited to events that happened before September 2021.3 If a user enters a prompt in the dialogue box and ChatGPT doesn’t know the answer, it can’t go away, research, problem solve, and come back with a creative solution. Nor can it respond with intuition or create something that hasn’t already been created.
ChatGPT has capacities for human-like expression and may create a man-like machine, but it will never be able to create what truly makes a human, human: the heart and mind. It can offer a starting point for research, answer a question, set up an outline, and more, but it cannot “add context, detect nuance, display originality or flair, and produce content of a sophisticated nature” like a human.4
At the end of the film, Edward is cast out to live the remainder of his days as a recluse. Since the community couldn’t fully understand him, they rejected him. So where does this leave us with AI? We have two choices: reject the beast out of willful ignorance, or embrace and seek to understand it. All the while, we must remember that it’s a useful tool, but a terrible human. We cannot put our faith in the machine.
1 forbes.com/advisor/in/business/software/what-is-chatgpt/
2 Ibid.
3 forbes.com/advisor/in/business/software/what-is-chatgpt/
4 Ibid.