What Makes Us Human

September 12, 2022
Poet Thomas (The Truth of You) and technologist Wang deliver a flashy yet insubstantial collaboration with the artificial intelligence program GPT-3, reflecting on humanity’s biggest existential questions. Thomas and Wang “prompted GPT-3 with selected excerpts from major religious and philosophical texts”—including the Bible, the Tao Te Ching, and Leonard Cohen lyrics—to teach it “tone, content, and delivery,” and they then asked it to answer such questions as “What is love?” and “What do I do when the world feels too much for me?” The results are mixed, adding up to a scrapbook of aphorisms that toe the line between profundity and nonsense, as when GPT-3 writes that “love is a movement, not a position” when answering how readers can “embrace love more fully.” Many of the answers are disappointingly plain, such as the truism “We are not lonely because we are connected,” though the occasional oddball dispatch amuses (“We are all the same human being”). The novelty value of an AI author only carries this so far, and the hollow generalities and clichés don’t reflect the distinctiveness of the process through which they were produced. This is an inauspicious start to GPT-3’s literary career.