The point of A.I. is to talk to a cool computer

PLUS: U.S. and U.K. media: What if both are bad?

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Now sit back and enjoy another edition of Read Max.

Greetings from Read Max HQ! In today’s newsletter, two items:

• A critical exploration of this week’s announcements from OpenAI and Google, and why I think the new Google search stuff sucks.

• Looking at The New Yorker’s Lucy Letby story as a story about media in the U.S. and the U.K.

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The core A.I. product is the experience of talking to a computer that talks back

This week, OpenAI announced a new model: “GPT-4o,” for “omni.” OpenAI says the model is a strong technical improvement on its current offerings: it “can respond to audio inputs in as little as 232 milliseconds, with an average of 320 milliseconds… significant improvement on text in non-English languages… especially better at vision and audio understanding compared to existing models.” But practically speaking, they built something that acts like the Scarlett Johansson robot from Her, as OpenAI C.E.O. Sam Altman confirmed by tweeting the word “her” during the announcement: GPT-4o is a conversational assistant that can process and respond to audio and video, whose synthesized voice can perform a wide range of emotional affects. At his own blog, Altman wrote, “it feels like A.I. from the movies.”

Is “A.I. from the movies” something to be impressed by? Her, as Brian Barrett points out at Wired, is not precisely a picture of an aspirational future. At his newsletter Blood in the Machine, Brian Merchant argues that’s the point:

The CEOs obviously don’t much care what some flyby cultural critics think of their branding aspirations, but beyond even that, we have to bear in mind that these dystopias are actively useful to them. […] With Her, it’s even simpler — lots of people, especially lonely men, would like to be surrounded full-time by a Scarlett Johansson bot that acts like it cares deeply about them and thinks they’re funny. Who cares if ultimately it is revealed in the film that the AI was not actually engaging in a personal loving relationship with the protagonist but a simulation of one, and that simulation was keeping him — and humans everywhere — from enjoying basic human experiences and depriving them of lasting connection with other people? It’s a personal 24/7 Scarlett Johansson AI companion.

So it turns out it is aspirational branding, it’s just a deeply misanthropic variety — we want you to have the cool high tech thing, even if it is at the expense of everyone else, or the wellbeing of, well, society in general. And that happens to track pretty well with the ideology of the founders making these sci fi-referencing products in the first place.

It seems worth keeping in mind that OpenAI and its management like to make grand claims about what they’ve developed that only sometimes bear out in reality. The public demos of GPT-4o should be taken with a grain of salt; it would be most accurate to say that they’ve built a (non-sentient) program that can act surprisingly similarly to the sentient A.I. operating system from the movie Her in certain controlled circumstances. John Herrman writes at Intel that the whole structure of the ChatGPT family of products is designed to enable the audience’s wildest fantasies about “A.I.”:

What OpenAI presented was… primarily a step forward in its products’ ability to perform the part of an intelligent machine. There are risks to doubling down on the personification of AI — if people are made to feel as though they’re talking to a person, their expectations will be both impossibly diverse and very high — but there are benefits, too, which OpenAI knows well. ChatGPT was initially released as a public tech demo […] There was (and remains) an enormous gap between what the interface suggested (that you were talking to a real person) and what you were actually doing (prompting a machine). With user expectations where they were, this interplay turned out to be hugely powerful. ChatGPT’s persona invited users to make generous assumptions about the underlying technology and, just as important, about where it would, or at least could, one day go. […] OpenAI’s sudden emphasis on ChatGPT’s performance over, well, its performance is worth thinking about in critical terms, too. The new voice features aren’t widely available yet, but what the company showed off was powerfully strange: a chatbot that laughs at its own jokes, uses filler words, and is unapologetically ingratiating. To borrow Altman’s language, the fact that Monday’s demo “feels like magic” could be read as a warning or an admission: ChatGPT is now better than ever at pretending it’s something that it’s not.

Over the last few years, when new large language models and new generative-A.I. applications have been unveiled for public consumption, the immediate reaction--from A.I. enthusiasts, sure, but also from journalists and members of the general public--has generally been a kind of awe. I think this reaction is understandable; the most recent generations of generative A.I. software are pretty immediately and obviously astonishing. But I’ve been struck by how quickly the awe seems to dissipate. Last February the Times columnist Kevin Roose wrote that he was “deeply unsettled” by Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, but in the year since he’s become sanguine enough about the ordeal to write a gently funny column about 18 chatbots he created as A.I. companions. I don’t think Roose’s experience--by which I mean the ebb of wonder and fear at generative A.I., not the 18 A.I. friends--is unique. The grand pronouncements and mysterious tweets from A.I. investors and influencers are much harder to find these days; the running joke about A.I. companies creating Skynet and destroying the planet despite the explicit warnings of Terminator has been downgraded to a joke about A.I. companies creating a robot that Joaquin Phoenix might fall in love with despite the explicit warnings of Her.

Why does the awe attenuate? I agree with Altman that many of OpenAI’s applications “feel like magic,” in the sense of a particularly amazing card trick. The first time you see it performed it’s absolutely astounding, but with every subsequent performance you become slightly more aware of the patter and the occlusions hiding the sleight of hand. Eventually the trick is explained to you; even if you yourself couldn’t pull it off, you can see its structure and its weaknesses. Watching it now, you’re still impressed--even astounded--by the technical skill of the magician and intricacy of the trick design. But the sense of pure, baffled awe you felt at first is increasingly inaccessible.

I suspect some people will say this metaphor is unfair because magic tricks are a form of entertainment, while generative A.I. is, supposedly, an economy-transforming technology. But now that we’re a few years in to the generative-A.I. craze, it seems pretty clear to me that these apps, in their current instantiation, are best thought of, like magic tricks, as a form of entertainment. They produce entertainments, yes--images, audio, video, text, shitposts--but they also are entertainments themselves. Interactions with chatbots like GPT-4o may be incidentally informative or productive, but they are chiefly meant to be entertaining, hence the focus on spookily impressive but useless frippery like emotional affect. OpenAI’s insistence on pursuing A.I. that is, in Altman’s words, “like in the movies” is a smart marketing tactic, but it’s also the company meeting consumer demand. I know early adopters swear by the tinker-y little uses dutifully documented every week by Ethan Mollick and other A.I. influencers, but it seems to me that for OpenAI these are something like legitimizing or world-building supplements to the core product, which is the experience of talking with a computer.¹²

As Herrman writes, this can be misleading, and it remains to be seen if “the experience of talking with a computer” is a service that is remunerative enough to justify OpenAI’s enormous costs (or its funders’ enormous investments). No doubt many people at and around OpenAI are hoping that a more clearly productive (and consistently executable) use with a large and free-spending addressable market emerges soon. I’ll admit, personally, that I don’t love the idea of a computer program feigning emotion and using first-person pronouns. But light entertainment is a noble purpose, and part of me appreciates OpenAI’s implicit commitment to making “A.I.” entertaining. Who doesn’t want to chat with a talking computer like in the movies--or, more accurately, to write with computer assistance a kind of collaborative sci-fi story experience in which you are a character and active participant?

Especially because the alternatives are so unbearably ugly, visually and spiritually.³ A few days after OpenAI’s announcement, Google’s parent company Alphabet held its annual I/O developer conference, announcing, among other new A.I. products, the expansion of a search feature called “A.I. overviews,” which will synthesize and summarize information from the web in a new module above the ranked results. Unfortunately for all of us, it sucks:

Sample query borrowed from Joel Chan

Since the debut of ChatGPT in 2022, tech-investor conventional wisdom has held that OpenAI’s chatbot--with its ability to synthesize and summarize reams of information--could displace Google and kill the web-search business entirely. Google itself was apparently frightened enough by this possibility to declare a “code red”; this feature is one product of the company’s institutional anxiety. For a number of reasons, I’m not particularly inclined to agree with the conventional wisdom here. But even if it is true that ChatGPT threatens Google’s prominence, I can’t imagine that “A.I. overview” is a worthwhile response.

It’s not just that it’s wrong quite often, not only about silly things like fruit but about actual facts you might be searching for. It’s not that it’s ugly--an annoying new module inserted into a results page already bulging with useless and intruding add-ons, confidently pre-empting out the actual search with hallucinations and mistakes. It’s that you’re not talking to the computer, which is the whole point of the chatbot. There’s no sassy talking computer with a husky voice. There’s no movie magic, no sci-fi future, no sense of awe at all. Just annoyance:

This is actually existing “A.I.,” with the retro-futuristic, talking-computer sleight of hand of the chatbot removed. And what actually existing A.I. looks like isn’t Her. It’s slop--incorrect, unwanted, and unnavigable L.L.M.-generated bullshit, forced into experiences that don’t really need it.

Lucy Letby as a “media story”

This week’s New Yorker has an article from Rachel Aviv on the British neonatal nurse Lucy Letby, who was convicted last year of killing seven newborns, largely based on circumstantial evidence:

The case against her gathered force on the basis of a single diagram shared by the police, which circulated widely in the media. On the vertical axis were twenty-four “suspicious events,” which included the deaths of the seven newborns and seventeen other instances of babies suddenly deteriorating. On the horizontal axis were the names of thirty-eight nurses who had worked on the unit during that time, with X’s next to each suspicious event that occurred when they were on shift. Letby was the only nurse with an uninterrupted line of X’s below her name. She was the “one common denominator,” the “constant malevolent presence when things took a turn for the worse,” one of the prosecutors, Nick Johnson, told the jury in his opening statement. “If you look at the table overall the picture is, we suggest, self-evidently obvious. It’s a process of elimination.”

But the chart didn’t account for any other factors influencing the mortality rate on the unit. Letby had become the country’s most reviled woman—“the unexpected face of evil,” as the British magazine Prospect put it—largely because of that unbroken line. It gave an impression of mathematical clarity and coherence, distracting from another possibility: that there had never been any crimes at all.

Aviv’s article persuasively introduces reasonable doubt into what had been--at least as far as British media was concerned--an open-and-shut case of pure evil. But because Letby is about to be retried on another count of murder, media outlets have been forbidden from publishing material that might prejudice the case, and the web version of the article is unavailable (though still widely accessible) in the U.K.

One thing that interested me about the article--and the subsequent response--is how much of the story is about the media, without Aviv every directly commenting on it. Because everything online manifests itself through national-chauvinist lenses, there’s been a fair amount of defensiveness over the verdict and media coverage of the trial on the part of Britons online, who have an understandable distaste for Americans on social media doing drive-by assessments of the fairness and sanity of U.K. criminal procedure or speech law. The r/LucyLetby subreddit seemed threatened to split along trans-Atlantic lines; on Twitter, Americans were often accused of having “true crime brain.”

There’s no doubt in my mind that too many Americans have been afflicted with “true crime brain,” of one kind or another, but I don’t think we’re particularly unique in the Anglosphere in this respect. Based on Aviv’s story, many of the people involved in the Letby case had, if not “true crime brain,” some kind of “television brain,” or maybe just “media brain.” Not that American television or American doctors are any better, but I was struck by the detail that one of Letby’s original accusers, the head of hospital pediatrics, was himself a reality-TV expert:

A lithe, handsome man with tight black curls, Jayaram appeared frequently on TV as a medical expert, on subjects ranging from hospital staffing to heart problems. When the cluster of deaths began, he was on the reality series “Born Naughty?,” in which he met eight children who had been captured on hidden cameras behaving unusually and then came up with diagnoses for them.

Obviously, being the lead doctor for Born Naughty? is not in and of itself dispositive as to reliability, but I’m not sure it speaks particularly well to judgment, or, maybe more importantly, the sobriety and judiciousness of the overall media environment in which the trial was taking place. And, indeed, after the verdict, even the cops were trying to get in on the true-crime media rush:

Within a week, the Cheshire police announced that they had made an hour-long documentary film about the case with “exclusive access to the investigation team,” produced by its communications department. Fourteen members of Operation Hummingbird spoke about the investigation, accompanied by an emotional soundtrack. A few days later, the Times of London reported that a major British production company, competing against at least six studios, had won access to the police and the prosecutors to make a documentary, which potentially would be distributed by Netflix.

Aviv doesn’t even mention the lurid documentary broadcast on BBC One seven hours after Letby’s conviction.

Reality-TV doctors and vulturous true-crime production companies are as numerous in the U.S. as they are in the U.K., and I think it’s fair to say that both the United States and the United Kingdom have degraded and debased criminal justice systems and media environments, each in their own unique way. But the hyperactive viciousness of the U.K. press is genuinely unique. Even accounting for Nancy Grace, TMZ, and the New York Post, U.S. tabloid media has barely a fraction of the power, influence, or reach of its U.K. equivalent. From a distance, what seems particularly troubling about the U.K. is the way the tabloid bloodthirst infects even the broadsheets; as Aviv notes, The Guardian “published more than a hundred stories about the case [and] called her ‘one of the most notorious female murderers of the last century.’”⁴

For whatever it’s worth, I think this is actually a pretty good argument for media restrictions around a trial--you can’t trust the British press not to prejudice the case. And, look, genuinely, there’s a balance to be struck between the right to a fair trial and the right to free speech, and I’m not convinced that the American balance is absolutely and always correct. (I don’t think, for example, that U.S. police departments should be compelled or even allowed to distribute arrestees’ mug shots.) But it’s very hard to argue that Letby’s right to a fair trial is being protected by these prohibitions: The BBC documentary referenced above, entitled “Letby: The Nurse Who Killed,” is still available, as are all of the articles published by The Daily Mail since the trial, as is the podcast produced by the Mail, and so on. As Aviv writes, at least one article calling into doubt Letby’s conviction was promptly removed. It seems farcical to regard that (or Aviv’s article) as potentially prejudicial in a way that the multiple articles calling her a serial killer aren’t.

Since the verdicts, there has been almost no room for critical reflection. At the end of September, a little more than a month after the trial ended, the prosecution announced that it would retry Letby on one of the attempted-murder charges, and a new round of reporting restrictions was promptly put in place. The contempt-of-court rules are intended to preserve the integrity of the legal proceedings, but they also have the effect of suppressing commentary that questions the state’s decisions. In October, The BMJ, the country’s leading medical journal, published a comment from a retired British doctor cautioning against a “fixed view of certainty that justice has been done.” In light of the new reporting restrictions, the journal removed the comment from its Web site, “for legal reasons.” At least six other editorials and comments, which did not question Letby’s guilt, remain on the site.

There’s another interesting difference between the U.K. and U.S. media ecosystems, besides relative spleen and speech laws. An American friend who works in British media likes to point out that the U.K. has no particular equivalent to The New Yorker, or any of The New Yorker’s many American peers--no outlet dedicated to long-form, “literary” investigative journalism and original reporting. (Except The Guardian’s “Long Read” section? And, maybe, the London Review of Books, sometimes?) Most weeks it’s probably fine not to have any good magazines--you’ve got episodes of Born Naughty? to watch, and who needs another profile of Judd Apatow, anyway. But on those rare occasions where the application of reporting time, column space, editorial rigor--I hope the fact checkers on this story are taking a little break for themselves--and institutional backing can be revelatory, no type of outlet is better equipped.

I’m not saying that if England had magazines, Lucy Letby would be free--for one thing, magazines are much better at this kind of after-the-fact re-reporting than they are at real-time advocacy--and, believe me, I recognize that prestige magazines are not unalloyed forces for good in the U.S. But stories like this are where they make the best case for their existence.

1. I feel less sure of this metaphor but the dynamic in some ways reminds me of the “Talkboy” tape recorder, the voice-changing features of which Kevin McAllister (Macaulay Culkin) uses in Home Alone 2 for various mischiefs. (I’m hoping that some 30-somethings are nodding along right now.) I wanted a Talkboy so badly, theoretically to use it for my own mischiefs, but when I got one it became clear that the main appeal was not actually the (limited) uses I could put a pretty basic but cool-looking tape recorder toward, but the feeling of being like Kevin McAllister when I held it.

2. Take, e.g., this tweet from Robin Hanson--while I understand why you might hope that a probabilistic model might answer a broad question by synthesizing relevant texts, and why it might sometimes give you a good answer, you can’t convince me that the main attraction here isn’t asking the talking computer.

3. I want to just be clear that while I think the Google A.I. Overviews are hideous, I don’t agree with this snotty little tweet from Altman bragging about the swaglessly generic interior design of OpenAI’s offices versus the memorably stupid production design of Google’s event stage.

4. I don’t want to overstate the sobriety or accuracy of American broadsheets, which are brain-dead in their own fashion and especially in the digital era have their own tabloid proclivities. Our media pathologies are different, and manifest in different ways.