This talk always starts with a relief: no, artificial intelligence does not want to take your job, it did not come to replace you as somebody's partner, and it is not going to drink your coffee. It is not HAL either, nor Terminator, nor that thing with the deep voice from Netflix thrillers. It is an extremely well-trained parrot. That is the first thing I say in a room, and if people laugh, everything else becomes possible.
What it is not.
Magical, omniscient, infallible. It has no opinions of its own, though it imitates them; it has no emotions, though it simulates them; and it certainly has no secret plan. If that disappoints you, welcome to the club: most myths about artificial intelligence live off people who would rather believe the magic is out there than learn to direct it.
What it is.
A brilliant improvisation actor who has read everything humanity published in the last few centuries. It knows how to imitate Borges, a corporate lawyer, your aunt when she is angry, a stoic mentor. Not because it understands any of them, but because it has read so many of their sentences that it can guess the next one with good aim. Just like at the movies: the plane never took off and even so the body feels the flight.
The question stops being how to program the machine and becomes how to direct the actor.
The mistake almost everybody makes at the start.
They talk to it as if it were Google. Five words, one result, disappointment, and back to Word. But the machine is conversed with, not consulted. A lazy question produces a lazy answer; a sharp question produces something that makes you think. And there is no shortcut here: if you come in rushing, you leave with garbage.
Four rules that hold for almost everything.
One. Give it context. It is not the same to say “write me an email” as to say “I am the principal of a private high school in Puebla, I am about to tell the parents that we are going to fold artificial intelligence into the curriculum, and I need an email that reassures the conservatives without sounding lukewarm”. Context is half the work.
Two. Ask it to take a role. “Answer me as if you were a New Yorker editor who detests clichés.” “Answer me like a stoic mentor, not like a motivational coach.” The voice you ask for is the voice you get, and that changes everything.
Three. Do not settle for the first answer. It is almost never the good one. Refine, contradict, push: “this sounds lukewarm, again, with more edge”. The gold is in the conversation that advances; the first attempt is the warm-up.
Four. Take up your role as director. The machine does not decide when we stop, what stays and what goes. You decide that. Authorship is still human, and so is responsibility.
The closing line that is worth the whole talk.
Today we learned how to talk to your robot. The real question, the one that opens the next door, is another: do you want artificial intelligence to merely obey you, or to think with you? The first is a service. The second is a trade, and trades are learned by the people who commit to the practice, not by the ones waiting for the miracle.