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Faking It

Artificial Intelligence in a Human World

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Faking It

Written by: Toby Walsh
Narrated by: Toby Walsh, Dominic Gruenewald
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About this listen

Artificial intelligence is, as the name suggests, artificial and fundamentally different to human intelligence. Yet often the goal of AI is to fake human intelligence. This deceit has been there from the very beginning. We’ve been trying to fake it since Alan Turing answered the question ‘Can machines think?’ by proposing that machines pretend to be humans.

Now we are starting to build AI that truly deceives us. Powerful AIs such as ChatGPT can convince us they are intelligent and blur the distinction between what is real and what is simulated. In reality, they lack true understanding, sentience and common sense. But this doesn't mean they can't change the world.

Can AI systems ever be creative? Can they be moral? What can we do to ensure they are not harmful?

©2023 Toby Walsh (P)2024 Bolinda Publishing Computer Science Ethics & Morality Philosophy Science

Critic Reviews

'Refreshingly clear-eyed ... Faking It is an insightful and intelligent book that's a must for those looking for facts about AI hype.' (Books+Publishing)
'Faking It includes a whistlestop tour of AI history, providing a long list of grifts and false dawns, from the 1770 marvel, the Mechanical Turk, a chess-playing automaton secretly linked to a human player, to ELIZA, the 1967 natural language model that could hold a conversation to the level of tuned-out coworker.' (The Age)
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