\n<\/p>\n
Few would disagree that 2023 was, in the world of technology at least, dominated by artificial intelligence. The dictionaries have taken note in their \u201cword of the year\u201d lists, and notably all the AI-related words they highlight are, in fact, existing words that have been appropriated and regurgitated with new meanings. A little on the nose, isn\u2019t it?<\/p>\n
Cambridge\u2019s word is \u201challucinate,\u201d<\/a> which is of course the habit of generative AI models like ChatGPT to invent anything from dates to entire people rather than admit it doesn\u2019t know. The problem is that these systems don\u2019t know what they don\u2019t know, because they don\u2019t know anything at all<\/a>.<\/p>\n As complex word prediction models, all that matters is that they produce a sentence that resembles their training data. If you ask it for famous 18th-century German surgeons and it doesn\u2019t have any exact matches, it will simply hallucinate something close, like Arman Verdigger of the Einschloss Research Hospital in Tulingen. See, I can do it too! All that matters is that it sounds plausible. Unfortunately, these hallucinations are so confidently stated that countless of them have been accepted without question as real.<\/p>\n Hallucinations can be put to good use, though: generative imagery and audio is entirely and deliberately \u201challucinated\u201d in that it is a mishmash of the model\u2019s training data but not an exact recreation of any of it (though it can get mighty close). This too has its dangers, as AI-generated art and photos of varying quality proliferate in numerous contexts.<\/p>\n The acceptance of the word despite its original limitation to human perception \u201cunderscores our readiness to ascribe human-like attributes to AI,\u201d said Cambridge AI ethicist Henry Shevlin. \u201cAs this decade progresses, I expect our psychological vocabulary will be further extended to encompass the strange abilities of the new intelligences we\u2019re creating.\u201d<\/p>\n Merriam-Webster<\/a> grabbed the other end of the stick with the selection of \u201cauthentic\u201d as their word of the year. \u201cWith the rise of artificial intelligence\u2014and its impact on deepfake videos, actors\u2019 contracts, academic honesty, and a vast number of other topics\u2014the line between \u2018real\u2019 and \u2018fake\u2019 has become increasingly blurred.\u201d<\/p>\n While \u201cauthentic\u201d didn\u2019t get a brand new definition, it did get a new and important connotation. For years we have worried about whether or not something we or others are doing is authentic. Authenticity is a paradox modern consumerism: it can\u2019t be bought or sold, and as such it is perhaps the most valuable and marketable quality in the world.<\/p>\n Before, we had to worry whether a trend or item represented the authentic interests and choices of a person or group. Now we have to wonder whether, like the Pope\u2019s fabulous Balenciaga puffer, a thing is real in the first place.<\/p>\n \u201cDeepfake\u201d also made the longlist at M-W, graduating (whether mercifully or unfortunately) from a niche tech for revenge porn to a general purpose term for generative AI. Its antecedents may not be respectable, but we can\u2019t choose what enters the zeitgest.<\/p>\n