Kimberly's friend Roz Hirch is the guest on this two-part series. Roz is a linguist, a college instructor in Medicine Hat, Alberta, and a language assessment specialist. She is also out of work for the summer for the first time in her life. Kimberly suggested that she read The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron, and that led to Roz asking ChatGPT and Claude for book recommendations as well. She wrote a question describing herself and her situation and asked ChatGPT and Claude for reading recommendations. Something in ChatGPT's answer bothered her enough that she took the identical question, word for word, and texted it to friends and family to see what people would do with it.

The machines gave her thirteen books and seven. The humans gave her one, or two, or none. Three titles appeared on both AI lists. Not one appeared on both an AI list and a human list. The AI books all pointed the same direction, which was creating a portfolio career, company of one, multipotentialite, like build an umbrella and put everything under it. The people who actually know Roz told her to write.

Roz and I analyzed the responses from the humans and the bots, and because Roz has a background in theater as well as linguistics, she reaches for the difference between naturalism, which is how people talk, and realism, which is how we think people talk. We look at what humans do that machines don't, such as dropping the subject, hedging in nearly every response, and knowing when to stop, which Grice's maxim of quantity covers and which one model violated thirteen times over. We also analyze the speech act itself, recommendations. A recommendation ordinarily requires the speaker to have read the thing and to stake something on it. The form survives in the AI answers. The function is hollowed out, because there is nobody there to have been inspired.

Links

• Roz's Random Ramblings: Language, History, and Other Adventures
• Roz on LinkedIn
• Women Writin' 'Bout AI
• John Searle, "The Chinese Room"
• Mini Philosophy, Jonny Thomson, the episode on online versus face-to-face conversation
• How to Be Everything, Emilie Wapnick
• Range, David Epstein
• The Wealthy Barber, David Chilton
• The Artist's Way, Julia Cameron

Leave us a comment or a suggestion!

Support the show

Contact us: https://www.womentalkinboutai.com/