How to outperform ChatGPT

Much of the magic of Curb Your Enthusiasm comes from the show being plotted but not scripted. The direction of the conversation is agreed in advance, after which the cast – mostly stand-up comedians and hence naturally good at extemporising – improvise the lines on the fly. This makes the show engagingly realistic even in the rare moments when it isn’t being funny.

ChatGPT is unaware of anything since 2021, and so believes that ‘Nicola Sturgeon is sure to have a long future in politics’

In such ‘high-context’ communication, there is always a side-channel alongside the words which determines their real meaning, whether through tone of voice, facial or hand gestures or shared knowledge. This is why policing language is so dangerous – it is too easy to strip words of their context. Everything becomes a version of the 1952 Derek Bentley case, where five words, ‘Let him have it, Chris’ (which could mean either ‘fire the gun’ or ‘hand it over’), can be framed to suit the prosecution. In such a world it is dangerous to use irony, metaphor, sarcasm, exaggeration or affectionate rudeness. This is why comedians, who depend on such things, mostly oppose restrictions on free speech.

Which brings me to ChatGPT and the question of the Turing Test, the rather arbitrary but interesting threshold for what might be described as computational intelligence, set by Alan Turing in 1950. This requires that in two open-ended conversations, one between a questioner and another human, the other between the questioner and a computer, the questioner is unable to tell which is which.

The obvious flaw in this test is that all of us know humans who fail the Turing Test. By which I mean you could read their transcribed words for many hours and still not be confident they weren’t produced by a machine.