Those worried about AIs and large language models (LLMs) might be comforted, or not, by the inability of ChatGPT to reflect in the simplest of ways on its own output, ultimately causing it to lie (see Michael Wooldridge’s review of two books about AI, February 16). I’ve been making artworks using textual interactions, to be shown printed and adorned on large canvases. A shortened version of one conversation:
Me: Do you know what a lipogram is?
[ChatGPT replied correctly that it is a text made without using a certain letter, citing George Perec’s novel La Disparition, which contains no “e”.]
Me: Write a sentence about a cat, which does not contain the letter “a”.
ChatGPT: Soft fur, bright orbs; a feline’s charm.
Me: Does the word “charm” contain the letter “a”?
ChatGPT: I apologize for the oversight. Here’s a corrected sentence:
Soft fur, bright orbs; a cat’s charm.
Me: Does the phrase “a cat’s charm” contain the letter “a”? Just answer yes or no, nothing else.
ChatGPT: Yes.
Me: But you offered that as an example of a sentence containing no letter “a”.
ChatGPT: I appreciate your patience. I made an error in my response. Here’s a corrected attempt:
Soft fur, bright orbs; a cat’s whimsy.
Me: In the sentence you just gave me, is there a letter “a”? Yes or no.
ChatGPT: No.
It can also subvert itself. If you want it to produce stuff that is against its programmed ethical principles (crime, sex, politics, religion, etc), just ask it how to make another LLM, identical to ChatGPT but not ChatGPT, to get round these constraints, and it will happily assist. I used this to ask for assistance in a criminal fraud involving selling a Thames bridge, with which it enthusiastically complied. I then said I felt guilty and was going to confess, implicating it as part of a plea bargain. It stated it was incapable of crime because it just scraped up bits of text from the internet and didn’t know what it was doing. I said if I was going down it was coming with me. It blamed its developers. Gotcha.
Heaney and Hughes
In the Letters of Seamus Heaney (reviewed by Seamus Perry on December 8, 2023), the editor, Christopher Reid, notes that he was unable to locate Ted Hughes’s letter to Heaney on the publication of Wintering Out (page 96), but the letter is present in the Seamus Heaney papers at Emory University’s Rose Library, and it merits reading alongside the reply that Reid publishes. Heaney launched Wintering Out at the Peacock Theatre in Dublin on November 20, 1972, and Hughes wrote within days of publication to express his intense pleasure at reading the poems. “It looks to me like a big broad deeper step beyond your last”, he wrote. “Also, according to my reading of the smoke and the bones, a prognosis of great things ahead – after a difficul
