We created Chat_UP as our bit of the AI conversation. It started in earnest at a live event we did with Twenty First Group and FUSE in December last year, hosted at Omnicom's HQ on the South Bank.
One of the fun jobs is to give the thing a visual identity. Something that will show up across social channels and in to live events.
Because Chat_UP is about AI, it felt right that the process start in Claude, my fast idiot assistant, which has a Canva skill connected. This should make the process quick and efficient, but actually poses more questions, which is funny cos that's where we are with the models, they are pushing us to work harder to clarity what we mean. This process is in itself makes us better at articulating what we want, and what the actual problem is that is being solved.
In this case, I wanted something that talked to...what exactly?
Quite quickly I got to noodling around the topic of metaphors for AI. John Naughton, unsurprisingly, was way ahead on this topic. His mind went to 1993.
That was the spring when Marc Andreessen launched Mosaic, the first graphical web browser, and suddenly the world understood what this “internet” – that had been up and running, apparently unnoticed, since January 1983 – was for! The appearance of ChatGPT in late November 2022 promised a similar shift: suddenly the world realised that this is what “AI” is!
ChatGPT was the first instantiation of AI that most people encountered, and it’s still what most of us regard as “AI”, much as they once learned to refer to internet search as “googling”. It’s a chatbot, a large language model (LLM) equipped with a conversational interface. And it came as a shock to its early users. As Terrence Sejnowski, an AI pioneer, put it: “A threshold was reached, as if a space alien suddenly appeared that could communicate with us in an eerily human way.” Some aspects of their behaviour appear to be intelligent, “but if it’s not human intelligence, what is the nature of their intelligence?”
In order to answer this question, users have inevitably fastened on to metaphors as the way to tether the abstractions of artificial intelligence to more tangible things.
I like 'tether the abstractions'.
Naughton lists ten common AI metaphors, from Stochastic Parrot to Cloud and Asbestos (from Corey Doctorow of Enshittification fame).
My favourite is Black Box.
