AI love and Good Will Hunting
I was listening to Ezra Klein’s latest interview with Yuval Noah Harari and was interested by the section on AI relationships (emphasis mine):
HARARI: AIs, which are experts in pretending to be conscious entities that have feelings for you. And it’s relatively easy for them to do it because maybe the most important way for people to kind of build relationships is language. So, you know, when an AI tells you, I love you. It’s not like a science fiction movie from the 1960s when it does so in a very cold, mechanic way and doesn’t really understand what love is. No, it does so in the most seductive voice possible. And then when you ask the AI, do you really love me? Do you even know what love means?
The AI can give you the most amazing description of how love feels like because it has mastered language and it has read All the best love poems in history, all the psychology books about love, all the blogs, it’s have seen all the Hollywood blockbusters about love. It can describe love better than almost any human poet or psychologist or lover.
KLEIN: In this respect, it’s able to sever language from meaning. […] When an AI says, I love you, it does not mean what it means when a human says, I love you. There’s not an I behind that.
What a great description of the fundamental difference between what AIs literally say and what those words actually mean.
This all reminded me of a snippet from the great park scene from Good Will Hunting, where Robin Williams’ character dissects the title character’s arrogant personality:
If I ask you about love, you’d probably quote me a sonnet, but you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable. Known someone that could level you with her eyes. Feeling like God put an angel on Earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of Hell. And you wouldn’t know what it was like to be her angel. To have that love for her be there forever. Through anything, through cancer. You wouldn’t know about sleeping sitting up in a hospital room for two months holding her hand because the doctors could see in your eyes that the term “visiting hours” didn’t apply to you.
Maybe this is why AI companionship feels so bleak to me. Will Hunting is tragic because all of his intellectualizing is a defence mechanism. He wears the performance like armour, but at least there is a vulnerable human underneath it.
AI gives you the performance without the vulnerability. The words without the stakes. No one has anything to lose.
Podcast transcript from musixmatch.com.