Leif Weatherby, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Have Fun With A.I. NYTimes, July 16, 2025.
We've got it wrong:
More broadly, I think we’re having the wrong debates about A.I. altogether. In a recent article for The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper called A.I. a “scam,” an animatronic simulation of intelligence. This claim went against not just Mr. Altman, but also many tech journalists and data wonks who think Silicon Valley’s narrative that we are close to real machine intelligence is plausible. The linguist Emily Bender and the sociologist Alex Hanna think that A.I. is a “con,” and Dr. Bender describes it as a set of tricks that produces “synthetic text” rather than human meaning.
These critiques do little to explain A.I.’s popularity. They miss the fact that humans love to play games with language, not just use it to test intelligence. What Mr. Altman inadvertently showed us is that what is really driving the hype and widespread use of large language models like ChatGPT is that they are fun. A.I. is a form of entertainment.
Cultural technology is entertaining:
One group of academics, led by the cognitive scientist Alison Gopnik, have characterized large language models as “cultural technologies.” They mean that the bots contain an enormous amount of human knowledge, writing, images and other forms of cultural production. I tend to agree, but I think it’s crucial to understand that using such systems is also extremely entertaining. Whether you are touching up the “Mona Lisa,” “reviewing” novels or doing logic puzzles, you are engaging in the very human drive to play.
As I’ve watched people adopt these systems, what I’ve seen is mostly people playing with art and language. If you go through the history of these bots, you see poetry, fiction and all kinds of little genre experiments like this as a constantly recurring theme. Literary uses like this are deployed to advertise the bots and their abilities, as well as quantitative metrics to determine A.I.’s linguistic capabilities in formal data science papers. [...]
We ought to think about A.I. as an entertainment-first system, before anything else. Would you replace all of primary education with “Sesame Street”? Or decide government policy with SimCity? It’s not an insult to the beloved children’s program or computer game to say no. The lesson is simple: We might be taking A.I. too seriously.
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