MY BOOK OF THE MONTH. Early in “The AI Mirror,” author Shannon Vallor reminds us that Narcissus died transfixed by his own reflection in a pond.
Desperate to save him, Echo could only repeat Narcissus’s lovesick words, which he mistook as affirmations from the “marvelous boy” staring back at him.
The more we rely on large language models (e.g., ChatGPT, Bard, Claude), the author writes, we more we become like Narcissus, too.
Seduced by an LLM’s clever responses, it’s easy to forget that its replies are simply echoes of our collective thoughts and words—the good, the bad, and the ugly.
“AI Isn’t developing in harmful ways today because it is misaligned with our current values," the author writes. “It’s already expressing those values all too well.”
Yet “The AI Mirror” isn’t an anti-AI screed. Vallor, a philosophy professor and former AI Ethicist at Google, is merely urging us to do what philosophy professors urge us to do—to think for ourselves.
That starts by resisting the compulsion to cede decisions and tasks to AIs for the sake of seamlessness and speed.
“Once you have decided that the highest goal for a human being, and the sole purpose of living, is to optimize your operational efficiency,” she writes, “it’s hard to see why you or anyone else would want to be anything more than a machine.”
Equally poetic and pragmatic, “The AI Mirror” is a book you’ll want to read with a yellow highlighter and notebook nearby. Vallor’s references—from Samuel Butler to Nico of the Velvet Underground—are as enriching as they are entertaining.
As George Lakoff once wrote, metaphor is “imaginative rationality.” It’s time to stop thinking about AI as a black box. It is a powerful mirror that can reflect and magnify, but also obfuscate, disguise and distort.
In the words of Shannon Vallor, “The true body of technology is not a mirror, but the creative act of a human being.”
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