A Tale of Two Mirrors
In the Harry Potter books and movies, the Mirror of Erised enticed everyone looking into it with comforting, persuasive images of whatever their hearts desperately needed. For young Harry, it was images of his lost parents, while for Ron Weasley, it was success and acclaim in the game of Quidditch. Though Harry quickly realized the fraudulent nature of the mirror by comparing what he saw to images others observed, he could not resist sitting in front of the Mirror of Erised for hours at a time, watching and hoping for a reality he knew was not there.
Albus Dumbledore eventually had to take action, warning Harry of the insidious dangers of a mirror that in the past had wasted entire lives by entrancing people with visions that seemed plausible if only because the hearts of those who gazed in the mirror so deeply wanted them to be true.
Let’s shift scenes: Imagine a world in which the Mirror of Erised is not some massive artifact hidden away in a secret room but a digital mirror available to all who desire it, regardless of age. What might happen?
We are, alas, about to find out.
Generative AI is, above all other things, a mirror. Like any mirror, it has no mind of its own. All it has is the images presented to it — the training — we’ve given it in the past. The main difference between GenAI mirrors and ordinary mirrors is that GenAI mirrors are holographic. These are mirrors with memories; in those memories, they blend similar images and concepts into a single canonical image. Like an optical hologram, viewers can peer at this sum of images from many angles and perspectives, giving them a breadth and degree of realism not available from the knowledge of just one individual. Yet despite the impressive breadth of these images, they remain nothing more than reflections of what the mirror sees in those who use it. The novelty of such holographic mirrors stems from having a breadth of perspective seldom available to a single person.
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And therein is the danger.
Like the Mirror of Erised, the holographic mirror of GenAI is just that: a mirror. It does not create. It does not intuit. It does not think. When pushed, it rolls the dice and shows creative combinations of images that are always creative, frequently beautiful, but seldom anything more than that: dice rolls. All a holographic mirror can do is reflect — and like the Mirror of Erised, its priority is to reflect whatever image it can find that makes the questioner’s heart happiest. If you roll the dice too many times in a row — if you fall into the gambler’s incantation that all those random dice roles must magically transform into an Emergent Sentience with abilities far beyond those of your marvelous and currently irreproducible mind — what you get is always the same: Increasingly random, but always pretty, hen scratches surrounded by claims of value that bear no relation to reality.
At that point, you are fully inside the mirror. You no longer know what is real or even possible.?
Let us hope that not too many lives are wasted.
Product & Engineering Leader / Advisor / Practitioner - building great software and customer-focused teams (Ex-MSFT/GoDaddy/ATT/startup)
5 个月Dumbledore's quote (paraphrased) "the time is coming when everyone will have to choose between what is right and what is easy." probably applies here too.
Founder and Prompt Engineer @ Turtle's AI ?? Consultant, Keynote speaker, AI expert (keeping humans at the forefront while advancing Society)?13k Followers | Follow me for daily AI related contents
5 个月Wow, Terry, you wouldn’t believe how much this piece aligns with what we’ve been pushing at Turtle's AI! It reminds me of Umberto Eco’s idea of the "open text," where meaning isn’t fixed but shaped by the viewer. And then, there’s Baudrillard’s warning about simulacra replacing reality—we’re seeing that risk now with AI. As you know, at Turtle's AI, we keep emphasizing that no matter how advanced AI gets, it’s up to us humans to provide the real creativity, intuition, and meaning. You nailed it—AI is an incredible tool, but it’s our responsibility to make sure it enhances reality, not distorts it. Great piece, as always ??
Building High-Growth Partnerships by listening and growing trust.
5 个月This one hits at so many levels, makes me think also about the data mirror that AI has, drawn mostly from social and Internet content that is not representative of the richer culture - which of course AI companies won't pay for, because then the model becomes unsustainable, at least for now. So AI looks into its tokenized mirror, but that data is so skewed that it's more funhouse mirror than a mirror of society, there is no reflection only bias....while AI leaders keep trying to remove bias by putting in their own.
Diversely Experienced Electrical Engineer - Consultant, Researcher, Inventor, Technologist, Author, and Dot-Connector Extraordinaire
5 个月An illuminating analogy Terry Bollinger. Thanks for sharing. It does point to one potentially tantalizing benefit of the Gen AI mirror - helping us get an accurate pulse of our collective consciousness or zeitgeist. Except that even at that it is failing miserably in its current form, due to at least two factors: first, due to the random dice rolls you note that just create something "sufficiently related" to the collective zeitgeist but nothing that distills its essence in some ways. And second, the inevitable "selective sampling" of the collective consciousness in the training of the mirror, that is a definitely self-defeating strategy for realizing this tantalizingly promising perspective.
Researcher-Practitioner Dedicated to Helping Kids Rediscover Their Joy of Learning. Building Plito.in
5 个月Thank you for sharing this wonderful analogy - makes it easier to convey the pitfalls of genAI to those who like Harry Potter ????