Correlation is not Communication

on snooker, robots, AI, and oral exams

(People love their AI, and seem to love talking about it even more. This’ll be more such talk, but not with love. More like weariness seasoned with frustration.)

The other day, the greatest snooker player of all time, Ronnie O’Sullivan—and by now it isn’t close—achieved the unprecedented feat of earning the ‘maximum score’ of 147 (a ‘maxi’ as they say in the biz) twice in a single session of play. He also became the oldest player ever (age 49) to achieve a maximum score. For context, O’Sullivan played his first professional match in 1992, has played in hundreds upon hundreds of professional matches, and prior to a few days ago, had scored the maximum (in a professional match) 15 times, already the record (by 2 over his contemporary John Higgins, and by 4 over the previously greatest player of all time, Stephen Hendry). Then, on August 15, he scored a maxi twice in the space of a few hours. Astonishing. I feel very fortunate to have watched it live (online).

If you are unfamiliar with snooker (or if you are familiar!), you might enjoy watching him do it, and, if you are unfamiliar and American, understand that the table is 50% again larger than a pool table, while the pockets and balls are smaller. (I can’t help myself: O’Sullivan also has the fastest maxi in history, as a much younger, and faster-playing, man.)

This ‘blog’ (or whatever it is) is about philosophy and psychiatry and related things, so why the talk about snooker?

Maybe it’s a way of not saying what this post was originally supposed to be about: ‘artificial intelligence’ is making me feel ill. I’m ill from hearing about it. I’m ill from people calling it ‘intelligence’ (a concept about which I already have many doubts, even as applied to persons, much less computer code). I’m ill from people speculating that it will ruin (or save) the world. (Nobody knows and the truth is almost surely ‘neither’.) Just ill.

Oops. Said it anyway.

That’s not (yet) a philosophical point, of course. For (just a little) background: I’m not a technophobe or a Luddite. I was a fairly early adopter of the internet. I was writing emails in the late 80s. My eBay account dates to 1996. I (co-)started a moderately successful internet company in 1998, and I wrote most of the code. (I got out in 2005.)

Could somebody build a machine to do what O’Sullivan did? People are already doing it. And yeah, it’s a cool project, an interesting technological challenge. But here’s something utterly uninteresting: A robot scoring a maximum break in a tournament. Couldn’t care less.

AI is also an interesting project, and it (or what we have of it so far) is the result of smart people (with very powerful computers) solving difficult problems about correlation and prediction in creative ways. Solving the ‘long contextuality’ problem was especially impressive. Good job, everyone. Well done. And here’s another utterly uninteresting something: An AI machine writing a piece of music, or an essay about philosophy. Couldn’t care less.

And yet, I have little doubt that I’ve consumed AI-generated essays (and perhaps, though less likely, AI-generated music), and that’s what’s bothersome about this technology. It makes one not want to read. I don’t want to read, much less respond to, my students’ essays any more. And increasingly, as the evidence mounts that AI-generated text inhabits not only university classrooms but also pretty much everywhere else, I just don’t want to read (much less respond to) anything written after 2022.

I used to read always under the assumption that text is an attempt, by another mind, to communicate something to me, another person involved in an act of communication. Novels. Poems. Essays. Even boring stuff like road signs and government documents. All communications of some kind. AI-generated text is not communication; it’s correlation. I’m tired of the fakery. I’m tired of text pretending to be what it is not.

Here’s a warning (but really a blessing) to my students: All essays are now oral and in-person. Will this procedure cost me a lot more time? Will it make you (and me) uncomfortable? Yes, and you’re welcome.

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Note

It is technically possible, in snooker, to score more than 147 if one’s opponent fouls prior to any balls being potted—it has happened once in official play, for a score of 148.