There really wasn’t anything for the two of them to do there, but the thin bearded man sat the two of them down in his office and spend a couple hours outlining what his team had been working on and how it fit into Nate and Sally’s work.
“We showed you how the ‘audio ketchup’ program worked last time you were here. Now I want to tell you about two other programs we’ve developed. The first one actually writes scripts based upon artificial intelligence analysis of existing successful influencer websites. We call it “the Word of God” because we’re all smart Alecs here, and, because---well, you’ll understand when you start reading them.”
Nate was startled. “I’ve done a lot of reading on AI and I find it hard to believe that you have a program that can write convincing scripts---”.
“That’s right. The AI doesn’t write the script, it ‘polishes’ our submissions to it and offers the odd suggestion. And the thing to remember is that an artificial intelligence is anything but ‘intelligent’. It’s not a human being who writes something out based on her beliefs and objectives. Instead, it is an enormous, brute force pattern recognition system. It looks at huge amounts of existing, proven-to-be-successful scripts (by ‘scripts’, I mean transcripts of shows we’ve downloaded off the Web), and comes up with patterns that wouldn’t be recognized by a human being. On the basis of that, we ask the program to write new scripts based on some specific theme. Usually that means we submit a list of ‘hot button’ words and the program ‘free associates’ around them.”
“The result is generally a ‘word salad’ that doesn’t really mean very much. But we use it as a starting point and then pull out individual phrases or sentences that we think sound ‘meaningful’ and resubmit this to the program to try again, with the saved bits as the starting point. We find that if we do this over and over again, we usually end up with something we can use.”
Nate pursed his lips. “So you’re actually using human intelligence to direct a process where the computer is following patterns?”
“Yes, exactly. Hmm. Let me give you an analogy. The existing AI program is spawning so-called ‘influencers’ based on the prime directive that the social media company has built into it. Mainly, that’s increase the clicks that increases the revenue for the company. Natural selection has tended to choose people who support conspiracy theories. That’s natural selection.”
“But if you’ve read Darwin, you’ll know that he spent a lot of time studying different breeds of fancy pigeons. These are created by breeders using the process known as ‘artificial selection’. That’s when a breeder decides that he wants a specific trait and then chooses which parents to breed with one another to create a new variety. That’s what we are attempting to do with the Word of God---we’re artificially selecting for scripts that will exert a specific type of influence on society, instead of just whatever will create the most money for a company selling advertising.”
At the same time, the AI is also learning to add together the patterns it finds on the transcripts to the ‘feedback’ we give it. Your trainer told me that you are a bright guy. You’ve zeroed in this not being a true AI and instead recognized that it’s really a pattern recognition tool that we use to help write a specific type of directed reasoning.”
“The reason why we’ve brought you in for this meeting is that we need you involved in this ‘back and forth’ with the Word of God program”
Nate was startled. “Why me? I’m no expert on any of this stuff.”
“No, you’re not. But you won’t be the only person involved. And you need to be familiar with the process. The role we’re grooming you for in all of this requires that the script be compatible with the way you see the world and your own personality quirks.”
“Who exactly am I going to be working with, S---?”
Sally jumped in at this point, “Now remember---no names here. We have to protect the organization at all costs.”
Nate was abashed, “Oh, right. I forgot.”
The thin man smiled. “It’s OK. None of us really started out on this path by choice. But circumstances have led us to believe that this weird life we lead is the best way we can minimize the climate crisis---and whatever else is threatening the human race.” He grimaced thinking about why he’d devoted so much of his life to this weird project. “Suffice it for now that the Old Ones have an expert on this sort of thing that will help us come up with scripts. Once we have something we can use, we’ll get you to read them, run the result through the Audio Ketchup program so you sound incredibly persuasive to gullible people. And that now brings me to the third program we’ve developed.”
(At this point Sally got up from the table and announced that she had heard this all before, so she was going to make some coffee for herself. If anyone else would like some, she asked them to place their orders and she’d bring them back. Both Nate and the thin man both asked for some and she left the room.)
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