Artificial intelligence vs unnatural silliness

In yet another attempt to pin the world’s woes on AI, much opprobrium broke out against ChatGPT after an article was published in The Irish Times that was attributed to a person who does not exist, and was largely written by the smart bot. The real discomfort, however, lies not in that the newspaper was unable to spot a machine mimicry artist but because of the piece’s subject: cultural appropriation. The AI-generated article published last week was about how the use of fake tan by Irish women makes a mockery of people with naturally dark skin. Posing as a Dublin-based Ecuadorian health worker, the real ‘author’ soon revealed that the article’s purported writer was created by image generator DALL·E 2 from the prompt, ‘female, overweight, blue hair, business casual clothing, smug expression’ – a stereotypical woke person.

While the debate has moved towards the ‘misuse’ of AI, the actual point was to highlight the ridiculous extremes of political correctness where cultural appropriation – e.g., White people-wearing bindis, the sale of indigenous products in high-street shops, etc – is seen by a certain self-righteous lot as 21st-century sin. The article’s anonymous sender is right when he/she tweeted, ‘…identity politics is an extremely unhelpful lens through which to interpret the world’. That is intelligent, artificial or natural.