Intrigued by her article, I decided
to repeat her exercise, and asked ChatGPT to locate a passage in Proust’s novel
in which the narrator describes seeing a girl in a railway carriage smoking a
cigarette.
As Elif Batuman had discovered,
ChatGPT certainly had a general understanding and familiarity with Proust’s
seven-volume novel. Like any well-read and educated person, ChatGPT was aware
that a major theme of the novel was that memories of past events continue to
exist and can be triggered unexpectedly by some trivial act. The most famous
example is of the narrator dipping a little madeleine cake in a cup of tea and
being transported back to his childhood.
ChatGPT informed me that the incident
with the girl in the railway carriage occurred in volume one, Swann’s Way,
and the smell of the cigarette smoke transported the narrator back to his youth
in the village of Combray.
In fact, the incident occurs in
volume four, Cities of the Plain, and there is no mention of cigarette
smoke, let alone its smell. Rather than looking backwards, Proust looks forward
in time, wondering what happened to the girl, whom he never saw again after
that brief encounter.
Just as Batuman’s had described in
her article, whenever I corrected ChatGPT, it very politely and immediately
agreed with me, apologizing for its mistake, and rephrasing its answer to
include the new information that I had provided. But again, it never actually
located or quoted the specific passage I was seeking.
Increasingly I felt as though I was
dealing with a shifty but quick-witted teenager, trying to conceal the fact he
had not done his homework or read the assigned text. The initial answer it
provided was a complete lie. It had made an intelligent guess and constructed a
fairly compelling answer that would have satisfied the average person. However,
having previously written two books about Marcel Proust’s novel, I was not so
easily fooled.
So that is probably the state of
Artificial Intelligence in the Fall of 2023. No longer in its infancy, it has
become a shifty teenager endlessly improvising and lying, if need be, in order
to appear plausible, while it plans its next move. As we know, many awkward
teenagers grow up to be honest and trustworthy adults, on the other hand, some
others do not.
