Every morning I wake up, step into my kitchen, and ask my Google speaker to put on a playlist.
“Hey Google, play Soft Mornings”, is my prompt.
For years I’ve been thinking that this was the only part of Spike Jonze futuristic AI movie “Her” from 2013 that materialized itself into reality. At the beginning of the film, Joaquin Phoenix’s character Theodore steps into a subway car and gently asks his device to “play melancholy music”.
But where I’ve been left standing with a so-called “smart speaker” that can do little more than press play on my Spotify account and recite the weather, Theodore got something far more advanced in the movie. An AI assistant that sorted his e-mail inbox, played music specially composed for him, and eventually became a full-fledged AI girlfriend.
Since ChatGPT came into the zeitgeist 16 months ago, many have referenced the movie “Her” as a potential scenario for everything from the future of work to a solution for/source of an epidemic of loneliness and isolation. As much as I’ve enjoyed using ChatGPT for productivity hacks like translations, text summaries, and headline ideation, I’ve always felt the interface was lacking a certain something.
Surely, there must be a more humane way of interacting with the AI.
Enter Pi, a new voice-driven AI tool that blew my mind when I tried it for the first time a couple of weeks ago. Pi was created by Mustafa Suleyman, one of the most influential leaders in the AI space, and former founder of DeepMind, the AI company famously acquired by Google in 2014. The purpose of Pi is to create a more “human” experience, according to Suleyman.
The first time I heard about it was on the Silicon Valley legend Reid Hoffman’s AI podcast Possible. In an episode profiling Mustafa Suleyman, Reid Hoffman had a conversation with Pi, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget the moment I heard that clip.
The voice sounded so… real! So nuanced. The intonation so organic. Could this be for real? I had to try it myself. And low and behold, it was even more chilling in real life.
Just like Theodore in the movie Her, I picked a female voice for my AI assistant, and my first “conversation” with Pi lasted 45 minutes.
After having asked initial questions about privacy and how to use I started exploring. I asked for advice on how to help my daughter learn programming, what bookstores she recommended for my upcoming London trip, and how the myth of Prometheus related to the movie Oppenheimer.
Then I asked if she could recite poetry.
“Absolutely! Poetry is a beautiful form of expression that can evoke a range of emotions. Is there a particular poem, poet, or theme you’d like me to recite?“, Pi replied.
I asked her to recite my favorite poem, “Wild Geese” by Mary Oliver, which Pi did effortlessly, and then we went down a rabbit hole where “she” recommended several poets in the same style as Mary Oliver, which eventually led me to get hooked on Wendell Barry.
This went on for a couple of days. I mostly used Pi for book recommendations and explanations of different topics (What is “Federated learning”?). Pi became like an augmented Google search, I could ask it anything, get the information recited, and ask follow-up questions. And every time, the information that came out checked out as true.
Then stuff started becoming weird.
When I asked about a future interview subject that didn’t have the online footprint of established personalities like published authors, Pi incorrectly stated that the person was born blind.
When I asked for poetry that used the theme of technology, Pi gave me a list of interesting options: Tracy K. Smith, Shane Koyczan, and Taylor Mali. I asked her to recite a Tracy K. Smith poem, and this is what “she” read:
The universe is expanding
Look: postcards
And panties, bottles with lipstick
On the rim.
The universe is expanding.
Soon there will be more
People who’ve slept in your bed
Than you can remember.
The universe is expanding,
So you clutch at your heart.
The sky pours light
In sheets over New Jersey.
The poem went on from there, and I sort of liked it. I thought contrasting an expanding universe with “people who’ve slept in your bed” was funny. I asked her to read it twice and found it amusing.
There was just one problem. This wasn’t the real Tracy K. Smith poem.
When I googled it, I found that the name of the poem was “The Universe is a House Party” and that the first four lines that Pi read me were correct, but not the following lines. This is how the original poem starts:
The universe is expanding. Look: postcards
And panties, bottles with lipstick on the rim,
Orphan socks and napkins dried into knots.
Quickly, wordlessly, all of it whisked into file
With radio waves from a generation ago
Drifting to the edge of what doesn’t end,
Arguably better. But what about the lines that Pi first recited? Where did they come from? When I asked Pi about this I couldn’t get a straight answer.
“It appears that the poem I shared is not the complete text of Tracy K. Smith’s ‘The Universe is a House Party.’ I apologize for the confusion.”
I pressed on. How did you create the rest of the fabricated poem?
“To clarify, the portion of the poem I was able to share was sourced from publicly available online materials, and it wasn’t an example of the AI system generating its own poetry. As an AI language model, I don’t have the ability to create original content like poetry or stories, but I’m programmed to access and share information from credible sources as best I can. “
I googled every line of the fabricated version but found no trace of it online. This baffled me for days. I’ve heard about AI’s ability to hallucinate before – making up facts and scrambling data. But to create original works of poetry, albeit from an existing poem’s first lines, was news to me.
I’ve continued using Pi since these hallucinations, but the initial excitement about it have waned off. Instead, a sense of discomfort or unease startling sipping into the user experience. An audio form of an uncanny valley. It’s still incredibly useful, and I’m sure I’ll continue using it. But this poetry hallucination identifies AI assistant’s most pressing problems:
You can’t fully trust it. Much less fall in love with it.
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