Humanity in between the Words
Sometimes, it’s not what someone says, it’s what they don’t say. There’s the cliche line “the silence was deafening”. The awkward pause that can reveal someone’s lying or reluctant to tell something, the glances between people, the weird feeling we might get before it rains — these are not things that are easily copyable by AIs.
“We know more than we can tell” is a line that comes from the concept of Tacit Knowledge. This is attributed to Michael Polany’s book The Tacit Dimension from 1966. There is much that is inherent to us that we can’t explain.
Our intelligence isn’t communicated with only the transcription of our words, it’s also through not only our outward movements but every way that our bodies function. How we produce energy, how we transmit signals from our mind to our fingertips or vocal chords… these are the result of trial and error over eras.
Only looking at us as the species homo sapiens, we’re the result of 6–12,000 generations. However, if we extend back to all life, we may be looking at trillions of generations, each passing along a bit more know-how in managing existence. Only part of that knowledge is now expressed through our words.
This is where liveness and humanity can be detected. The uncanny valley response gets triggered when observering something that’s a copy of us but the real thing. Even in Unreal Engine’s new face mimicking technology, something seems off about the individuals being produced. How they look and make facial expressions gives away that they’re not really us.
A few months ago, I challenged ChatGPT to re-create the roast of Justin Bieber with Jeff Ross and Andrew Dice Clay doing the roasting. There were some pearls that came through but for the most part, the AI produced facts that didn’t find humour. They seemed forced or were just completely unfunny. Humour is a property that is hard to define by rules (even if there is the Rule of Threes’ and the Comic Triple).
It might take quite a bit longer for AI to completely fool us. At that point, little giveaways of our humanity might be used by other AI’s to detect liveness. They still won’t be able to be us and express those trillions of generations needed to be one of us. That will take much more time and many more lifetimes lived by AIs inside of simulations.
