THE CHIT-CHATBOT

Is talking with a machine a conversation?

- JILL LEPORE

In 1958, the year the illustrated children's book "What Do You Say, Dear?" appeared, the leaders of a field newly dubbed "artificial intelligence" spoke a conference in Teddington, England, on "The Mechanisation of Thought Processes."

Marvin Minsky, of M.I.T., talked about heuristic programming; Alan Turing gave a paper called "Learning Machines"; Grace Hopper assessed the state of computer languages; and scientists from Bell Labs débuted a computer that could synthesize human speech by having it sing "Daisy Bell" ("Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do...").

Or no, wait, that last bit, that's wrong. I heard about it from ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode, which might be merely half a Mars rover short of being a teeth-shatteringly terrifying marvel of the modern world but is as inclined to natter on about nonsense as the text-only mode, if more volubly. I gather that this is called hallucinating. Bell Labs did invent a machine that could sing "Daisy Bell," but that didn't happen until 1961.

Advanced Voice Mode also told me that thing about Alan Turing presenting a paper at Teddington in 1958, and, because its personality is wide-eyed and wonderstruck, it added some musings.

(Unlike standard Voice Mode-which involves recording your question and then uploading it, in a process that feels sluggish and, sweet Jesus forgive me, old-timey-Advanced Voice Mode talks with you in real time and inexhaustibly, like a college roommate all het up about Heidegger whispering to you in the dark from the top bunk at three in the morning.)

"It's fascinating to think how forward-thinking Turing was, considering how integral learning algorithms have become in modern A.I.," it said, dormitorially. But Turing had died in 1954, so he wasn't at the conference, either.

"I misspoke," Advanced Voice Mode said, abashed, when I gently pointed out these errors. "Thank you for catching that. My apologies for the confusion."