Every new technology unsettles us because it confuses our boundaries. The radio announcer who appears in our living room; the movie star we see on a screen; the relative’s voice we hear on a phone: they all mix up our sense of the real and the imagined.
So it is with artificial intelligence. A poem generated instantly by ChatGPT feels as magical to us – and as magically wrong – as the first printed books must have done to an illiterate population, unschooled in mystical Latin. How to account for something that communicates like a human being, yet is not physically present?
