I often find myself thinking of a sentence by the American novelist Nicholson Baker about the size of thoughts: “Most are about three feet tall, with the level of complexity of a lawnmower engine.”
The sentence comes to mind when I’m presented, casually, with ideas produced by our new emotionless sidekick “generative AI”. The most insistent examples of this come at the top of Google searches, which, rather than simply providing “real world” links to that morning’s query – “What time does the pub open?”, say – offer first a little machine-generated reply that allows you to imagine yourself slickly informed.
