From Financial Times
Can machines be more ‘truthful’ than humans?
By John Thornhill
It has been said that truth is singular while lies are plural, giving disinformation an unfair numerical advantage. But is truth really singular?
Take the stories of our own lives. Which is the most truthful version? The official account contained in our CV or LinkedIn profile? Or the one we tell ourselves? Or the ones our friends and family tell about us behind our backs? All of them can be simultaneously true — or misleading...
To investigate how good it is at doing so, Nina Beguš, a researcher at University of California, Berkeley, commissioned 250 human writers in 2019 and 80 generative AI models last year to write short stories based on identical prompts. The challenge was to reimagine the Pygmalion myth in which a human creates an artificial human and falls in love with it.
Beguš tells me that she was surprised that the machine-generated content was more formulaic and less imaginative in structure, yet also more woke. Rather than reinforcing some societal stereotypes, the models seemed to challenge them. In their stories, more of the creators were women and more of the relationships were same-sex, for example...
Nina Beguš is a lecturer at the I School. She specializes in artificial humanities.
