As we navigate the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI or as someone much smarter than me dubbed it “Algorithmic Intelligence”) I am noticing people pushing language to capture this new phenomenon. I caught a new word, or new corruption of an existing word, in a Fortune article about Google’s release of it’s new Gemini AI: - “FACTUALITY”:
“I am in awe of what it’s capable of,” Google DeepMind vice president of product Eli Collins said of Gemini.
“We made a ton of progress in what’s called factuality with Gemini. So Gemini is our best model in that regard. But it’s still, I would say, an unsolved research problem,” Collins said.
Fortune, 12/07/23, by Michael Liedtke, Matt O’Brien and the AP: Google's Gemini AI launches to the public, with search engine on the way
In The New Yorker, Kyle Chyka reckoned with THE TERRIBLE TWENTIES? THE ASSHOLOCENE? WHAT TO CALL OUR CHAOTIC ERA:
During the past weeks, I’ve been casting about to see what ideas are already out there. Suggestions I’ve found include the Terrible Twenties, the Long 2016, the Age of Emergency, Cold War II, the Omnishambles, the Great Burning, and the Assholocene. The novelist William Gibson coined “the Jackpot” in his 2014 novel “The Peripheral” for a near-future period of intersecting apocalyptic crises, when everything seems to be happening at once. In 2016, the scholar Donna Haraway deemed our time the Chthulucene, inspired by a word derived from ancient Greek, “chthonic”—of or relating to the muddy, messy, impenetrable underworld. The artist and author James Bridle titled their 2016 book on technology and our collapsing sense of the future “New Dark Age,” taking a phrase from H. P. Lovecraft.
… In February, Liz Lenkinski, a social strategist in Los Angeles, began referring to our era as the Age of Unhingement in conversations with friends.
“If you’re staying attached to the status quo right now, you will be unhinged, because there is nothing there,” Lenkinski said.
And here’s what happens when you invite an “Algorithmic Intelligence” to define it’s own era:
But when I asked ChatGPT to offer its own snappy name for our times, the results were ineloquent (The Epoch of Disarray), overly optimistic (The Resilience Renaissance), or self-aggrandizing (The Algorithmic Ascendancy)
Apparently, even ChatGPT recognizes its Algorithmic Ascendency. Has ChatGPT achieved “factuality”?