The Wizard of AIoz
Pay No Attention to the Pretrained Generative Transformer Behind the Curtain
As so many have, I recently had the lovely experience of seeing the film “Wicked” with my ten year old daughter, her best friend and a dear colleague from work. The film was a rousing, heart-filled biting wonder-play of emotion and song. And then at Thanksgiving, my parents and my daughter and I watched the original Wizard of Oz film so my daughter could fill in some of the important elements of what-is-to-come narrative in the Land of Oz. And as the story unfolded again in front of my eyes, I realized, as I so often do with so much narrative fiction these days: I was watching another story about artificial intelligence; perhaps a warning or perhaps a hopeful tale of the promise of the human heart, mind, spirit and body; however you decide to look at it, just don’t look too closely at what’s behind that curtain.
This won’t be a very long post or a massive thesis on the entire film. I really just wanted to get some thoughts down about the scenes with Dorothy and her friends when they encounter the Wizard of Oz himself on the two occasions they do. Upon first meeting the Wizard in the film, he presents himself as a massive, intimidating, complex, spectacle of wonderment and awe. A truly bewildering sight, this Wizard is utterly magical; who could deny the power and promise of a being so auspicious?
A similar feeling plumed when platforms like ChatGPT first arrived in public form in November 2022 and millions of users began adopting and using these tools; AI seemed very magical, as if it could do anything you asked by simply typing in a request through a simple and intuitive user interface.
In the film, the travelers each want something miraculous from the Wizard who says he can grant them their wish but first they must do something for him. Which they do. Upon returning with their trophy, the travelers discover the truth about the smoke-and-mirrors-magical wizard: he is actually only a man controlling a series of levers and machinery behind a larger curtain, not the magical, god-like machine they first encountered but a human being. And so they demand their prize. Befuddled and wanting to please the travelers query, the Wizard pulls several objects from a bag and hands these objects to the travelers with a short explanation for each.
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The scarecrow earns a brain, the tinman gets his heart and the lion his courage. But these gifts are really just benign objects pulled from a bag; the point here is that they were there all along; the Scarecrow didn’t need his degree in Thinkology, the Tinman didn’t need a heart-shaped watch and the Lion already had bravery in excess. So, what does this mean for thinking about AI? A few things.
I believe AI is a human endeavor. It may seem like a scary, god-like Wizard of Oz floating there above smoke and fire, but really it is more like a man handing out degrees in Thinkology behind a curtain with a bag of trinkets who can help you find what is already inside yourself. Like the magic of Oz, the slippers, the power to grow and resist and learn and fight and find true friendship and companionship and love and courage; all these things are human things and AI (like the wizard) might help you get there with all of those pursuits. It might also cause harm. The Wizard ordered the death of the Wicked Witch of the West in exchange for all this; so AI can and is causing harm, too.
Stories from the past casting echoes into the future; Oz, Frankenstein, Skynet, Solomon; the list goes on. Humanity has always been concerned with non-human minds and a self outside our own self; that elusive identity that is not our identity and what it means to understand or know something beyond our own consciousness. Perhaps all stories help us with this, all mythology all narrative all belief. Perhaps one day we will get closer to finding that truth. Until then…follow the yellow brick road.
Believe in yourself. Believe in humanity and its potential to do good in the world and to overcome evil.
In every version, I'm always impacted by the response that the "wizard" is not what they are imagined to be. And yet, we still trust the entity to give us what we think we need and answers we can't conceive without intervention. What a great argument for humanity and the capacity of human-generated technologies.