Rod Miller: Do Artificial Brains Wear Artificial Stetsons?

It's me writing this, relax. No, really...this is Rod Miller ranting out this column.

At the urging of my youngest son, Vic, in whom I am well-pleased and who knows more about this stuff than I do, I handed my last column to an AI chatbot to write. 

But I’m back. Really. This is me.

It was an instructive and interesting exercise to “work” with artificial intelligence to crank out a column. I didn’t know what to expect, and it went exactly as I expected.

Vic and I gave the chatbot (his name is Claude, I believe) a few simple instructions to familiarize itself (himself) with Cowboy State Daily, and then to write a column pretending to be me. 

We told it to have fun, too – if machines are capable of fun.

The result came back in less than a minute. Mere seconds, actually. My first reaction was, “Whoa, I’ll never miss another deadline!”

You saw the result. It was hyperbolic, exaggerated and full of cowboy vernacular. Campfire gossip on steroids. Pretty much like the stuff that I write. 

Some folks ignored the disclaimer and thought that I really wrote it, and said it was my best work.

Reader reactions to the column were all across the board, as would be expected. But a lot of the reactions were to the phenomenon of AI, and not particularly to the content. Again, to be expected.

I was asked if AI made me nervous that I could be replaced as a CSD columnist by a bot. After all, Claude and his ilk have memorized every word written in any language, along with every math calculation ever done by man’s hand.

I have too much ego to worry about that. I will always be a better roper and luckier with flesh & blood ladies than a disembodied mass of smart-alecky electrons. 

But my interest is sure as hell piqued.

Vic and I were monkeying around with another bot, asking it political questions and grilling it about government. It immediately spat out answers that hit the nail on the head every time. Uncanny stuff.

After all, it had memorized every law since Hammurabi and every political speech since Themistocles. It had read every newspaper article and blog ever published. It was well-prepared.

If writers don’t have much to worry about with AI, politicians should be sweating bullets.

As the result of our experiment, Vic has filed to run for mayor of Cheyenne as an AI-assisted candidate.

The bot’s name in this case is VIC (Virtual Integrated Candidate) and human Vic will be the meat face of the campaign. 

Human Vic, it must be said, is the only one who can meet the age and residency requirements for candidacy. But AI VIC will do all the heavy lifting policy-wise.

This campaign should be very interesting to watch. It already has some noggins being scratched in the halls of power and on the street. 

The very idea of artificial intelligence having in its digital fingers the reins of corporeal authority will give some folks the heebie-jeebies, especially in a conservative state like Wyoming. But we’d best get our heads wrapped around the notion. 

Give me one good example of a new technology that has been successfully resisted by folks who thought it came from the devil. Just one. I’ll wait.

And ask me what I think about artificial intelligence and I’ll quote the old southern politician who said, “Some of my friends are for it, and some of my friends are agin’ it. As for me, I’m for my friends.”

Rod Miller can be reached at: rodsmillerwyo@yahoo.com