Opinion | AI tells us what Marilyn Monroe, Mark Twain and Confucius have in common, but is it right? How do we know? We get a little less reasonable
- AI reckons up to 70 per cent of Monroe quotes are wrongly attributed while Voltaire’s quote about respectful disagreement is also dubious
- Monty Python’s John Cleese and Michael Palin discussed what makes a good argument in a popular 5-minute sketch
Are you the kind of person who just likes to get it all off your chest? If not, could you be the kind of artificial intelligence that likes to output the full data load from your natural language processing spatial accelerator chip?
Perhaps we all need a good argument every now and again. You can say exactly what you think or “think”, enter into the spirit of disagreeableness, and at the end of it, get on with the rest of your less contradictory life or being. Once you’ve said your bit, it’s done.
In the Monty Python comedy sketch, a customer (played by Michael Palin) pays one pound for a decent five-minute argument, and is disgusted to receive a series of assertions and substanceless contradictions from John Cleese.
Customer: “I came here for a good argument.”
Service provider: “No you didn’t. You came here for an argument.”
Customer: “An argument is a collected series of statements to establish a definite proposition.”
