‘Engines of Engagement’ is a curious (authors’ description) book about Generative AI. Julian Stodd, is the progenitor of this project. If you know Julian, as I do, you’ll know this will be an interesting read. Along with his co-authors Sae Schatz and Geoff Stead, they’ve come up with something wonderful.
The book is fluid, a bit like a large language model. It has avoided the fixity of most books on the subject and is honest about the ambiguity of Generative AI. People find it difficult to think probabilistically, yet that is what one has to do with Generative AI. We demand certainty, right answers and truth-machines. Julian and his co-authors have admirably avoided this trap. Our brains are intrinsically probabilistic, as are these Generative AI tools, so the subject demands a different mindset, one that is more open and doesn’t fall into the trap of using pejorative language such as ‘hallucinations’. It has this great line,“AI isn’t perfect – because neither are we” and has more questions than answers, is playful rather than dogmatic.
They have also avoided the endless moralising we hear from academics and quango folk with a lot of time on their hands, accompanied by little knowledge of AI or ethics, riding into the discussion on their moral high horses. They pose questions and recognise the complexity of the situation. It’s also relatively short, a blessing in this age of verbosity. So I’ll end my review here.
Lastly, a confession. I have a small piece in the book on ‘Human Exceptionalism’. Julian was open enough, as always, to take a risk on a piece that tries to demolish the idea that we are special and exceptional. Copernicus and Darwin put that to rest, yet we still hang on to our 21st century skills, whatever….
Well done to these three and See Saw Publishing.
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