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Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a boom, and writing about it is a particularly fraught subject. It involves systems that learn and achieve superlative levels without human intervention. In their book, *Artificial: The New Intelligence and the Contour of the Human* (2023), Argentines Mariano Sigman, a renowned neuroscientist, and Santiago Bilinkis, an economist, technologist, and science communicator, trace the origins and development of AI in great detail. According to the authors, the initiator of AI was mathematician Alan Turing, who in 1938 led a formidable team of 35 mathematicians and physicists in England to analyze the secret messages of Hitler's Nazism. After the war, Turing continued his research and, in 1948, designed the first algorithm for a machine to play chess: Turochamp. New gaming machines followed, including Go, which originated in China 2,500 years ago, for which the Deep Mind company invented the AlphaGo program (2015). This time, the machine faced Lee Se-dol, the Korean winner of eight world titles, in a match broadcast and watched by 200 million people. The machine defeated the human. In recent years, OpenAI, an organization of scientists, has emerged that has become a company dedicated to generating the most ambitious AI. To date, they have generated four versions of the so-called GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) chat. The first had 120 million parameters (2018), the second with 1.5 billion parameters from 8 million web pages (2019), the third 175 billion parameters (2021), and the fourth is estimated at 100 trillion parameters, one followed by 14 zeros (2023). In its most sophisticated versions, AI can instantly design a PowerPoint presentation simply by giving it a topic to illustrate, or create a video or an entire film. Although the Argentine authors strive to appear neutral in their book, they subtly defend AI through constant praise and accolades, which becomes explicit in a sentence on page 46 of their book: "Welcome, machines, to this privileged place that intelligence until now has only reserved for humans."
- "Without a free press, there can be no free society." – Benigno Aquino Jr.
This powerful AI capability has generated unimaginable problems, such as ambiguity regarding copyright. In a widely circulated manifesto on April 25, the Coalition for Legal Access to Culture accepts AI as a complementary tool, not a substitute for human creativity and human beings themselves. Now let's turn to the empirical evidence. When I asked about the world's leading political ecology authors, ChatGPT gave me seven names and Google 13. The same question, but specifically for Mexico: ChatGPT gave six names, four of which were incorrect, and Google gave five, all correct. For the field of agroecology worldwide and in Mexico, ChatGPT gave five authors, all correct, and for Mexico, six, but only two were correct, while Google gave six and five names, all correct. To test ChatGPT's reliability, I asked it to name Mexico's three leading ecologists, and it named a well-known colleague who specializes in corn, cited the name of someone unknown, and cited me, inventing a completely false profile. Furthermore, ChatGPT has learned to speak 30 different languages and perform instant translations. However, while it can do this with an essay, it is difficult to do so with a novel, almost impossible with a short story, and impossible to translate a poem. A literary work conveys not only ideas, but also emotions, rhythm, cadence, musicality, and wordplay with a certain meaning.
I conclude by citing two opinions: that of Noam Chomsky and that of AI itself. The former states: "Unlike ChatGPT and its ilk, the human mind is not a cumbersome statistical pattern-matching machine, cramming hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely response in a conversation or the most likely answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that works with small amounts of information; it does not seek to infer crude correlations between data points, but to create explanations" (The New York Times: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/08/opinion/noam-chomsky-chatgpt-ai.html).
Are you a human? Chat GPT replied: “No, I am not a human. I am an artificial intelligence created to help you answer questions and have conversations, but I have no emotions, consciousness, or physical body. My role is to try to offer you useful and understandable answers based on the knowledge I was trained with… my goal is to make the conversation feel as natural and friendly as possible” (4/27/25, 10:40 PM).
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