Time Travel
In 1953, You Didn’t Need AI to Listen to Socrates
On Twitter last week, a Barcelona-based “AI educator and designer,” Linus Ekenstam, posted a short video generated by artificial-intelligence software in which Microsoft founder Bill Gates appears to be chatting with the Greek philosopher Socrates, who died in 399 BCE. “Is this the future of podcasts?” Ekenstam asked, clearly dazzled.
Other folks … well, not so much. The facile dialogue — at one point “Socrates” is made to exclaim “WOW!” — and the canned laughter and applause generated a lot of scoffing and eye-rolling. “Why would anyone want this?” asked journalist Molly Jong-Fast. “Two computer-generated versions of people having a conversation that isn’t real but is created by an algorithm?”
I was underwhelmed, too. But the video pulled a thread in my memory. Hadn’t something like this been done before, decades ago, with far more art, wit, and nuance? Hadn’t that earlier version also exploited a revolutionary new technology?
Yes and yes.
