If Socrates was the wisest person in Ancient Greece, then large language models must be the most foolish systems in the modern world. In his Apology, Plato tells the story of how Socrates's friend Chaerephon goes to visit the oracle at Delphi. Chaerephon asks the oracle whether there is anyone wiser than Socrates. The priestess responds that there isn't: Socrates is the wisest of them all. At first, Socrates seems puzzled.

As the capabilities of natural language processing technology continue to advance, there is a growing hype around the potential of chatbots and conversational AI systems. One such system, ChatGPT, claims to be able to engage in natural, human-like conversation and even provide useful information and advice. However, there are valid concerns about the limitations of ChatGPT and other conversational AI systems, and their ability to truly replicate human intelligence and interaction. No, I didn't write that. It was actually written by ChatGPT itself, a conversational AI software program, after I asked it to create "an opening paragraph to an article sceptical about the abilities of ChatGPT in the style of Kenan Malik". And it is not difficult to see why there has been such excitement, indeed hype, about the latest version of the chatbot since it was released a week ago.

Jonathan Swift's 1726 novel Gulliver's Travels describes a'wonderful machine' that permits "the most ignorant person, at a reasonable charge, and with a little bodily labour" to "write books in philosophy, poetry, politics, laws, mathematics, and theology, without the least assistance from genius." Imagine my surprise and delight when, nearly 300 years later, I stumbled across EleutherAI's version of this very machine: GPT-Neo. With a few clicks, I was able to generate hundreds of thousands of words. More specifically, I was able to create Wikipedia-style biographies for the 118 Nobel Laureates in Literature without the hassle of research, the despair of a blank page, or the need, really, to labor at all. I discovered the GPT-Neo's ability to generate Wikipedia pages accidentally.