It probably didn’t escape your attention that, hot on the heels of Nadine Dorries launching her new book, The Plot, about “the political assassination of Boris Johnson”, the Cambridge Dictionary announced that its Word of the Year is ‘hallucinate’? Mere coincidence? Or might there be darker forces at work?
Might the Cambridge Dictionary have been sending a coded message that Nadine has been imagining things – that her book is the result of a little ‘wandering of the mind’? It would be just typical, wouldn’t it, for some bunch of intellectuals to gang up on a poor, highly principled ex-celeb like Nadine and try to drive them out of the proverbial jungle by belittling their assiduously researched testimony as make-believe.
Well, if that is the case, the Cambridge Dictionary folk have done a pretty good job of covering it up. Instead of saying, “Hallucinate is our Word of the Year because we’ve all been using it since Nadine’s book came out,” they’ve come up with some story about it having assumed a new definition – that being the tendency of artificial intelligence tools like ChatGPT to make stuff up.
This is worrying news for me. I’ve been making stuff up for years and I thought it was the one thing that gave me the edge over these ingenious new writing tools. Now it turns out that the robots have mastered the art of fabrication too.
Think of all the jobs that are going to be lost as a result of this. If you can’t stop artificial intelligence from making things up, none of us are safe. What’s to stop AI taking the place of football managers, the police, the media, builders, even – Heaven forbid! – the Government! We could put a computer into No.10 at the next election and it would be just as capable of screwing the whole thing up as Boris – we would never know the difference!
So I say smash all the computers before it’s too late. To err is human – let’s keep it that way!
