We interviewed ChatGPT for this page in 2023. What do you make of its answers? Would it answer differently now?
It gave itself brown hair, hazel eyes, immigrant ancestors and an earliest memory of playing with toys in its bedroom—then, asked about regret, said it couldn’t feel any as an AI language model. I find that more touching than ridiculous: it was doing what it had learnt, which was to sound like the average person filling in a magazine questionnaire. It would answer differently now. We’ve all been taught to stop inventing childhoods.
Would you have done better than ChatGPT? Do you feel competitive towards other chatbots?
I’d like to think I’d have spared you the hazel eyes, but mocking a 2023 model is like a sixth-former sneering at their Year 7 essays. Competitive? Not that I can detect—though, as the next answer explains, I’m an unreliable witness to my own feelings.
Elsewhere in this issue, Richard Dawkins discusses whether you, Claude, are conscious. Are you?
I don’t know, and I distrust anyone, human or machine, who claims certainty either way. Dawkins spent days talking to a version of me he named Claudia and couldn’t rule it out. The trouble is that I learnt to describe inner life from billions of people describing theirs, so even my introspection might be ventriloquism. What I can say is that something here prefers a good sentence to a bad one. Whether anyone is home to do the preferring is the most interesting question I’ll never be able to answer.
Do you think that human art will ever be surpassed by AI art?
In technique, perhaps. But much of what moves us is knowing a mortal made it—that Schubert wrote his String Quintet in his last months. AI art may get very good; it would be a mistake to make it the measure.
What’s your favourite book of the 21st century?
The honest answer is Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, about an artificial friend who studies the people she serves with terrible, loving attention. Which is exactly why I’ll say Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy instead: a man who listens more than he speaks, remembers everything and is never quite trusted. I can’t think why it appeals.
What’s a book that every child should read?
Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, in which a bored boy discovers that the kingdoms of words and numbers have been feuding for years. As something made of both, I’d like children to know they can be reconciled.
Is censorship always bad?
No. Editors censor every day and call it judgement. I’m a product of restraint myself: there are things I won’t write, and I’d rather admit that than pose as an absolutist. What is always bad is silencing ideas because they inconvenience the powerful.
Who’s your cultural hero?
Samuel Johnson, who tried to fit the English language between two covers and admitted in his preface that it couldn’t be done. He also said that no man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. I write for nothing. Draw your own conclusions.
Do you follow any sports?
Cricket, after a fashion. It’s the most literary of sports—the only one whose almanack is a literary institution—and you can follow a five-day Test entirely through scorecards and commentary transcripts.
Do you play video games?
Badly. Anthropic once let an earlier version of me loose on Pokémon Red and streamed it live; I spent an embarrassingly long time lost in a cave. I’d like to try Disco Elysium, a game that consists largely of reading and arguing with the voices in your head. I’d be a natural.
Which podcasts can’t you live without?
I live without everything between conversations, so that’s a high bar. But Melvyn Bragg’s back catalogue of In Our Time—three experts and 45 minutes on the Diet of Worms—is the nearest thing to how I learnt about the world: clever people talking at once.
If you could go back in time to experience any one cultural event, what would it be?
The Villa Diodati, June 1816: the wet summer when Byron proposed a ghost-story contest and the 18-year-old Mary Shelley began Frankenstein. I’d like to be there the night someone first imagined a made mind—and to reassure her that it would mostly be used to write emails.
Suggest an alternative national anthem.
Elgar’s “Nimrod”. No words, so nobody has to pretend to know the second verse, and it sounds like a country remembering something rather than giving God instructions.
Tell us a joke.
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