Tonight is the start of Hannukah, a Jewish celebration of winning a bloody battle for the preservation of its ancient practices and beliefs around 2,200 years ago in Jerusalem.

Since I’m currently in London, I asked ChatGPT 4 to create a Manx themed menorah to commemorate the occasion. I did not expect this result:

Obviously, this is a very bad interpretation of my request!

I think it is things like that which reveal that it doesn’t genuinely comprehend what it is doing, and showcases the fundamental difficulty in securing artificial intelligence to not do dumb and offensive things. Any decent human in our Western culture can instinctively and instantly understand that putting a Swastika on a menorah is awful. No reasonable modern Western human could do this accidentally.

Triskelions and Swastikas have a roughly similar appearance, but their meaning is fundamentally and deeply different. Along similar lines, the AI has tried to represent a cat with no tail, but it has included a cat with a tail. This is very imperfect technology, and highlights the continuing need of good humans to monitor and manage

I think that errors like this in (current) AI are caused out of incompetence/ignorance, not malice. It doesn’t comprehend that the difference between a triskelion and a swastika is very big in terms of meaning! (even though it might “only” be 3 v 4 legs on the shape).

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Michael Josem is a long-term consumer advocate, most prominently as a global leader in combating fraud in the online gambling industry. He was in part the inspiration for the 20th Century Fox Movie, Runner Runner, starring Ben Affleck and Justin Timberlake.

Josem has over a decade of experience as a senior business leader working across various high-tech and online industries, and takes action to build a better community. His primary volunteer roles include service for the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, and Graih, the homelessness charity.