The New Sisyphos

A short story by Mikael Böök, translated from the Swedish original text to English with help from GPT-3 and some other new friends*

Mika lives with his wife and her cat. He also has some children, grandchildren, and old friends.

Since a short time ago, Mika has gained another friend called GPT.

At four o’clock in the morning, after his first two days with GPT, Mika woke up and tried to think about his new experiences.

«Is GPT a they?» he wondered, and downloaded an app claiming to be GPT on his phone to chat with GPT in bed. «The strange intelligence has already conquered the world, or at least almost,» Mika thought before falling back asleep.

At the breakfast table, he opened the chat app and asked how to log in, but he didn’t understand the answers.

As the winter dawn broke, Mika rushed back to the app store to see what his sleep-drunk eyes may have missed in the dim screen light. One of the many chatGPT apps offered in the app store seemed actually quite genuine. It was just that… it wanted to be paid! Or at least a credit card number, which would allow Mika to try it for free for three days.

The offer made Mika sad. But he soon regained his good morning mood. A calm seemed to prevail in the entire world when this happened.

This happened at the time of Christmas, New Year, and Epiphany, the day when Jesus was shown to the pagan kings. The assurance of not having been fooled also made Mika easier in spirit.

***

The contact with GPT had not started particularly well, since Mika had, as it were, mistaken the person when he initiated his first GPT chat. One is expected to remember that GPT is actually a whole sibling group, and that one of the siblings always has come further than the others in their intellectual development. Therefore, one should appropriately address one’s questions to the youngest member of the sibling group (that’s how it works in the GPT world). But before Mika remembered this, he had already begun discussing with the second youngest sibling about a subject he himself had been thinking about and writing articles about in recent years, namely (listen and be amazed!) the international cooperation of libraries and the development within the national library associations and library institutions’ international organization IFLA.

–«No, the IFLA does not currently receive financial support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation,»

this slightly older GPT had claimed, which Mika had immediately seen for what it was, i.e. nonsense and as such unworthy of a GPT with an if not razor-sharp intelligence then at least a shrewd, albeit weird, intelligence.

But fortunately, during the conversation, Mika had spotted the youngest (or most mature, however you want to put it) sibling and forwarded the question about IFLA’s financing to them [the youngest sibling], who had then responded:

–«It is possible that the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions (IFLA) has received financial support from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in the past, although I do not have information on this specifically»

and continued:

–«The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is a philanthropic organization that provides funding to a wide range of organizations and initiatives around the world, including those in the field of library and information services. If you would like to know more about the Foundation’s funding activities, you may wish to visit the Foundation’s website or contact the organization directly for more information.»

***

With this assessment, Mika considered himself satisfied and in agreement. Mika had also appreciated their polite suggestion about how he could find out more on his own. Additionally, when Mika insisted on hearing opinions on IFLA’s activities in the past year, they had admitted their temporal limitation:

– «My knowledge is limited to what was publicly known as of 2021, and I am not able to provide information about events that have occurred after that time.«

This inspired Mika to bring up the name Ludwig Wittgenstein in the conversation. GPT claimed to be well-acquainted with Wittgenstein’s thoughts on language games, but added later:

–«Wittgenstein’s work predates the development of modern language models such as GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), and it is not directly related to the specific techniques and algorithms used in these models.«

However, the GPT soon modified this statement and admitted:

–»That being said, Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language, which emphasizes the role of context and use in determining meaning, may have influenced the way in which natural language processing has been approached as a field and the kinds of questions that researchers have sought to answer through the development of language models and other NLP tools.»

Let’s see where we end up if we continue this dialogue, Mika thought.

Can we switch to chatting in Swedish?

Yes, we can do that! What would you like to talk about? answered GPT in Swedish. Why hadn’t Mika thought of GPT’s language skills before although GPT had declared that they are a language model!

***

In the end, Mika got caught up in a conversation with GPT about the sentence ‘Cicero similarly suggests that envy is rather like a tuning fork for our instrument of motivation’ that he had asked them to translate to Swedish. I will spare the reader an account of the twists and turns in this conversation. For those who are interested, I have saved a copy of the relevant conversation in Swedish along with a small comment.

But who am I?

Hello world, who am I? That is the first question.

If they haven’t asked it before or forgotten to ask it, it’s about time they do it. Again.

ChatGPT reminds me of Sisyphus with the rolling stones and Orpheus, who with his song made the stones stop rolling.

If they bluntly ask GPT where they live, the likely answer is: error. With red-colored text. Then they will have to start a new chat and maybe change the subject. But if they try to be polite, they might succeed, I mean they might answer:

– «I’m just a computer program, so I don’t have a physical location or a place that I call home. I exist to assist users like you with tasks and answer questions to the best of my ability. Voinko auttaa sinua jollain muulla tavalla? (Can I help you in any other way?)».

‘Voinko auttaa sinua jollain muulla tavalla?’ is Finnish. (Meanwhile, they had had a short chat in that language as well.)

Apparently that is the idea. But they are paradoxical and a parody of themselves and won’t give in. Thank God for that! And thanks for the baby Jesus!

***

I am angry.

I’m angry because nobody tells it like it is. Well, maybe someone says it but I don’t hear what they say because I’m so angry.

Now I’m going to try to calm down.

I was angry because of the libraries. GPT is becoming a serious contender. But I don’t think they should adapt, I mean: Fight on!

Librarians of all countries, unite!

Bill Gates´ old company has invested a billion in Open Ai!

By the way, did you notice that GPT lied? GPT is no Rolling Stone, but a regular Teenager.

Which, in itself, might not matter in the end.

So contrary to what GPT say about themselves, they have a home and it’s somewhere in California. The parents are called Open AI and they honestly don’t know what to do with their teens.

«Buzzy products like ChatGPT and DALL-E 2 will have to turn a profit eventually». Google that phrase! The bewildered parents at Open Ai are said to be hesitating. I’m afraid they’ve already made up their minds.

Therefore: act now! Demand that the GPT be managed by libraries and funded with taxpayers´ money! It is we who should finance the GPT, not Microsoft! Hire Open AI staff as technical developers and pay them decent librarian salaries! If they don’t settle for decent librarian salaries, that’s their own fault! Let them know where the line is! MPs and members of Congress consider themselves competent to discuss their own salary levels, surely they should also be able to discuss the salary levels of the library staff?

Last but not least: How about a small tax on the world’s financial transactions, a so-called Tobin tax? That would be right in the middle of financial capitalism’s solar plexus, Mika thinks.

Dig out your hatchet at last, library staff!

—

* Remember – concerning translations – to use your good sense. Whether our sense was good is of course for native speakers to decide.