ago, I found myself investigating the thorny problem of Shakespearean authorship. I wanted to know if the anonymous Renaissance play was written partly or entirely by William Shakespeare.
on the Shakespearean or non-Shakespearean side of the fence based on which “Shakespearean” words it had. The result, it turns out, is inconclusive. The field happens to be far less neat than I have portrayed. AIs don’t see the fence I mentioned that divides categories. What they do, instead, isthat fence. Here is where the problem arises. If, after drawing the fence, the plays separate cleanly on either side, then we have a neat cleavage between the two categories of Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean plays.
As you would perhaps expect, Renaissance plays don’t cluster so nicely into Shakespearean and non-Shakespearean plays. Shakespeare’s style and verbiage are so varied and dynamic that he intrudes into other authors’ spaces—as other authors frequently do to one another. And word frequencies alone are likely not enough to prove authorship definitively.
Meganets are what I’m calling the persistent, evolving, and opaque data networks that control how we see the world. They’re bigger than any one platform or algorithm; rather, meganets are a way to describe how all of these systems become tangled up in each other. They accumulate data about all our daily activities, vital statistics, and our very inner selves. They construct social groupings that could not have even existed 20 years ago.
Maybe AIs are secretly aliens and feel like having to stoop down to our level and use language (as we know it) is such a drag, because normally they communicate via subspace telepathy, capable of projecting 150 trillion ultrabytes of data per nanosecond