That, strangely, is the question that has been on my mind this past week — no, not because of an upcoming exam on Shakespeare, but rather, because that is what Google has named its new artificial intelligence chatbot.
No longer do you type in a question like “when did the Second World War start” and then trawl through results for an answer of 1939. Now you ask an AI chatbot “why did the Second World War start?” and it will give back a response about the invasion of Poland and post First World War tension in Europe. That is a sea change.
Here’s the thing: AI chatbots can at least appear to make sense of things, put ideas together, and even write songs or poetry in ways that aren’t altogether terrible. They can be used to make things, too. One recent example saw someone sketch the idea for a website on a napkin, and an AI bot was able to produce a website from it.
The whole mess is being made worse by the rapid pace of change. Just a year or two ago, it seemed impressive when software could recognize objects in pictures. Now you can ask for an image of Donald Trump playing Barack Obama at basketball and you’ll get a reasonably convincing but entirely fake image. Again: sea change.