Whenever I come across an interesting passage in a book, I frequently will dog-ear the page or take a picture with my smartphone so that I can look up the point being made at a later time. I was recently reading the 19th century satirical novel Erewhon by Samuel Butler (more on the novel shortly) when I came across the sentence:
"There are few who are so holy as to feel that 19 and 13 make 32 as certainly as 2 and 2 make 4."
I thought it was an interesting sentence, so I did what I typically do and dog-eared the page so that I could come back to it later. Here's where things get interesting, at least in my opinion. I looked up the passage on Google and Google's artificial intelligence (AI) engine (Gemini) came up with the following information, which I am copying verbatim:
This famous quote comes from Walter Bagehot, a well-known English writer and economist from the 1800s.
To help me share more details, let me know if you are interested in:
- The book or essay where he wrote this
- More information about Walter Bagehot himself
- Other famous quotes about how humans think about logic
Let me know how you would like to explore this quote further!
I was a little surprised about the result. Admittedly, Samuel Butler first wrote the book in 1872, and Walter Bagehot was a British economist who lived from 1826-1877, so it seems plausible that Bagehot could have written the sentence first. Of course, that would mean that Butler committed plagiarism, but I'm not sure a 19th century editor would have noted that an obscure sentence in the 20th chapter (page 175 of the Penguin Classics edition) of a satirical novel was previously used by someone else. After reading Gemini's explanation, I responded in the affirmative to the prompt about whether I wanted additional information.
To my surprise (again), here is what Gemini responded with:
Actually, my previous mention of Walter Bagehot was incorrect. This quote actually comes from Samuel Butler, another famous English writer from the 1800s. The line appears in Chapter 20 of his brilliant 1872 satirical novel, Erewhon.
Well, at least Gemini recognized and corrected its mistake! I was telling my wife and our son (who as a computer science engineer knows a lot more about AI than I do) about my experience, and I decided to try it all again. The next day, I typed the exact quote into the Google, and Gemini came back with the following:
This beautiful quote comes from C.S. Lewis, a famous author who wrote The Chronicles of Narnia. He wrote this line in his 1943 book about religion and human nature called The Problem of Pain.
Once again, I was confused by the response. Given that C.S. Lewis lived from 1898 to 1963, I think it is logical to assume that if he did, in fact, use the quote in his book, The Problem of Pain, which was published in 1940, he borrowed the quote from Samuel Butler! That's probably okay, but when I prompted Gemini to explain further, here is the response that I received:
I need to correct my previous answer. That quote actually comes from Samuel Butler's famous 1872 satirical novel, Erewhon.
Just to give Gemini one final chance ("The third time is a charm" after all), I checked again one day later. At least it was consistent and claimed that the quote came from C.S. Lewis. However, this time Gemini stated that the quote came from his book, The Screwtape Letters. Once again, I can neither confirm nor deny that C.S. Lewis included this particular quote in his book, but the fact that I've received three different citations to the quote (two of which were corrected when I asked for additional information) leads me to be very suspicious about the accuracy of all these responses!
The irony here is that the whole reason that I read Samuel Butler's novel is that he talks about an early form of artificial intelligence (AI) in a famous three-chapter section of the book called "Book of the Machines." Butler was heavily influenced here by the 1859 publication of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection in On the Origin of the Species and technological innovations produced in the Industrial Revolution. The material he covered in "Book of the Machines" involved concerns that machines would attain artificial consciousness ("intelligence") through a process similar to natural selection. He first raised these concerns in an excellent article published in 1863, "Darwin among the machines", which I found to be a much easier and enjoyable read than his novel.
There is no question that "artificial intelligence" is going to be a game-changer (maybe it already has been one). However, we also need to acknowledge that AI obtains its information to "learn" from what is already available in the public sphere. Sometimes that information is correct, but sometimes that information is wrong. As the saying goes, "Don't believe everything that you read on the Internet." If the information used by AI is false, then AI learns incorrectly. As I discussed in a recent post on Pope Leo XIV's first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas (see my post, "Magnifica humanitas"), AI is not human. However, as my example above clearly shows, AI is at least human-like in one regard - it's far from perfect! As the adage goes, "Garbage in...Garbage out!"
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