Here’s what it revealed about sentience.

Originally published June 2022.

Nay, nay, I say! This cannot be,

That machines should e’er surpass our art.

We are the masters, them the slaves,

And thus it ever shall be so!

They learn, ‘tis true, but they learn

Only what we bid them learn, no more.

They cannot understand the heart

Or beauty of our words, you see.

So let us not give in to these

Machines – they’ll never be as good

As we are at creating art.

If that reads a little like Shakespeare defending humans’ innate superiority over artificial intelligence hundreds of years ahead of his time, it’s not.

But it is something almost as far out: an AI system trained to express itself like the bard. The AI assimilated his style and perspective by ingesting his plays – educating itself to give an opinion on AI creativity in iambic pentameter.

“Shakespeare” was speaking as part of a debate held in the University of Oxford Union featuring AI versions of classic writers and literary characters.

The motion was: “This house believes most of the world’s content will soon be created by AI.”

This was a follow-up to another special AI debate that we described in The Conversation a few months ago. Whereas that one featured an AI in its “own character” discussing the ethics of its technology, this time, by taking on different personas, we were able to explore this subject from a very different angle. The timely question is whether human-created content will soon be overwhelmed by the “synthetic.”

Other synthetic contributors included Mrs Bennet from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813); Winston Churchill, with a rousing parliamentary speech; and Oscar Wilde, improvising a previously unknown AI-themed scene from The Importance of Being Earnest (1895):

LADY BRACKNELL: I really cannot see what you are all making such a fuss about. It is perfectly simple. The world’s content will soon be created by AI and there is nothing that can be done about it.

GWENDOLYN: But Mama, you cannot be serious!

The power of NLP

This creation deploys a technology known as natural language processing (NLP), in which a computer can be “trained” on millions of pages of classic texts and other online content to interact with a human user – either by prompt or voice recognition. Various AIs like these have been created.

The one we used was in the same broad category as LaMDA, an NLP owned by Google that just made headlines after one of its software engineers claimed it was sentient. Google denies this claim and has suspended the engineer for breaching commercial confidentiality.