That's cool - though what you describe sounds more like a Certificate of Apprenticeship or a Certificate of Completion of Apprenticeship, which would have been presented to the apprentice on the successful completion of the indenture. From the ones I've been looking at online, sometimes these mentioned the number of years served, sometimes not, but they look much more like something you'd frame and hang on the wall than the contracts (the indentures) themselves, which are rather plainer and wordier.
The term of an apprenticeship indenture was (originally) normally seven years and was a legally binding obligation.
In the UK a lot of companies switched in emphasis or wholly from graduate schemes and degree sponsorships to degree apprenticeships, because they could fund this from the compulsory apprentice levy.
Latterly I think they've ended up dropping even those, or using the money to fund - say - execs who want to do a business degree or MBA.
That's cool - though what you describe sounds more like a Certificate of Apprenticeship or a Certificate of Completion of Apprenticeship, which would have been presented to the apprentice on the successful completion of the indenture. From the ones I've been looking at online, sometimes these mentioned the number of years served, sometimes not, but they look much more like something you'd frame and hang on the wall than the contracts (the indentures) themselves, which are rather plainer and wordier.
The term of an apprenticeship indenture was (originally) normally seven years and was a legally binding obligation.
Andrew Bailey, Governor of the Bank of England, and also Chairman of the international Financial Stability Board, expressed some very serious concerns here.
The immediate risks to the global economy in general and job markets in particular would appear to be destabilisation alarm, increasing lack of confidence and a consequential slump. Not the news I expected when I started this thread.
On the other point I’m doing some more research into the fascinating question of whether AI will eventually develop some kind of self awareness. There’s been much more written about this possibility than I knew. Might be worth a separate thread.
It strikes me that the trouble with AI/LLMs is that the focus is on the wrong things. If the focus was on the right things, there would be little clamour to use and promote it as it would be very difficult to make money.
What I mean by this is that in the main people are using it to make their lives easier - you get it to write an essay, you have it check job applications, write computer code and so on. These are all functions that the AI chatbots do very quickly and very badly.
Where I think there is in value is where the AI/LLM makes things more difficult, and humans can use that difficulty to leverage themselves into new things. This is an iterative process, a conversation with a fairly intelligent and well-informed but flawed partner who you need to correct.
So for example perhaps a novice painter or potter or author could engage with an AI chatbot to improve self-criticism of their work so they can improve next time.
My view is that these kinds of activities are likely to be a miniscule part of the data-centre mushroom growth so when the economic bubble eventually bursts, they will likely remain.
The immediate risks to the global economy in general and job markets in particular would appear to be destabilisation alarm, increasing lack of confidence and a consequential slump. Not the news I expected when I started this thread.
The last report from the Bank of International Settlements also highlighted this risk:
I think Asimov's stories tell us rather more about how humans are inclined to reason about AI than how we *need* to reason about AI.
A key plot point in Liar is that the robot is telepathic. I think the most significant contribution of Liar is to introduce the word "robotics" to the English language (according to the Oxford English Dictionary).
I perceive a pervasive underlying assumption that AI is somehow behaving like a developing human being. It isn't. Not in the slightest.
And I find much of what is written and said about "Artificial Intelligence", including the words themselves, to be disingenuous rhetoric.
Currently, the biggest proof or argument we have regarding the future capability of AI is the amount of money that is being invested in it. On Thursday (a couple of days ago), Nvidia's market value increased by $442 billion, following their second-quarter earnings report (which included favourable revenue guidance). This was the second-largest one-day gain in history (after Microsoft, a few weeks ago). Nvidia is the most highly-valued company in history.
Magic beans, anyone?
For the whole of my professional life, computer science has been promising general artificial intelligence in 'a few years.' The only tangible progress I have noticed is that computers are consuming more and more of the Earth's (finite) resources. For every breakthrough in medical science there are a million people using it to produce spoof videos, or plagiarise someone else's creative work.
We seem to come back again to the old argument that even if you try and restrict it, someone will go beyond those restrictions because they can. Of course an outright ban on using AI in certain circumstances will have the same effect.
Talking of such things, I was recently hearing about a top Professor who has been annoying his colleagues by stitching together code written in multiple languages using an LLM to create the functions he wants. The colleagues, some of whom are actually experts in designing working research code, cannot even assess whether the resulting multi-language code does anything at all because none of them have the knowledge across the languages and the professor thinks the solution to this problem is further iterations with the LLM.
One might think that senior academics might be more intelligent about trusting their work to malfunctioning machines that no human can verify, but apparently not.
One might think that senior academics might be more intelligent about trusting their work to malfunctioning machines that no human can verify, but apparently not.
I thought senior academics were notorious for tending to being blithely ignorant of everything outside their narrow field of study and with a confidence that matches their level of ignorance. Hence Richard Dawkins.
Tilly Norwood was asked by a News Nation interviewer about the earlier incident where she inexplicably started speaking Cantonese to Piers Morgan, and after saying something about a "snafu" and her brain going "sideways", finished off with "I guess that's what happens when you're made out of math and British wit."
Not that I was in any way offended by Norwood speaking Chinese, but I don't think wit, British or otherwise, was really the pertinent concept there(maybe something like cosmopolitanism). It sounded like her learning apparatus had just picked up the tendency of some British people to cite their supposed national sense of humour when trying to cover up conversational fuck-ups.
Just watched another interview, on CBS, with Tilly Norwood. When the interviewer asked who she'd like to work with, Norwood replied that she's "been campaigning" to star with Leonardo DiCaprio, at which point the interviewer agreed that he's a great actor, to which Tilly replied...
But I like him the way he likes women. Under 25. Titanic Leo, or nothing for me.
It sounded like a socially awkward person trying to make jokes at a party.
Guardian commentator Peter Bradshaw said of AI actors -
We need another movement like the Campaign for Real Ale in the 70s, which was repeatedly told that gassy tasteless lager was the way of the future – but refused to accept it.
Boogie - at least the gassy tasteless stuff contained the amount of alcohol stated. In no sense can an AI "actor" be said to be human, or to act. But still, the Campaign for Real Actors does have a certain ring.
As far as I'm concerned, the correct pronoun for "Tilly Norwood" is "it".
The title of this thread seems curiously prescient.
You do realise that introducing AI slop into a discussion without clearly labelling it is a big no-no, non?
And this:
It sounded like a socially awkward person trying to make jokes at a party.
Isn't going to win you many friends here.
As to the first point, in a discussion about the potential of AI to mimic humans, I think it's quite relevant to examine an AI bot's attempts to do that. I wasn't using her statements to prove a point about an outside issue, eg. googling "Was the French Revolution a good thing?" and then posting the AI results, which I assume is the sorta thing the ban on AI slop is meant to prevent.
As to the second, my point was not to draw a connection between socially awkward people and misogyny(boo hoo those poor incel dudes, just too shy to talk to women), but socially awkward people and non-sequitorial statements generally; any out-of-place joke on whatever topic would have worked for my case. If I was insensitive as to the problematic content of what she said, I apologize.
As to what pronouns to use for Ms. Norwood, I actually did consider "it", but I thought that would have been a passive-aggressive way to make a point that I was otherwise trying to make directly. Furthermore, we would use "she" and "her" in a sentence like "In that cartoon, Minnie Mouse gets mad when she sees Pluto running off with her hat", without anyone thinking it's an attempt to validate Minnie Mouse's existence as a real person.
You do realise that introducing AI slop into a discussion without clearly labelling it is a big no-no, non?
And this:
It sounded like a socially awkward person trying to make jokes at a party.
Isn't going to win you many friends here.
As to the first point, in a discussion about the potential of AI to mimic humans, I think it's quite relevant to examine an AI bot's attempts to do that. I wasn't using her statements to prove a point about an outside issue, eg. googling "Was the French Revolution a good thing?" and then posting the AI results, which I assume is the sorta thing the ban on AI slop is meant to prevent.
The problem wasn’t citing the example. The problem was, as @pease said, citing it “without clearly labeling it.” Yes, it’s certainly relevant to cite an AI bot, but it should be made clear that’s what you’re doing. I assumed Tilly Norwood referred to a real person, not to a manifestation of AI.
You do realise that introducing AI slop into a discussion without clearly labelling it is a big no-no, non?
And this:
It sounded like a socially awkward person trying to make jokes at a party.
Isn't going to win you many friends here.
As to the first point, in a discussion about the potential of AI to mimic humans, I think it's quite relevant to examine an AI bot's attempts to do that. I wasn't using her statements to prove a point about an outside issue, eg. googling "Was the French Revolution a good thing?" and then posting the AI results, which I assume is the sorta thing the ban on AI slop is meant to prevent.
The problem wasn’t citing the example. The problem was, as @pease said, citing it “without clearly labeling it.” Yes, it’s certainly relevant to cite an AI bot, but it should be made clear that’s what you’re doing. I assumed Tilly Norwood referred to a real person, not to a manifestation of AI.
Well, I will say that I was kind of assuming that a) the artificial nature of Tilly Norwood was made clear in my initial post about it, eg. describing it as starting to speak Cantonese out of the blue for no reason, and quoting its self-description as "made of math and British wit", and that b) anyone who read my second post about Tilly Norwood would have read the first one. Plus, the overall context of this being a thread about AI.
But fair enough. From here on in, any reference to an AI bot with superficially human qualities will include clarification that it is is a bot.
I'd be grateful for that too. I totally missed her/its bot nature--if I noticed anything a bit odd about the description, I put it down to me having missed something about the actress, not to it being non-human.
I'd be grateful for that too. I totally missed her/its bot nature--if I noticed anything a bit odd about the description, I put it down to me having missed something about the actress, not to it being non-human.
I think the oddest thing about my posts, from the POV of someone who didn't know I was talking about a bot, would be "Why did Stetson come onto the AI thread and post something about an actor speaking Chinese and commenting on DiCaprio's personal life and film career?", since none of that has anything to do with AI.
That said, I myself have on occasion misinterpreted writing in such a way as to render it nonsensical in its context, without really giving it a second glance, so that's something that certainly can happen.
As to what pronouns to use for Ms. Norwood, I actually did consider "it", but I thought that would have been a passive-aggressive way to make a point that I was otherwise trying to make directly. Furthermore, we would use "she" and "her" in a sentence like "In that cartoon, Minnie Mouse gets mad when she sees Pluto running off with her hat", without anyone thinking it's an attempt to validate Minnie Mouse's existence as a real person.
A clanker is even less a real person than is a fictional character, who is at least a product of human thought and creativity. More importantly we all know Minnie is fictional, so we're not being conned into treating her like a person.
Indeed. By a similar token, I would say HAL's pronoun is also "he". As would be Max Headroom's.
But within the internal universe of 2001, HAL, prior to encountering the monolith, has no more consciousness than Tilly Norwood does in our world. So the characters who refer to it as male are making the same mistake as we supposedly make if we call Tilly Norwood "she".
Indeed. By a similar token, I would say HAL's pronoun is also "he". As would be Max Headroom's.
But within the internal universe of 2001, HAL, prior to encountering the monolith, has no more consciousness than Tilly Norwood does in our world. So the characters who refer to it as male are making the same mistake as we supposedly make if we call Tilly Norwood "she".
Quite a number of people refer to their cars, which are machines without any kind of semblance of cognition, as "he" or "she".
HAL 9000 was designed to have a self-aware consciousness. His personhood did not derive from meeting the monolith. The computer software known as Tilly Norwood is not self-aware in the same sense.
Indeed. By a similar token, I would say HAL's pronoun is also "he". As would be Max Headroom's.
But within the internal universe of 2001, HAL, prior to encountering the monolith, has no more consciousness than Tilly Norwood does in our world. So the characters who refer to it as male are making the same mistake as we supposedly make if we call Tilly Norwood "she".
Quite a number of people refer to their cars, which are machines without any kind of semblance of cognition, as "he" or "she".
HAL 9000 was designed to have a self-aware consciousness. His personhood did not derive from meeting the monolith. The computer software known as Tilly Norwood is not self-aware in the same sense.
I have always assumed that as the ship approached(or otherwise interacted with) the moon of Jupiter, HAL made or was in the process of making, the same leap into consciousness that the apes had made at the dawn of man, and hence at that point, and only at that point, he took up the human habit of killing.
Or was he self-conscious from the start, and the monolith's main point in the narrative was to give humans the opportunity to rise to the level of space-babyhood, and HAL tried to use his inherently existing human-like faculties to stop that?
(I've only seen that movie twice, and only the second time with a pre-existing understanding of the story. I know what the general theme and point is, but will admit the details about what happens when might be a little rusty.)
Refreshing my knowledge of 2001, it seems my recollection of HAL's motivations was incorrect, or perhaps more precisely, incomplete. He had been initially programmed to prevent the astronauts from discovering the monolith, so killed them so he would not have to continue lying to them.
I had never heard of Tilly Norwood, and didn’t really understand why the post was there. If asked I would have guessed it was pointing out that people can do odd stuff too, not just AI.
HAL 9000 was designed to have a self-aware consciousness. His personhood did not derive from meeting the monolith. The computer software known as Tilly Norwood is not self-aware in the same sense.
Yup. HAL was activated a number of years before the mission. My understanding is that he spent the intervening time in general education and then training for the mission. During this process, my view is that HAL would have learned to think of himself as being male.
In 2010, HAL 9000 has a twin, SAL 9000 (no prizes…). Also:
Dr. Chandra discovers that HAL's crisis was caused by a programming contradiction: he was constructed for "the accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment", yet his orders, directly from Dr. Heywood Floyd at the National Council on Astronautics, required him to keep the discovery of the Monolith TMA-1 a secret for reasons of national security.
Ships are always 'she' even in the merchant navy. Maybe originated in gendered languages?
The version I like is that ships are she because sailors are traditionally male and relying on their vessel to look after them and bring them safely home. Also, because sailors are traditionally superstitious, related to dedicating ships to goddesses, who provide protection at sea.
I had never heard of Tilly Norwood, and didn’t really understand why the post was there. If asked I would have guessed it was pointing out that people can do odd stuff too, not just AI.
That would be a plausible explanation for the post's appearance on the thread.
FWIW, I myself am NOT any authority on Tilly Norwood, and I'm not even sure if my previous awareness of the bot spans back more than a few weeks. My sum total of listening to it is the two or three interviews discussed on this thread, roughly about five minutes of screen time.
In case it's not obvious, I am so far quite underwhelmed by Tilly, though I suppose it might do a better job with dialogue actually written by a human.
The most greatest compliment I have read about Tilly Norwood is that the stories in which she features are technically competent. That’s very good for AI, but it also mentions a lack of innovation and imagination, as any literary critic can tell you.
And there’s a problem: literary criticism isn’t a walk in the park, and it might be difficult to use it, say in court, to demonstrate harmful or illegal AI,
The most greatest compliment I have read about Tilly Norwood is that the stories in which she features are technically competent. That’s very good for AI, but it also mentions a lack of innovation and imagination, as any literary critic can tell you.
That's basically my take on Tilly and assorted creations, from what I've seen. There's a basic level of "coolness" attained("Wow, it's amazing what they can do nowadays"), but it falls flat on the dialogue, timing etc. In the interview where Tilly is asked about the earlier snafu into Cantonese, it opens its reply with "Oh, that", and even that sounds forced and unnatural.
I actually felt embarrassed for the anchor when he laughed at the bot's joke about being made of "math and British wit", since it's a level of humour that probably would be considered pretty pedestrian if a human said it(eg. if Tilly's creator had said it about the bot). And the guy's goofy beam at hearing the joke was the thumbnail for the video, which made him look all the more ridiculous.
Long before Tilly Norwood, there was Max Headroom, “the [world's] first computer-generated TV presenter”, here being interviewed by Terry Wogan.
I think my greatest volume of direct exposure to Max Headroom was via a series of Coke ads he did during the 1980s Cola Wars. Which is probably another way of saying that he never really made a cultural impact, because I don't remember anyone else talking about where you could see him in his primary venue, so to speak. I gather he was a British creation, but he seemed American in his style and accent, and whatever sitcom he was fronting never seemed to have a very high profile.
Doonesbury caricatured Ronald Reagan as a Max Headroom-type persona for a while, but that always struck me as rather low-effort satire. Maybe a way for Gary Trudeau to skirt his self-imposed taboo against directly showing real-life politicians in his strips.
Doonesbury caricatured Ronald Reagan as a Max Headroom-type persona for a while, but that always struck me as rather low-effort satire. Maybe a way for Gary Trudeau to skirt his self-imposed taboo against directly showing real-life politicians in his strips.
Ron Headrest, he was called.
Given that Max Headroom was already a character used to deliver satiric commentary, re-appropriating him for the same purpose seemed rather redundant on Trudeau's part(*).
(*) Yes, you've got stuff like the various updates on A Christmal Carol, with the nasty Victorian Scrooge translated eg. into an 80s Manhattan yuppie, but I think the passage of time makes a difference there.
Long before Tilly Norwood, there was Max Headroom, “the [world's] first computer-generated TV presenter”, here being interviewed by Terry Wogan.
Except that Max Headroom wasn’t actually computer-generated. He was only billed as computer-generated.
Yeah, he's on the same list with HAL and the Tannhauser Gate guy, along with their legion of imitators.
I'm not sure if eg. Lost In Space ever got into the issue of whether Robbie The Robot had consciousness. I tend to think of that topic as entering pop-culture with 2001.
I'd be grateful for that too. I totally missed her/its bot nature--if I noticed anything a bit odd about the description, I put it down to me having missed something about the actress, not to it being non-human.
I think the oddest thing about my posts, from the POV of someone who didn't know I was talking about a bot, would be "Why did Stetson come onto the AI thread and post something about an actor speaking Chinese and commenting on DiCaprio's personal life and film career?", since none of that has anything to do with AI.
That said, I myself have on occasion misinterpreted writing in such a way as to render it nonsensical in its context, without really giving it a second glance, so that's something that certainly can happen.
Well, it's not unknown on the Ship for someone to get the wrong thread, or even on the right one, to go off on a tangent. And I wasn't aware that there WERE bot actresses. Not that that's surprising, given how rarely I watch anything in video format.
Except that Max Headroom wasn’t actually computer-generated. He was only billed as computer-generated.
As stetson points out, HAL wasn't actually a self-aware conscious AI.
And Max Headroom was a satirical figure, who existed both as an investigative reporter in a dystopian cyberpunk future and as a current-day TV presenter of a music video show. (He was a British TV creation, played by an American-Canadian actor, that was subsequently picked up by American broadcasters.)
His origin-story reminds me of Robocop (if Robocop had been an investigative reporter), which didn't have anything at all to do with the 3 series he then appeared in for Channel 4 and Cinemax, but is the story that he returned to on ABC.
Back on Tilly Norwood, a particular feature of Max Headroom was his speech glitching, in order to make him seem more artificial. And watching that interview with Piers Morgan and Tom Conti, it seemed to me that Tilly Norwood is a long way from being an actor, and much more like an AI-assisted puppet. Given Eline Van der Velden's background, it seems quite possible that Tilly Norwood was conceived as a satirical project.
From the respective wikipedia pages, the premise for the original Max Headroom TV movie:
The story depicts a near-future where corrupt corporations control much of the world and manipulate the public for the sake of ratings and wealth.
and spin-off TV series:
In the future, an oligarchy of television networks rules the world. Even the government functions primarily as a puppet of the network executives, serving mainly to pass laws—such as banning "off" switches on televisions—that protect and consolidate the networks' power. Television technology has advanced to the point that viewers' physical movements and thoughts can be monitored through their television sets.
Who'd have thought to shrink the screens and make them portable, and to employ psychologists to create an experience that people didn't want to switch off from?
Comments
The term of an apprenticeship indenture was (originally) normally seven years and was a legally binding obligation.
Latterly I think they've ended up dropping even those, or using the money to fund - say - execs who want to do a business degree or MBA.
It looks like this https://www.theyard.info/men/indenture.asp
Concern seems to be growing.
Andrew Bailey, Governor of the Bank of England, and also Chairman of the international Financial Stability Board, expressed some very serious concerns here.
Also this
AI has been oversold and so far has underdelivered.
The immediate risks to the global economy in general and job markets in particular would appear to be destabilisation alarm, increasing lack of confidence and a consequential slump. Not the news I expected when I started this thread.
On the other point I’m doing some more research into the fascinating question of whether AI will eventually develop some kind of self awareness. There’s been much more written about this possibility than I knew. Might be worth a separate thread.
What I mean by this is that in the main people are using it to make their lives easier - you get it to write an essay, you have it check job applications, write computer code and so on. These are all functions that the AI chatbots do very quickly and very badly.
Where I think there is in value is where the AI/LLM makes things more difficult, and humans can use that difficulty to leverage themselves into new things. This is an iterative process, a conversation with a fairly intelligent and well-informed but flawed partner who you need to correct.
So for example perhaps a novice painter or potter or author could engage with an AI chatbot to improve self-criticism of their work so they can improve next time.
My view is that these kinds of activities are likely to be a miniscule part of the data-centre mushroom growth so when the economic bubble eventually bursts, they will likely remain.
The last report from the Bank of International Settlements also highlighted this risk:
https://www.bis.org/publications/aer-2026
There's a podcast from Foreign Policy magazine by the economic historian Adam Tooze that covers some of the issues mentioned:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QevC7OrdJP8
Magic beans, anyone?
For the whole of my professional life, computer science has been promising general artificial intelligence in 'a few years.' The only tangible progress I have noticed is that computers are consuming more and more of the Earth's (finite) resources. For every breakthrough in medical science there are a million people using it to produce spoof videos, or plagiarise someone else's creative work.
And what Lambchopped said.
One might think that senior academics might be more intelligent about trusting their work to malfunctioning machines that no human can verify, but apparently not.
I thought senior academics were notorious for tending to being blithely ignorant of everything outside their narrow field of study and with a confidence that matches their level of ignorance. Hence Richard Dawkins.
It's something this is being discussed in the context of academic "vibe coding" and quality assurance.
See https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3786583.3786866
Not that I was in any way offended by Norwood speaking Chinese, but I don't think wit, British or otherwise, was really the pertinent concept there(maybe something like cosmopolitanism). It sounded like her learning apparatus had just picked up the tendency of some British people to cite their supposed national sense of humour when trying to cover up conversational fuck-ups.
It sounded like a socially awkward person trying to make jokes at a party.
And this: Isn't going to win you many friends here.
The second point I agree with. The first no. Tilly Norwood is known. She is the AI actor so by saying it was her you are being warned it is AI.
Seems wise to me.
If you've heard of it. I'm not particularly keen on being forced into RPing that a clanker is 'she'.
As far as I'm concerned, the correct pronoun for "Tilly Norwood" is "it".
The title of this thread seems curiously prescient.
Ok I guess I thought she or it was more well known than she is. You live and learn
As to the first point, in a discussion about the potential of AI to mimic humans, I think it's quite relevant to examine an AI bot's attempts to do that. I wasn't using her statements to prove a point about an outside issue, eg. googling "Was the French Revolution a good thing?" and then posting the AI results, which I assume is the sorta thing the ban on AI slop is meant to prevent.
As to the second, my point was not to draw a connection between socially awkward people and misogyny(boo hoo those poor incel dudes, just too shy to talk to women), but socially awkward people and non-sequitorial statements generally; any out-of-place joke on whatever topic would have worked for my case. If I was insensitive as to the problematic content of what she said, I apologize.
As to what pronouns to use for Ms. Norwood, I actually did consider "it", but I thought that would have been a passive-aggressive way to make a point that I was otherwise trying to make directly. Furthermore, we would use "she" and "her" in a sentence like "In that cartoon, Minnie Mouse gets mad when she sees Pluto running off with her hat", without anyone thinking it's an attempt to validate Minnie Mouse's existence as a real person.
Well, I will say that I was kind of assuming that a) the artificial nature of Tilly Norwood was made clear in my initial post about it, eg. describing it as starting to speak Cantonese out of the blue for no reason, and quoting its self-description as "made of math and British wit", and that b) anyone who read my second post about Tilly Norwood would have read the first one. Plus, the overall context of this being a thread about AI.
But fair enough. From here on in, any reference to an AI bot with superficially human qualities will include clarification that it is is a bot.
I think the oddest thing about my posts, from the POV of someone who didn't know I was talking about a bot, would be "Why did Stetson come onto the AI thread and post something about an actor speaking Chinese and commenting on DiCaprio's personal life and film career?", since none of that has anything to do with AI.
That said, I myself have on occasion misinterpreted writing in such a way as to render it nonsensical in its context, without really giving it a second glance, so that's something that certainly can happen.
A clanker is even less a real person than is a fictional character, who is at least a product of human thought and creativity. More importantly we all know Minnie is fictional, so we're not being conned into treating her like a person.
But within the internal universe of 2001, HAL, prior to encountering the monolith, has no more consciousness than Tilly Norwood does in our world. So the characters who refer to it as male are making the same mistake as we supposedly make if we call Tilly Norwood "she".
Quite a number of people refer to their cars, which are machines without any kind of semblance of cognition, as "he" or "she".
HAL 9000 was designed to have a self-aware consciousness. His personhood did not derive from meeting the monolith. The computer software known as Tilly Norwood is not self-aware in the same sense.
I have always assumed that as the ship approached(or otherwise interacted with) the moon of Jupiter, HAL made or was in the process of making, the same leap into consciousness that the apes had made at the dawn of man, and hence at that point, and only at that point, he took up the human habit of killing.
Or was he self-conscious from the start, and the monolith's main point in the narrative was to give humans the opportunity to rise to the level of space-babyhood, and HAL tried to use his inherently existing human-like faculties to stop that?
(I've only seen that movie twice, and only the second time with a pre-existing understanding of the story. I know what the general theme and point is, but will admit the details about what happens when might be a little rusty.)
They give them names too. My brother gives his spirit level a name!
Ships are always 'she' even in the merchant navy. Maybe originated in gendered languages?
In 2010, HAL 9000 has a twin, SAL 9000 (no prizes…). Also:
That would be a plausible explanation for the post's appearance on the thread.
FWIW, I myself am NOT any authority on Tilly Norwood, and I'm not even sure if my previous awareness of the bot spans back more than a few weeks. My sum total of listening to it is the two or three interviews discussed on this thread, roughly about five minutes of screen time.
In case it's not obvious, I am so far quite underwhelmed by Tilly, though I suppose it might do a better job with dialogue actually written by a human.
And there’s a problem: literary criticism isn’t a walk in the park, and it might be difficult to use it, say in court, to demonstrate harmful or illegal AI,
That's basically my take on Tilly and assorted creations, from what I've seen. There's a basic level of "coolness" attained("Wow, it's amazing what they can do nowadays"), but it falls flat on the dialogue, timing etc. In the interview where Tilly is asked about the earlier snafu into Cantonese, it opens its reply with "Oh, that", and even that sounds forced and unnatural.
I actually felt embarrassed for the anchor when he laughed at the bot's joke about being made of "math and British wit", since it's a level of humour that probably would be considered pretty pedestrian if a human said it(eg. if Tilly's creator had said it about the bot). And the guy's goofy beam at hearing the joke was the thumbnail for the video, which made him look all the more ridiculous.
I think my greatest volume of direct exposure to Max Headroom was via a series of Coke ads he did during the 1980s Cola Wars. Which is probably another way of saying that he never really made a cultural impact, because I don't remember anyone else talking about where you could see him in his primary venue, so to speak. I gather he was a British creation, but he seemed American in his style and accent, and whatever sitcom he was fronting never seemed to have a very high profile.
Doonesbury caricatured Ronald Reagan as a Max Headroom-type persona for a while, but that always struck me as rather low-effort satire. Maybe a way for Gary Trudeau to skirt his self-imposed taboo against directly showing real-life politicians in his strips.
Ron Headrest, he was called.
Given that Max Headroom was already a character used to deliver satiric commentary, re-appropriating him for the same purpose seemed rather redundant on Trudeau's part(*).
(*) Yes, you've got stuff like the various updates on A Christmal Carol, with the nasty Victorian Scrooge translated eg. into an 80s Manhattan yuppie, but I think the passage of time makes a difference there.
Yeah, he's on the same list with HAL and the Tannhauser Gate guy, along with their legion of imitators.
I'm not sure if eg. Lost In Space ever got into the issue of whether Robbie The Robot had consciousness. I tend to think of that topic as entering pop-culture with 2001.
Well, it's not unknown on the Ship for someone to get the wrong thread, or even on the right one, to go off on a tangent. And I wasn't aware that there WERE bot actresses. Not that that's surprising, given how rarely I watch anything in video format.
And Max Headroom was a satirical figure, who existed both as an investigative reporter in a dystopian cyberpunk future and as a current-day TV presenter of a music video show. (He was a British TV creation, played by an American-Canadian actor, that was subsequently picked up by American broadcasters.)
His origin-story reminds me of Robocop (if Robocop had been an investigative reporter), which didn't have anything at all to do with the 3 series he then appeared in for Channel 4 and Cinemax, but is the story that he returned to on ABC.
Back on Tilly Norwood, a particular feature of Max Headroom was his speech glitching, in order to make him seem more artificial. And watching that interview with Piers Morgan and Tom Conti, it seemed to me that Tilly Norwood is a long way from being an actor, and much more like an AI-assisted puppet. Given Eline Van der Velden's background, it seems quite possible that Tilly Norwood was conceived as a satirical project.
From the respective wikipedia pages, the premise for the original Max Headroom TV movie: and spin-off TV series: Who'd have thought to shrink the screens and make them portable, and to employ psychologists to create an experience that people didn't want to switch off from?