The Terminator was released in 1984. It remains a great action movie. Among the many things that made it great was its conception of an autonomous, artificially intelligent computer overlord, Skynet, that takes the initiative to exterminate human beings because they hindered its achievement of its goals. The Terminator, Skynet’s time traveling assassin, blended in with humans in order to kill a future leader of the human rebellion against Skynet. To achieve this goal, the terminator had to possess good language capabilities, and one iconic scene demonstrates how much better its grasp of language was compared with the “language models” driving chatbots like ChatGPT.
The perfect manifestation of The Terminator’s grasp of human interactions is in this classic scene in which it briefly ponders the response to the janitor’s question regarding the stench emanating from his room and elects the absolutely perfect response of “Fuck you, asshole.” The response is terse, appropriate for the context and achieves the purpose of warding off the nosy janitor, lest he discover that the robot was arming itself to the hilt.
The response is perfect, of course, because it was conceived by a human for a specific effect, and that fact illustrates the point perfectly: AI models cannot tailor responses for context or effect. The typical chat bot’s response might be “Oh, no sorry, sir. There is no dead cat here, but that is a keen observation on your part because there is an unusual smell in this apartment, but I assure you that it is not that of a dead cat, despite your clearly keen olfactory sense.”
Of course, many of us say “fuck you, asshole” or even “go fuck yourself” for comedic effect with those companions whose sensibilities are known to us. Though there are claims that AI systems will soon be able to gauge human emotions by studying facial expressions, it is hard to conceive that any AI system will be able to understand the context of an exchange keenly enough to elicit laughter with a carefully chosen insult. AI will never emulate Don Rickles, Richard Pryor or Triumph the Insult Dog Comic (aka, Robert Smigel) because AI is not human, and if it were human, it would be an immeasurably stupid one.
