Building Bespoke Bridges
Can large language models help us connect to specific strangers?
Recently, I did a poor job of setting the stage for a decision-forcing case, a classroom exercise in which present-day people take on the role of a real person who, at some time in the past, found himself faced with an especially challenging problem. In particular, I failed to make allowance for the absence of connections between things already familiar to the participants - young men who had spent most, if not all, of their lives in the US state of Virginia - and the world in which the events in question had taken place in in 1762, in territory of what, in those days, belonged to the duchy of Hanover.
Happily, I quickly hit upon a trick that helped the players build bridges between their own experience and a problem faced by a person from a clime and time that differed greatly from their own. ‘Is anyone here from Hanover County?’, I asked.
A hand shot up. ‘Do you know where the name of Hanover County came from?’
‘It’s a place in Germany, I think.’
‘How about Brunswick County?’
Another arm for the sky.
‘Lunenburg?’
This time, there were no takers.
‘Strange to say, “Brunswick-Lunenburg” was another name for “Hanover”.
‘So, how did this one place in Germany lend its names to so many places in Virginia?’
Crickets.
‘Let me ask the question in a somewhat different way. Who ruled Virginia when these counties got their names?’
‘King George?’
‘That’s right. To be precise, a lot of counties in Virginia were formed in colonial times, when the United Kingdom was ruled by kings - all named George - of the House of Hanover. In fact, while George I, George II, and George III reigned over Britain’s American possessions, they also served as dukes of Hanover.’
‘This meant that, when a young whippersnapper named George Washington starts a war with the French here in America, Hanover, which shares a long border with France, gets pulled into the conflict.’
‘By the way, is anyone here from Prince William County?’
‘I am, Sir’.
‘That county takes its name from the Prince William, who commanded an army formed to defend Hanover from the French in 1757. And that is where our story begins.’
As happens so often these days, this experience led to thoughts of large language models. More specifically, I started to wonder if a peripatetic presenter, whether educator, entertainer, or some combination of the two, might be able to use an artificial intelligence program to suggest the sort of commonalities that would help him build bridges to his audience.
With this in mind, I presented the freebie incarnation of ChatGPT with the task of building bridges between my decision game and the geographical background of the players. Marvelous to say, it returned a solution that resembled the one that I had used.
As I expected, the Dollar Store version of the large language model made a few mistakes. For example, it mistook the principality of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel for the duchy of Brunswick-Lunenberg. (To be fair, isn’t that something that we have all done at some point in our lives?) On the whole, however, the silicon brain did a fair job of replicating the work of Mrs. Muros’ good-looking husband.
With that in mind, I asked the Mother of all Bots to help a big-city comedian connect to an audience in small-town America. (My query mentioned particular places. However, rather than changing the names to protect the innocent, I have decided to avoid specifics.)
To its credit, ChatGPT compared my question to previous queries, declared me an imposter, and cancelled the conversation. (This reminded me that, even though I had declined to sign in, the artificial intelligence program had been keeping track of me.)
Once I had convinced the program of my bonafides, I posed my query in a way that accorded with the things that I thought it knew about me. For my trouble, the Casper Milquetoast of the Ghost in the Machine Club returned information of a highly generic, non-committal, less-than-concrete kind.
To put things another way, rather than bothering (and bothering with) a large language model, the stand-up comic new to the ‘joy that the bluebird brings’ would be better off watching Dry Bar Comedy for a few minutes and reading Wikipedia articles about the towns surrounding the venue.
