"A friend of mine who is a computer scientist describes artificial intelligence as a Rorschach test. Invented by the psychologist Hermann Rorschach in the early 20th century, the famous test involves showing subjects a series of ink blots and asking them to describe what they see. The test is a psychoanalytic technique to help determine a psychological profile of the patient."
"When my friend calls AI a Rorschach test, he means that what we see in AI says more about us than it does about the AI. I have seen this phenomenon firsthand. I recently participated in a workshop aimed at developing ethical guidelines for research using AI. The workshop participants came from a wide variety of backgrounds: higher ed, K-12 education, data science, mathematics, public policy, and industry."
"Surprisingly, the people who had the most familiarity with AI differed wildly in their judgments of its capabilities. Some of them were optimistic -they claimed that AI was already revolutionizing scientific research or business. Some of them were deeply pessimistic, claiming that AI's hallucination problem was endemic, that it was overhyped, and that whatever practical uses it had would be limited ones."
People often interpret AI through personal feelings, causing assessments that reflect observers more than the technology. A Rorschach-test analogy shows individual perceptions projecting onto AI. Workshop participants with diverse backgrounds and varying familiarity expressed widely different judgments of AI capabilities. Some experts described AI as already transforming scientific research or business, while others emphasized endemic hallucinations, overhype, and limited practical utility. Historical parallels with debates about the microscope illustrate longstanding patterns of technology appraisal shaped by attitudes rather than purely objective measures. Emotional stance therefore influences evaluations of emerging technologies.
Read at Psychology Today
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]