Making Merry: How I learned to stop worrying and have fun with AI

NEW YORK: This spring, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, advertised a new model of ChatGPT by showcasing its ability to write fiction. Altman had prompted the bot to write a story about grief, in the style of “metafiction” (a self-reflexive genre in which the narrator weaves personal details into the story).

It duly generated a winding tale that compares grieving a dead loved one to the loss function, technical jargon for a bit of the math that makes modern artificial intelligence systems work. Altman crowed about the passage, implying that such a complex genre, one associated with pretentious literary types, could be written only by a really intelligent agent.

I’m a professor of literature, and I think the story is a solid illustration of the genre. I don’t know that it’s great literature, or that ChatGPT is about to take over literary publishing. I certainly don’t think it proves that ChatGPT is intelligent; it just shows that it is an expert imitator of style.

More broadly, I think we’re having the wrong debates about AI altogether. In a recent article for The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper called AI a “scam,” an animatronic simulation of intelligence.

This claim went against not just Altman, but also many tech journalists and data wonks who think Silicon Valley’s narrative that we are close to real machine intelligence is plausible. The linguist Emily Bender and the sociologist Alex Hanna think that AI is a “con,” and Dr. Bender describes it as a set of tricks that produces “synthetic text” rather than human meaning.

These critiques do little to explain AI’s popularity. They miss the fact that humans love to play games with language, not just use it to test intelligence. What Altman inadvertently showed us is that what is really driving the hype and widespread use of large language models like ChatGPT is that they are fun. AI is a form of entertainment.

OpenAI seems to understand this. ChatGPT was the (then) fastest-ever platform to gain 100 million users, a feat it pulled off in just two months. The company just teamed up with Mattel, which could result in a Barbie you can have a conversation with.

The endless back-and-forth about “intelligence” seems abstract compared to the reality that hundreds of millions of people are using these systems to write emails, simulate tutors and even fall in love with their chat-partner avatars. The scholar Neil Postman’s idea about the rise of television — that we were “amusing ourselves to death” with the medium — could extend to AI. You can’t become obsessed with something that isn’t amusing in the first place. No one ever fell in love with a calculator.

There’s a name for being fooled into thinking you’re dealing with an intelligent being when you’re not: the Eliza effect. The name comes from the first-ever chatbot, built by computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966 and named for George Bernard Shaw’s character Eliza Doolittle. Weizenbaum thought of his program as a simple trick and was horrified when his secretary, testing it, asked him to leave the room because her conversation with the chatbot had become too intimate.

Even the most serious face of AI — its ability to pass tests, solve difficult logic problems and math problems, and hit benchmarks — can also be viewed as a form of entertainment: puzzles. Humans have always used cognitive challenges as a form of fun, and the history of AI is filled with these types of games, such as chess and Go. We ought to think about AI as an entertainment-first system, before anything else.

The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/16/opinion/ai-entertainment-chatgpt.html