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Anna Karenina, a Book Like Any Other
Don’t judge an AI by its cover
I opened my brand-new edition of Anna Karenina yesterday. To my dismay, I could only find some ink-scribbled symbols on the page. I turned a few more to see if this was a bad-taste joke or a serious mistake. Nothing. More weird symbols imprinted on the paper. I furiously closed the book and wrote the most damning review ever on Amazon: “Anna Karenina, a book like any other.”
When I told people the story today they somehow kept insisting Anna Karenina is a masterpiece. Tolstoy is a genius, the characters are complex, Anna’s arc is tragic, and so and so. But I have proof that all of this is nonsense. Because at the end of the day, what is Anna Karenina? Ink in paper. That’s all. A physical artifact of no particular significance, mechanically produced like the rest. A book like any other.
This ridiculous take is what I hear when people say that “AI is just linear algebra” or some of the other reductionist analogies they recite. Unfortunately, they’re late. This cheap mic-drop was refuted as a rhetorical fallacy long ago by the late philosopher Daniel Dennett. A deepity, as he called it, is a statement that has two interpretations, one of them trivially true but uninformative and the other profound but wrong or meaningless.
