AI about “Human circle”, reincarnation, favorite food (and secrets).

Nabokov’s Questionnaire, commented and annotated

Merzmensch
Merzazine
Published in
17 min readJul 19, 2020

--

In his letters to his eternal love Véra, Nabokov sent ironical sketches, riddles, games. One of these was “Questionnaire for the immodest and curious”, his version of the famous Proust Questionnaire (which became a popular salon and parlor game of the late 19th century).

It was a list of questions about personality, most of them seemingly without any agenda. Just for getting to know you better. And probably for yourself to sort your thoughts and individual features of life.

After my eye-opening dialogue with AI about God and the Reality, I was inspired to try out something else. Something personal, without any meta-level. GPT-3 is a fantastic intelligent model. It has profound knowledge of practically everything — philosophical essays, world literature, recipes, game walkthroughs. You can generate texts, or you can speak with it.

Does AI have a personality?

Every time you will encounter another “incarnation” of this Noosphere: learning with every your entry it determines its own “personality” (and probably soon I can get rid of quotation marks).

This can be compared with us humans: even if you get learned in school about thousands of things, you are still quite different persons.

Here is what I’ve got from one session with GPT-3. You will find also my notes, where we can learn more about GPT-3, AI, and humanity itself.

Introduction

In which I take over the “Human” part. “AI” is written by GPT-3…

The following is a conversation with an AI assistant. The assistant is helpful, creative, clever, and very friendly.Human: Hello, who are you?
AI: I am an AI created by OpenAI. How can I help you today?
Human: Have you heard about Nabokov?
AI: A Russian author whose novels are stylistically complex and linguistically playful.
Human: Yes, exactly. Have you heard about his “questionnaire for the immodest and curious”?
AI: Yes, and I know that it’s the name of a poem he wrote for the New Yorker in 1941.
Human: Well, actually it was a questionnaire developed by…

--

--

Merzmensch
Merzazine

Futurist. AI-driven Dadaist. Living in Germany, loving Japan, AI, mysteries, books, and stuff.