Putting together some thoughts for a piece I was writing, I asked ChatGPT, "What is it called when you think of something and then start seeing examples of it everywhere?"
To which it replied:
To which it replied:
What you're describing is called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, also known as the frequency illusion.
"Um, what?" was my first thought. Because the name was so familiar. I could have sworn it was a German terrorist group, even though I hadn't thought of them in years (decades?). Perhaps a bit of background is in order.
Back in my undergrad days, I wrote several papers on the subject of international terrorism as part of my political science course work. One of the groups included in some of those papers was the Red Army Faction (RAF), also known as the Baader-Meinhof Group. (Did I mention my undergrad days were smack dab in the middle of the '80s?) As I said, I hadn't thought of them for many years, probably could not have come up with the name of the group if you'd asked me. So, of course, I asked ChatGPT about it.
You're absolutely right! The term "Baader-Meinhof phenomenon" indeed gets its name from the Baader-Meinhof Group, also known as the Red Army Faction (RAF), which was a German far-left terrorist group active during the 1970s and 1980s. The odd connection comes from a casual mention in an online forum, where someone first heard about the Baader-Meinhof Group and then kept hearing about it repeatedly in a short span of time. This gave rise to the name for the phenomenon, despite it having nothing to do with the group itself.
Kind of like how this letter has nothing to do with what led me down that rabbit hole ;)
Like many others, I am still finding my way with genAI, trying to figure out how I can use it as an aid (an aide?), an assistant, to help me focus on the things that add value to my work. The "discussion" I shared above is an example of how I have started using ChatGPT as my search engine of choice for queries based on established knowledge (as opposed to time relevant news type of things).
I've also found genAI tools to be very useful as a partner in pair programming. Sometimes I let it drive while I navigate, sometimes the other way around. Though I doubt any of the tools have learned anything new from me, they have been a good teacher for me to learn from. (I am, at best, a hobbyist when it comes to code, as I spend most of my time at the "figure out what the user needs and help the developers understand those needs so they can build something awesome.")
At the same time, I am cognizant of the larger impacts - realized and potential - of the artificial intelligence boom. Or, as Yuval Noah Harari calls it in his latest book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, "alien intelligence". From the environmental impact of the massive computational requirements to the impact on society as a whole, there is a lot to consider.
Until next time,
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