The 11-year-old boy bites his lip. His hands are clammy with sweat. Finally, he opens his mouth. Out spills the question that’s rattled around in his head for a week.
“What’s a flame?”
His teacher raises her eyebrows and stares down at him over her thick glasses. In this pause, his eyes grow even wider with curiosity.
“It’s oxidation.”
The response pops the bubble of excitement in his chest. This is the person he respected for her endless knowledge — for knowing why the sky is blue and how mountains are formed. How could she answer the mystery of fire with another mystery?
That boy was Alan Alda, the American actor, and it took him more than 65 years to get the answer that he wanted.
After an Emmy-winning, 11-season run on M*A*S*H, Alda started hosting the show Scientific American Frontiers in the 1990s. As he interviewed hundreds of scientists, he became the boy in the classroom again. Except this time, he bombarded the experts with questions until they explained things in a way that he could understand.
“The real person behind the scientist in the white lab coat could emerge,” he wrote later. “Suddenly, both young people and adults could see that scientists were like them, with a natural way of speaking and even a sense of humor.”
These conversations convinced him that scientists needed to be good communicators, and in 2009, he helped found the Center for Communicating Science at Stony Brook University in New York, built around an improv-heavy curriculum. Then, in 2012, Alda announced the Flame Challenge, proof that the television show and school had been an elaborate ruse to avenge his curious younger self.
Six thousand 11-year-olds chose the best explanation of a candle’s glow: a video that includes a naked man being tortured by fire, LEGO atoms boxing, and cupcakes. You can watch it if your interest has been sparked.
I tell you this story today because I feel that the tech industry might benefit from being subjected to a similar trial. How do we know whether to trust tales about agents building their own civilizations? Would someone please explain how AI is going to kill all of us? A news report about the Flame Challenge featured Neil deGrasse Tyson, who has literally made it his career to explain stuff like stars and galaxies to the public. Who is the Neil deGrasse Tyson of tech?
It’s also not just the big AI companies. A founder reached out to me this week for a phone call. He wanted my take on a product that (I think??) had to do with being able to license my content to AI companies and preserve my authorship (again, I think?). I took one look at the website and told him I couldn’t speak to him until he got further along: it was gobbledygook, all cryptographic attestation and procurement-grade deployment. If your own ideal customer can’t understand what you’re selling, you need to go back to the drawing board.
Maybe the real test for anything trying to explain the future to the rest of us is whether or not it would withstand the Flame Challenge. Or whether it leaves your audience standing like Alda did all those decades ago, confused by another mystery.
In the debate over AI and writing, both sides love to reach for the same analogy: the camera’s impact on art. Two heavyweights entered the fray on that very question in the past two weeks.
This month, Yellowface author R.F. Kuang argued that the camera “expanded creative options” by giving artists a new way to express their perspective and human experience, and that AI doesn’t pass that test.
Good artistic developments just keep adding to the toolbox of the ways you can do that, but AI-created art bypasses that entirely. You never even ask the question: ‘What am I observing? How do I feel about this? What do I want to put on the page?’
Tech book publisher Tim O’Reilly disagrees. AI, he argues, is a medium, like painting or sculpture. Once writers get better with it, we’ll really see its true power.
If AI is a medium, the idea that you can’t write with it will someday seem as odd as the idea that you can’t make a good portrait or landscape with a camera, only with paint or pen and ink.
If you’d like to debate questions like these, join me on Monday for a meetup of writers in London as part of the Founder-Writer Collective with Alys Key.