So this morning I woke to the news that Firefox would be adding a daily AI-powered crossword to its ever more cluttered content-rich new tab page. This is all well and good, but it also got me thinking about something. I love a good cryptic crossword, and… well, if there’s one form of crossword with which surely AI would struggle, it’s that most perverse and curiously human of puzzles, the cryptic crossword. I bet that none of the consumer LLMs could make any sort of fist of tackling a proper cryptic. Right? Well, it seems that I’m not the only one thinking about this—and it also turns out that perhaps I’m wrong. Barely a week ago, an employee at something called OreateAI wrote a blog post about how “for ‘cryptic’ puzzles common in the UK and the more devious US themes, Large Language Models (LLMs) such as Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o have recently demonstrated a surprising ability to reverse-engineer wordplay that stumped previous generations of software.”
We’ll see about that. I have no doubt that ChatGPT et al can figure out a basic anagram clue, but what about clues that rely on the most abstruse, evil-intentioned, confounding forms of wordplay? Surely these require a form of creative perversity that could only be quintessentially human?
