Want to see an example of artificial intelligence and its misunderstanding? Look no further than auto-correction. Most of the time the correction is wrong. And with a faster phone, the correction process tries to recorrect as I’m typing in the word I wanted. The suggestion is wrong. Not dumb, but wrong. Not what I was going for.
The next right word is not a formula for creativity. Not human creativity, anyway.
Even in my spell-checking software, Grammarly, there is illumination of the struggle. Think of it this way. AI is great at summarizing any data you throw at it. So is the human mind. The difference is that one is math only. One is soul-driven. If I could imagine my own mind as a massive database of all my hopes, reflections, and dreams. My past hurts, joys of life. That’s what makes me human. My mind has no linear mathematical predictive algorithm.
As grammary suggests grammar I am constantly fighting to remove or add commas. Mostly, they are unnecessary. Where I am going, a comma is a speed bump. I have a story to weave, a biographical history to unfurl before your very eyes. AI has math. Yes, the database of its knowledge is vast and contains most of the published writing on Earth, the machine learning has no emotional or spiritual connection to the words, the sentence, the idea I am hoping to translate through words directly into your mind. I want to speak with you. In you. Your mind is where I am whispering when you read my writing. That’s a trip.
Here we are. Together for a short journey. AI is of no help. Beaudelair is no guide into sadness or madness. Miller and Nin only trail maps for spiritual and emotional fusion. Together for a bit, they became more than their individual selves. The craved connection and the intellectual stimulation of bonding a man and woman in a shared task. Love fully. Express honestly. Share widely.
Today, we’re losing our ability to focus attention for more than a few seconds. We want to flit to our phone, see if we got a response to our text. Scroll a few Tiks. Apply for a few more jobs. Even watching an amazing music video for more than 45 seconds is a chore. See how quickly you get distracted, think you should/could be doing something else, something more productive. But is all life just productivity? Am I a slave to my own creative ambition? Of course, that’s how writers and artists are born. We strive to communicate something about our inner life. Where’s the inner life of a large language model?
Underneath our rush to create thinking machines, we are obscuring their lack of comprehension. A GPT doesn’t understand your prompt. It simply does some math. Here’s the input number. An equation of the request. Here’s the perfectly formed and confident answer that is 100% wrong.
Grammarly cannot write. It wants to nullify my human poetry. Give me “artificial intelligence’s next right word.” But what is right? How does a machine predict the right words? It has only been given a fraction of the story. It can’t feel anything. The death of a mother can be reduced to math, yet, it’s easy to understand that that reduction lacks human understanding. AI has no concept of the world, life, living. There is zero emotional intensity or comprehension of sadness.
AI can reference the great depressive poets, writers, and artists of the world and not get any closer to fathoming sadness. Or the color blue. How the two concepts, color and emotion, are related. Contextual human information is absent. It’s not a randomizer we need to humanize AI writing. It’s not possible for AI to feel or foster an educated opinion. Life has no opinion. Evolution is cold and inhuman. We survive anyway.
Push push push for your own human experience. Drop the phone in the toilet, for real this time. Turn off the chat, the tv, the noise of your life. Listen for your voice.
Listen.
AI will never be able to write Lady Chatterly, in a million years, with all the quantum computing power on the planet. It can write and produce the next Marvel Universe movie. It won’t be good. It will be what humans have come to expect from mediocre entertainment. In life there are Tarantinos and Lynches, and then everyone else. Even if they are not to your taste, their visceral take on life and what we are all longing for, the human condition, is irreplaceable.
The human mind is vast. Even before you add in the collective unconscious of Jung, or god, or any of the major religions. I am my own religion. I study my human trail. My struggle to climb the Seven Story Mountain. Beside me the spelling savaant suggests fixes. The grammar intelligence attempts to dumb my writing down. To give us more Joel Olsteens. Summarize, say nothing new, collect royalties. There’s a lot of false entertainment and religion today. They have grown too close.
God is not here to entertain us. That’s up to us as individuals. It wasn’t Original Sin we were born into, it’s Original Blessing. Our path to god, god-consciousness, Jesus, is through our human contemplation. Preachers can point us in their known direction, but god is beyond our comprehension. God is beyond.
If we let go of an external god, we have to focus on our own internal god. The god within. The paradise on Earth. Born again and again. Each day we birth ourselves into life. Eyelids flutter open. Coffee jolts our electrical system. What’s next is up to us.
I promise you, AI is not going to wake up.
*image: Grammarly tries to dumb down my writing with an awful suggestion
