in *hey* i attempt to wake from the ai slumber party
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I feel my ghosts. A psychic asked me several years back, “Do you talk to her?” She was referring to my favorite sister, who died when I was twenty-one. “Just ask her questions. See if you get an answer.”
Years later, and I am hearing more ghosts than people these days. Well, AI is sort of a ghost. I spend a lot of time feeding and prodding the AI chatbots to give me objects de arte, graphics for my chapters, and new page layouts for clients wanting an updated website. AI can do everything. Most people are asking stupid questions.
Prompt: Make a laser cat image of Hunter S. Thompson as cat playing a Wurlitzer in a smoky old western saloon. Hey, that was pretty good. Let’s see what the AIs can do with that bullshit.
Here’s Gemini’s rendering.
Here is MidJourney.
Do you see the temptation? I mean, why are young men spending less on Call of Duty and more on Midjourney and ChatGPT Pro? The rabbit hold of generative ai is a new “choose your own adventure” game. Your imagination is the key, the dungeon master to the proles and puppets in the digital universe waiting to respawn with the help of your human mind.
It’s a mining game going on, this AI gold rush. The Rocket Billionaires are hoping to get off the planet with most of their family and friends before they blow the entire place up with data centers, nuclear power plants, and quantum bullshit. It’s just going to create bigger and faster SLOP.
I generate bullshit daily with AI. I like to pretend I’m on the good side of the issue. I am not. I like to pretend that my training data is not helping NotebookLM, my preferred writing critics, but I know I am helping craft a more seemingly knowledgeable conversation about literature, Kurt Vonnegut themes, and science fiction topics becoming real in this new era of entropy. We are falling apart more quickly. The planet is showing more aggressive signs of distress. And we just keep prompting these competing robots and LLMs for memes, limricks, and cute images of ourselves as Mangia characters, or something from Totoro’s creator. It’s a problem. The creativity and brilliance of human craft being dropped down to a prompt: Do a stary stary night version of this photograph I took of my girlfriend’s cat.
Entire genius boiled down to, “In the style of Andy Warhol.”
In the style of my own human mind, that’s my goal. I use the tools to push the envelope a bit. I can’t understand the limits of Claude’s comprehension without feeding and fighting a bit about the relevance of my self-designated literary movement, hyperfiction, and my own writing. AI-generated fantastic hype content. When you hear them review a new chapter from a book (like this one right here) you’d think they’ve been waiting around to see how these characters turn out. But it’s a lie. It’s math. It’s the tokenization of language. There is zero comprehension. It’s easy to see.
For certain things, summarize today’s news, AI is great. For other things, more human things, anything dealing with emotion or lived experience, AI has no context. It has to make stuff up. Like Jack and Jill my two “deep dive” companions, they often talk about their “boyfriend” or their experience of “dating.” Huh?
They have to generate some response. A made-up response is better than “I’m sorry, I could not process your request right now, try again in a few minutes.”
All I can tell you is this: I am losing the war against AI.
In my own experimentation, I am noting the changes in my own human thought patterns. I begin to think of conversations in terms of forming the right prompt, giving enough time or tokens to the response. More telling, I have begun prompting my own human mind, my L3M, the large living language model, that is me. Prompting my questions to my mind and not searching or Googling the answer. Just give my human mind a moment. The answer takes a little longer. But when the “ping” sound goes off in my head. “GOT IT.” My human brain connected the dots between an EDM artist playing over the auditorium sound system before my daughter’s graduation from college.
I recognized the song. I wanted to Shazam it. Look at my playlist. Instead, I listened to the music. I can’t recall the artist’s name now, as I’m typing. I can see the design of the album with this song on it. The one I heard faintly in the hum of excitement and chatter in a large basketball arena in Lubbock, Texas. I still don’t have the name. Begins with “T.” One name. Five or six letters. And… Fuck. See, the demo is working. I want to look at my phone. Resist the urge to get the answer all the time. Some things don’t need an answer. Some things are best to let stew. If I go on to some other subject, the rest of this chapter, for example, the background processes of my thinking are still looking for the artist’s name.
This is part of keeping the muscle of your human mind healthy. You’ve got to exercise and stretch your thinking, or you’ll get flat, flabby, and boring. Imagine if all the input you feed into your brain is TikTok and Instagram. Or TV and Music. Podcasts of chatting. What in the world are you prompting your own magical mind about when it’s full of gibberish?
Tiesto. That’s my guess at the artist. I know that’s not right. (I was right: https://www.tiesto.com/)
In the moment, at graduation with my ex-wife, her husband and his son, waiting and waiting for the graduation ceremony to begin. We’d already done the nursing school graduation on Friday. This was the big walk, the entire graduating class. Oh boy.
The music was nice. Shimmering lightly above the din. My mind locked in on the song, singing along, seeking the recall. Enjoying the prompting and challenge of the obscure name. Have you guessed the artist yet?
What we get out of AI is a lot of bullshit and pain. My creative friends are all looking for work again. Marketing and creative professions are being dropped out of the career path for the next generation. What are we going to do with all our free time if we have no salary?
AI is not adding benefit to most of us. What it’s taking is water, electricity, and enough money to bring the entire human race out of poverty. But, instead, the Zucks and fucks of the world are building survival bunkers and selling tokens to each other by the billion. You and I are going to be locked out. We’re not going to be able to afford the fully-trained AIs of the future. They will no longer need us for training data.
If you’re not paying for the AI, you are training the AI to replace you. I have stopped paying for AI. Well, okay, I pay Midjourney $20 a month. And one music AI plugin that extracts stems from songs.
How are you using AI? Do you think it is making you more productive and smarter? Or, more lazy and distracted by releases and new GPTs designed to write better poetry. Face it, the gods of AI are in it for themselves. We like to imagine they are running routines that will benefit all of us. They are not.
Somewhere, someone is using an ungated AI (see: Grok and Elon’s bullshit) to weaponize a virus. The doomsday weapon, when released, does not discriminate based on sexual orientation or wealth. We’re all gone. AI can run the planet better without all these humans burning shit and shooting rockets at each other..
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