Good thought-provoking article, thanks for writing it. AI has been a focus of my attention for a while, being a student of anthroposophy and an IT dev, it's not something one can avoid anyway :o)
I have read the below words from the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman:
“ChatGPT is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness.
it's a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now. it’s a preview of progress; we have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness.”
But I guess only a fraction of that 1 million people (who have subscribed to it in a single month) is actually aware of that. I think the main problem it generates is a trust-issue. AI-generated (to a lesser extent in the past) content is not new however but it hasn't been that much in the front. Based on my research the biggest danger is not what AI can do but what people think (are led to believe) it could do. And the same words that are enthusiastically have been used labeling AI systems (wishful mnemonics) in a human way, are extremely (and likely intentionally) misleading: play (chess), think, being intuitive... these words have a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT meaning when it comes to us, humans and to computer systems. The results can be deceiving and - as I said - intentionally so.
I tend to agree with Nigel Gilmer, who wrote in the latest New View magazine:
"Evil is the counter pole of the good and shows up in the world as a counter-image or only an
imitation of the good. Evil has no creative original powers and only imitates or counterfeits the truly original creativeness of God."
To touch on the content generation theme once more: with SEO (search engine optimisation) this bastardisation of authoring started quite a while ago. If you think of how search engines find a website, it is based on keywords not nicely composed sentences. If the right keywords are there even as only a list, the page will be high among the search results.
And in the age of "fact-checking" and more how low-quality (and subject to financial interests) that can be, I would not be surprised many journalists using AI-generated content more and more in the future without actually checking how close it is to reality.
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I did write your essay was thought-provoking, right? I hope it didn't provoke TOO MANY thoughts that I put into this comment :o)
Thanks for your response, it was thought-provoking in turn. Your point about using human words like "play," "think," and "intuition" when they're not at all appropriate, is a good one. I wrestled with that a little bit in the article because so many of the words that we use for AI's activities are the same ones we use for our own... but I didn't really focus in on that and try to parse it out completely (I think I thought it would be too clunky, so instead I just tried to avoid certain words when I noticed it). But that is perhaps the biggest issue with the whole thing - we don't frame it correctly in our own minds and so we constantly mis-think and mis-use it. (I was struck even just in reading the Sam Altman quote that you referenced: the use of the word "truthfulness" suggests that it could lie, when it seems like "accuracy" would be, by far, the better term.)
And your point about SEO is interesting. Funny how we break everything up (in this case into key words) and reduce it to the most spreadsheet-version of itself...
Thank you for being on the front lines. Recently I picked up a popular organization that had espoused good human living and found they were enchanted with this new AI 'writer' that could write such an awesome story about love and God and human emotions and partnered themselves with it with awe. Uniting with the machine and Ahriman. Computer can beat us at chess and write better than most of us for sure. But they can't feel pain, or love, or consciousness, or empathy for our fellow man.. Now more than ever it is our deeply human encounters that are a necessity to keep our core spirituality and prepare for the future evolution stages with humanity with real hearts and real souls. Guard your soul! Recognize that many people will choose to live so called life through an avatar where we can feel mighty and empowered not helpless and useless in real time. Real life with real people is messy but it is real and break throughs in our human sharing and caring with might of spiritual blessing is beyond anything AI can ever dream of creating.Oh, yes this will have its day and way but never ever forget it is beyond clever but not human. Death and resurrection at a higher state of consciousness is the spiritual law . Blessings on the work going forward on this day of the miracle of Our Lady of Guadalupe! Nancy Jewel Poer
Thanks, Nancy. It's well said: "Death and resurrection at a higher state of consciousness is the spiritual law." It's just one step after another, and we don't need to fear that which is bringing the death forces but focus on the resurrection. In certain ways, it's only bringing what's truly human into sharper relief. All the best to you! - Seth
I enjoyed this article. I don’t know why some people are so enamored of AI. To me, it can be a bit of a dead end. The enormous knowledge and the conveniences brought to us by technology can get in the way of learning basic life skills like patience and tolerance and just being a human being connected to others. For many people, it will complete their disconnection to nature. Perhaps you are correct, in that with its introduction into our lives, because of the losses, many will have to turn to their own inner light — which is what we want anyway.
I appreciate your mention of reincarnation — it is on my mind every day. Can’t imagine my life without knowledge of it. And I have loved Blake for years.
Thanks for saying so, Ardith. Yeah, it's interesting to see how the most basic social capacities, including patience and tolerance, have deteriorated. They've become muscles that we've stopped exercising (if we ever even learned how to). It was interesting turning towards Blake in this article. his work is so deeply human and so powerful. All the best - Seth
Seth, I plan to share this with friends in my local study group. Some of them are following the developing AI phenomenon with a mixture of worry and fascination, which you capture here. For my part, I tend to avoid the issue because it just brings me down--but I also recognize that, as spiritual beings evolving in freedom, we will always be changing and pushing through a darkness of our own creation. Sad as that may sound, it actually gives me great hope.
Me too, Frederick. Also a kind of call to (spiritual) arms. There's a possibility, when we first encounter a thing, to experience it as a foil - as a kind of opposite to what's really needed. AI thinks nothing but dead thoughts, thoughts from the past, but has access to the whole online collective and can combine / connect those thoughts in all new ways. But they're still not actually new thoughts, they're not living thoughts, inspired thoughts. How much of my thinking is dead - just a derivation from I've already thought or what someone else has thought? And can I develop my own consciousness through study, exercises, and meditation, so that it becomes more deeply perceptive of the world and a more fitting vessel for inspiration to find a home?
Seth, this is a wonderful essay and wonderful Blake illustration of it. THANK YOU for bringing this new development to consciousness and expanding our awareness of what it can mean. The question of discernment will become ever more demanding.
Hey Stu - thanks for speaking up in this forum, I've gotten emails and messages elsewhere, but it's nice to talk about the work here. Glad you appreciated the article, I felt it was important to try to bring other pictures concerning where these developments are taking us. It's an intense phenomenon, especially when I first used the actual program - it's amazing how cogent and quick its responses are.
And I'm glad you appreciated the Blake illustration. I came across it after I'd written the whole article and it somehow felt like it was an antidote or balm to what I'd been writing about, and especially the images that DALL-E 2 has created. In certain ways I think they're "beautiful" (the teddy bears grocery shopping has a kind of sweet quality to it) but they clearly lack the power and humanity that comes through Blake's piece. I don't know that I quite understand it yet, but the feeling difference is quite strong.
This is really well stated Seth! Excellent work…
Good thought-provoking article, thanks for writing it. AI has been a focus of my attention for a while, being a student of anthroposophy and an IT dev, it's not something one can avoid anyway :o)
I have read the below words from the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman:
“ChatGPT is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness.
it's a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now. it’s a preview of progress; we have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness.”
But I guess only a fraction of that 1 million people (who have subscribed to it in a single month) is actually aware of that. I think the main problem it generates is a trust-issue. AI-generated (to a lesser extent in the past) content is not new however but it hasn't been that much in the front. Based on my research the biggest danger is not what AI can do but what people think (are led to believe) it could do. And the same words that are enthusiastically have been used labeling AI systems (wishful mnemonics) in a human way, are extremely (and likely intentionally) misleading: play (chess), think, being intuitive... these words have a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT meaning when it comes to us, humans and to computer systems. The results can be deceiving and - as I said - intentionally so.
I tend to agree with Nigel Gilmer, who wrote in the latest New View magazine:
"Evil is the counter pole of the good and shows up in the world as a counter-image or only an
imitation of the good. Evil has no creative original powers and only imitates or counterfeits the truly original creativeness of God."
To touch on the content generation theme once more: with SEO (search engine optimisation) this bastardisation of authoring started quite a while ago. If you think of how search engines find a website, it is based on keywords not nicely composed sentences. If the right keywords are there even as only a list, the page will be high among the search results.
And in the age of "fact-checking" and more how low-quality (and subject to financial interests) that can be, I would not be surprised many journalists using AI-generated content more and more in the future without actually checking how close it is to reality.
---
I did write your essay was thought-provoking, right? I hope it didn't provoke TOO MANY thoughts that I put into this comment :o)
Thanks for your response, it was thought-provoking in turn. Your point about using human words like "play," "think," and "intuition" when they're not at all appropriate, is a good one. I wrestled with that a little bit in the article because so many of the words that we use for AI's activities are the same ones we use for our own... but I didn't really focus in on that and try to parse it out completely (I think I thought it would be too clunky, so instead I just tried to avoid certain words when I noticed it). But that is perhaps the biggest issue with the whole thing - we don't frame it correctly in our own minds and so we constantly mis-think and mis-use it. (I was struck even just in reading the Sam Altman quote that you referenced: the use of the word "truthfulness" suggests that it could lie, when it seems like "accuracy" would be, by far, the better term.)
And your point about SEO is interesting. Funny how we break everything up (in this case into key words) and reduce it to the most spreadsheet-version of itself...
Ahhh the original sin of atomisation-
Hi Seth!
Thank you for being on the front lines. Recently I picked up a popular organization that had espoused good human living and found they were enchanted with this new AI 'writer' that could write such an awesome story about love and God and human emotions and partnered themselves with it with awe. Uniting with the machine and Ahriman. Computer can beat us at chess and write better than most of us for sure. But they can't feel pain, or love, or consciousness, or empathy for our fellow man.. Now more than ever it is our deeply human encounters that are a necessity to keep our core spirituality and prepare for the future evolution stages with humanity with real hearts and real souls. Guard your soul! Recognize that many people will choose to live so called life through an avatar where we can feel mighty and empowered not helpless and useless in real time. Real life with real people is messy but it is real and break throughs in our human sharing and caring with might of spiritual blessing is beyond anything AI can ever dream of creating.Oh, yes this will have its day and way but never ever forget it is beyond clever but not human. Death and resurrection at a higher state of consciousness is the spiritual law . Blessings on the work going forward on this day of the miracle of Our Lady of Guadalupe! Nancy Jewel Poer
Thanks, Nancy. It's well said: "Death and resurrection at a higher state of consciousness is the spiritual law." It's just one step after another, and we don't need to fear that which is bringing the death forces but focus on the resurrection. In certain ways, it's only bringing what's truly human into sharper relief. All the best to you! - Seth
Ardith Truhan
I enjoyed this article. I don’t know why some people are so enamored of AI. To me, it can be a bit of a dead end. The enormous knowledge and the conveniences brought to us by technology can get in the way of learning basic life skills like patience and tolerance and just being a human being connected to others. For many people, it will complete their disconnection to nature. Perhaps you are correct, in that with its introduction into our lives, because of the losses, many will have to turn to their own inner light — which is what we want anyway.
I appreciate your mention of reincarnation — it is on my mind every day. Can’t imagine my life without knowledge of it. And I have loved Blake for years.
Thanks for saying so, Ardith. Yeah, it's interesting to see how the most basic social capacities, including patience and tolerance, have deteriorated. They've become muscles that we've stopped exercising (if we ever even learned how to). It was interesting turning towards Blake in this article. his work is so deeply human and so powerful. All the best - Seth
Seth, I plan to share this with friends in my local study group. Some of them are following the developing AI phenomenon with a mixture of worry and fascination, which you capture here. For my part, I tend to avoid the issue because it just brings me down--but I also recognize that, as spiritual beings evolving in freedom, we will always be changing and pushing through a darkness of our own creation. Sad as that may sound, it actually gives me great hope.
Me too, Frederick. Also a kind of call to (spiritual) arms. There's a possibility, when we first encounter a thing, to experience it as a foil - as a kind of opposite to what's really needed. AI thinks nothing but dead thoughts, thoughts from the past, but has access to the whole online collective and can combine / connect those thoughts in all new ways. But they're still not actually new thoughts, they're not living thoughts, inspired thoughts. How much of my thinking is dead - just a derivation from I've already thought or what someone else has thought? And can I develop my own consciousness through study, exercises, and meditation, so that it becomes more deeply perceptive of the world and a more fitting vessel for inspiration to find a home?
Seth, this is a wonderful essay and wonderful Blake illustration of it. THANK YOU for bringing this new development to consciousness and expanding our awareness of what it can mean. The question of discernment will become ever more demanding.
Hey Stu - thanks for speaking up in this forum, I've gotten emails and messages elsewhere, but it's nice to talk about the work here. Glad you appreciated the article, I felt it was important to try to bring other pictures concerning where these developments are taking us. It's an intense phenomenon, especially when I first used the actual program - it's amazing how cogent and quick its responses are.
And I'm glad you appreciated the Blake illustration. I came across it after I'd written the whole article and it somehow felt like it was an antidote or balm to what I'd been writing about, and especially the images that DALL-E 2 has created. In certain ways I think they're "beautiful" (the teddy bears grocery shopping has a kind of sweet quality to it) but they clearly lack the power and humanity that comes through Blake's piece. I don't know that I quite understand it yet, but the feeling difference is quite strong.