AI vs RT
I was given a Monday Prompt a couple of weeks ago: Why do you write? Why don't you just let AI do your writing?
I had fun with this prompt. I’d be lying in bed, and another answer would materialize. I made a list of all the answers, which were all the same, really, just said in different ways, but sometimes I think that’s all my poems are just the same thing, said in fifty different ways. Because they are mine.
I found it amusing, though, that I was using a process analogous to the process of AI: you ask it a questions, and then it mines its data, and spits out answers. I had been given a question, and was processing everything I knew about it. But the more I thought about it, the less alike the process became. I was using RT (Real Thought). I was not just mining data. I was mining life; I was mining love. I was mining a living collective consciousness so much bigger than AI that the comparison was laughable. In a really not funny kind of way.
Why Do I Write?
Because I want a witness. Because I want to share. Because I want to connect with everything that is outside of myself.
If I let AI do the writing, then I am alone again. The connection is broken.
Writing is fun. Why bother writing if you aren’t writing? You could give AI this prompt. Would AI have fun with this prompt?
AI has no idea what I am trying to say. Hell, I sometimes don’t even always know what I’m trying to say until I’ve said it, and then I say to myself, oh. My brain knows things it doesn’t know it knows. AI will never find them.
If four different people asked AI the same question, there would be four identical answers. AI cannot write from a unique self. It is as flat as seltzer left in the sun. It is the voice of no voice. It cannot be my voice.
AI draws from all the words on the internet, true or not, and it ignores all the knowledge that is not online: all the yellowing letters, the concertos, the curled photos, the writings and poetry gathering dust in museums, where diligent scholars go to mine for past things thought, to relive past lives, and to bring past knowledge forward to light.
It is not tuned to the universe. It is circumscribed. The collective consciousness is closed to it. No voices whisper to it.
AI may be instructed to seek the truth, but it will not know when it has found it.
AI cannot love.
AI defeats the purpose of existence.
I absolutely LOVE this. I agree with all your points. "No voice whispers to it." Lovely!
Nine “yes’s” and an amen! That was great.