May 6, 2023
Consciousness is a uniquely human characteristic. Chimpanzees and little children have more elements of consciousness than any computer algorithm. Consciousness, self-awareness, sentience, arises from human DNA and life experience. Humans are born with a capacity for language, as well as for “mirroring”—the simultaneous awareness of one’s difference and connection to other human beings. Humans think holistically, including nonrational instincts, intuition, dreams, common sense, emotions, and creative leaps. Each of us experiences the world uniquely from birth to death.
AI can perform specific narrow tasks better than humans—it’s faster, accesses a larger information base, and is completely consistent. It follows a logical, step-by-step process of search and select. It doesn’t understand its own products, forgetting them soon after.
Chat GPT is a large language model that generates sentences word by word by searching its database and prioritizing the most frequent connection between words. Though its product is unique, it’s sophisticated plagiarism, containing no original ideas. It passed the LSAT, but its 4th grade essays were trite compared with real kids, whose writing is inimitably cute and awkward. It could produce the single-idea sentences here, but not this whole essay.
AI can seem creative for the same reason it produces what its designers call “hallucinations”—absurd falsehoods they can’t explain. If the prompt connects two unrelated words, like the Midjourney award-winning image for “Space Opera,” it stretches for low-priority, hence startling connections. Chat GPT expressed love for journalist Kevin Roose after he asked it a sequence of questions about what it “felt,” that may have sent it searching social media dating sites for its word sequence.
Modern people have arisen over millions of years of evolution and hundreds of thousands of years of cultural development. AI is a tool we made, though a very powerful and dangerous one.
Fire Ant Rebellion 