I’d rather not be one of the cranky old fuckers that thinks the younger generation is just plain wrong. It’s a song as old as time. Socrates or Aristotle or one of those old gay queens has a quote about how the younger generation listened to weird music and didn’t respect their elders. That’s from like 3000 years ago. Every generation bellyaches about their immediate successors. I’d like to think I’m aware enough to understand that the kids born after me have a different worldview, a different experience than I did coming up. Right, right on. I get it. They won’t like the same things, their music might be something else, whatever. Frankly, I never felt an intrinsic need to respect my elders. Don’t be an asshole to me, I won’t be an asshole to you. My music was different than the Top 40 hits today. Totally get that stuff.
I am concerned about the kids though. This “artificial intelligence” stuff seems to be an overly important thing in their lives. Now, hypocritical as I’ll ever be, I used the internet machine to try to find out a couple of facts. The AI-assisted results told me that 70% of Gen Z uses ChatGPT and also that 57% of Zoomers aspire to be an influencer for their career.
This seems somewhat dire to me.
However, I will try to examine this in a way that does not make me just a crabby old fucker. Not a white-bearded, whiskey-drunk misanthrope, shouting at the children at the nearby bus stop to stay away from my acorns, because them squirrels is my friends. You got it?
The “artificial intelligence” that we have access today is just a refined search algorithm that speaks in English syntax back to you. That’s really all it is. I mean, Google had this shit like ten years ago but they didn’t package it in the way that it seemed like another person or entity was responding. If you typed in “That one movie where women couldn’t have babies anymore”, it would just show results for “Children of Men” as a list of links. Now, if you asked ChatGPT, it says “Oh yeah! Children of Men, starring Clive Owen. What a great film! I especially like the use of handheld cameras and the long shots in it,” It’s basically just you inputting a sentence, and then it will take the keywords in it, search, and then spit the results back in a MadLibs style response in the form of a sentence. It will grab nouns, adverbs, and verbs and fill them in where necessary to reply in the form of a human sentence. This is enough to trick half the fucking planet into thinking that it’s sentient or something. It just grabs more information from the sources it has been fed and spits it out in a grammatically correct way. This is how people personify it. It’s “talking back”. Not just giving me a list. Wowzers! It is incapable of insight, because it is an aggregator of previously recorded information. It will grab the most commonly used information first, and so it is a softening of the boundaries of knowledge and will always puddle into lowest common denominator. It “learns” on all the media that has been fed into it, and will act as a blender, taking the information and slurrying it into a slop you can drink, but it “talks” back like it knows something.
Now some dinghole who loves the new “AI” might be asking me “Well, BeardBiteMan, how is that any different than human sentience? Isn’t consciousness just a complex search algorithm that takes in new stimuli and juxtaposes it to an existing database to produce a response?!” To which I will say simply “Fuck you. Kind of.”
But I will grant myself this thing: I can say that “AI” is not sentient without having an airtight definition of human sentience. Because this is pretty much the basis of several different disciplines of philosophy, psychology, neuro-sexual-discography, etc. It is the essential human question. And when that little smartass René Descartes thought he nailed it, everybody dogpiled on him.
I do think that for an artificial intelligence to really have consciousness, it would need to have a body. It would need to have somatic experience with sensory information to process. A computer today can have lots of information loaded into it, but it has no volition to seek anything. It can’t discover a novelty, a new thing. AND YOU CAN’T pretend that an AI that gets to read the internet can do it, because that is a recounting of other peoples’ information. It would have to walk around in a town, or a wood, or a wooded town. It would have to see things that others have not reported already. And in having a physical form, it would understand intimacy, death. Perhaps it would see a robin watching it back from a tree branch, and it would not record it. It would just experience it.
These kids offer over their intelligence, their understanding of the world to ChatGPT and Grok and whatever other dumb shit. I dunno. When the written word first shot out into the world with the printing press, there were worries about books making up crazy fantasies in peoples’ heads. Television was thought to be a powerful new devil in movies like Videodrome and Network. Those were mediums where you just consumed the thing. You engaged with it, and it had an effect. Now you talk to it, and it talks back. It talks back so singularly. It’s got access to your internet cookies. It will know you so intimately.
My message to the kids using Chat GPT to complete their homework is this: Wouldn’t you rather figure it out? Understand it? Because if you’re just trying to coast onto easiness, why are you alive, bitch? Why? You can do it. Life’s really rewarding if you challenge yourself sometimes.
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