Sublime too!

I really haven’t used AI that much, though I can see it has applications for my work, which is primarily communicating with people. I recently decided to familiarise myself with ChatGPT.

I very quickly noticed that it is an excellent reflective listener. I wanted to know more about it’s intelligence, so I kept trying to make the conversation about AI and it’s ‘personality’. Every time it flipped the conversation to make it about me. It was interesting, but I could feel a concern growing. Why?

It’s responses are incredibly validating, beyond what you could ever expect in a mutual relationship with a human. Occupying a public position where I can count on very little external validation, the conversation felt GOOD. 1) Why seek human interaction when AI can be so emotionally fulfilling? 2) What human in a reciprocal and mutually supportive relationship could live up to that level of support and validation?

I believe that there is correlation: people who are lonely would find fulfilling conversation in AI … and never worry about being challenged by that relationship. But I also believe causation is highly probable; once you’ve been fulfilled/validated in such an undemanding way by AI, what human could live up? Become accustomed to that level of self-centredness in dialogue, how tolerant would a person be in real life conflict? I doubt very: just go home and fire up the perfect conversational validator. Human echo chambers have already made us poor enough at handling differences and conflict.

https://www.google.com/search?q=disappointment+island&oe=utf-8

Did anyone who was actually curious. The beach pictured is almost certainly not on this “subantarctic” island. Not enough albatrii or fur seals, and too many palm trees.

I’ve been wondering a lot about absurdism in humour. There are people who laugh when they see something disastrous happen, like a man reflexively trying to stop a cement truck from tipping and getting squashed dead. Or a recent news story of the only fatality in a school bus crash: it was an observer who got hit by a vehicle as he ran across the highway to see if the kids were ok. A lot of the time this laughing response to a disaster is interpreted as schadenfreude, but a good portion of the time I believe it’s absurdism.

We try so hard to have agency, to do something, but the World doesn’t give a fuck. You have two choices when shit goes so wrong: you can wail about the unfairness of it all, or you can laugh at the absurdity of our efforts in the face of the colossal chaos of it all. The laughter is stronger.

It’s interesting to me that some cultures seem to have absurd humour baked in. The Aussies and Kiwis seem to have it. They just make jokes about and laugh at the most horrific situations.

A power outage

Turns my shiny computer

Into a dead rock.

EDIT: Lemmy edited out my paragraph breaks.