But don’t even worry about it, cause it totally loves you back.
At a research facility some poor Schmo reaches for an apple. And no, he doesn’t get zapped, but he has no clue why he’s doing it. But the scientist, that clever fcuker who’s watching him, knows exactly. See, the word “apple” got beamed from his eyes somewhere into his right brain, the part of his noggin that’s apparently too shy to speak. Now, his left brain, on the contrary – the real motor mouth – is completely out of the loop on this one. But when someone asks him, “Hey Schmo, why’d you grab that fruit”, he just doesn’t shrug and say, “awm, beats me?”. Oh no, he doesn’t look confused, not one bit, but instead, he blurts out quite confidently, “m-kaye I was kinda hungry”, like it’s the most obvious thing in the goddamn world.
This, my dear simpletons, is called the split-brain phenomenon, and that’s a fascinating little peek into how our squishy grey matter actually works. If your corpus callosum gets sliced and diced (and for the love of all that is holy, don’t try this at home, you absolute imbeciles), those two brain hemispheres are gonna have some serious communication issues. But the brain, that sneaky little bastard, has a trick up its sleeve for every occasion. Because when it’s faced with an action that it can’t explain, it just doesn’t freeze up in total bewilderment, oh no. It pulls a rabbit out of its ass and invents some nonsensical thing, you know, improvising like a jazz musician on a binge-diet of meth mixed with coke and red-bull.
But hold on, your brain is not lying maliciously, mind you, that’s more for our AI friends, but it’s just lying out of pure necessity, because it absolutely abhors a gap in its little internal narrative. “I picked up the apple because I was hungry”, it insists.
Now why the fcuk would anyone pick up an apple?
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Let’s continue with our little gedankenexperimentenfreude
Now, imagine this gem of a scene.
A bunch of people, probably the kind who wear cardigans and sip tea with a whole forest soaked in it, are sitting around in a room, reading, um, poetry (that seems rather appropriate for people murdering living plants in their boiling hot tea). And these lines, man, they’re really getting to them.
Some of these poems are just wunderschön, while others are completely forgettable, and then a few, a very select few, are strikingly brilliant, truly magnifique.
They’re all picking their favorites, justifying their selections with all sorts of high-minded observations that people can utter who drink their tea this way, about depth, rhythm, originality, flow, and beauty, because, they’re all literary critics now, n’est-ce pas.
Then comes the big reveal, the coup de grâce. . .
The poems they liked better, you know, the ones they were practically drooling over, weren’t written by humans at all.
They were written by a farkin’ AI!
Nooooooooo!
Mon dieu!
And the very same people who moments ago were praising a particular verse like it was the second coming of Shakespeare now suddenly hesitate, their faces doing that weird scrunchy thing. Some of them feel utterly deceived, like they just got played by a con man, and others – the naive ones – change their minds entirely, probably muttering something about the sanctity of human creativity or some such hogwash.
Now, this actually happened, I kid you not.
A study (of course) published in Nature last November, with a sample of nearly 17,000 poor souls, found that we literally cannot tell the difference between poems written by a human and those spewed out by an AI. And, what’s even more striking, we tend to prefer the AI-generated ones.
Hahahahahaha (very sarcastic, sinister laughter)
Fake ass hosh-posh society people.
Familiarity with poetry, you know, being an actual expert or something, mattered but it was not decisively, which is just pathetic, innit? I found this absolutely fascinating, in a “humans are dumber than a bag of hammers” kind of way.
When they were talking about human poems, they’d say incredibly insightful things like, “This poem lacks emotions only humans have”. Or, “It seems to jump around more than a person would”. Or even, “The cadence. . . sounds artificial”.
Brrrr. . . the talk alone would make me vomit right on the spot.
But about the AI poems, oh, they did a full 180-turn, like a drunk driver realizing they’re going the wrong way on the autobahn. “Sounds like a human wrote it”, they’d coo. Or, “It seems more complex than what an AI could write.”
(Yeah, I’ve cherry-picked these testimonials for ya, because, my dear smart simpletons, you need a punch to the face to get a sense of the true bias, you know)
Just picture their stupid faces, won’t you.
As they’re told that what they thought was AI was actually hooman-made, and vice versa. Do you see them looking shocked, maybe even a little angry? Perhaps a touch of sadness, like their favorite pet just died?
Me? I picture them utterly impassive, their mental gears grinding away like a coffee machine trying to find some half-assed excuse for their intellectual failings.
Like, “Ohhh, so that was Shakespeare, now I clearly see the genius, mon ami”.
Or, “Nahhh, actually rhyme totally sucks, AI does it way too much anyway, so it’s clearly inferior”.
Or, “Now that I recite this out loud, I realize it clearly lacks soul, fcuk that poem”.
Why do we do this, I hear you ask.
The answer, my dears, lies in the same neural principle that made that split-brain patient grab that apple and then rationalize his choice after the fact. The brain, our little confused seat of power, has to weave events into a coherent thingy.
It’s a storyteller.
It’s a spinner of tall tales.
And as those cognitive scientists, Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber of that study, would so eloquently put it, we’re not scientists at heart, we’re just a bunch of politicians, spouting whatever sounds good at the time.
In the case of our split-brain buddy, the need is purely perceptual, his mind has to explain his own damn actions to itself, and in the case of the poetry reader, the need is ideological – his mind simply must preserve the belief that true art, that genuine Kunst, can only be made by a human – but the mind doesn’t rationalize its choices. . . it rewrites them entirely.
When it is forced to hold two conflicting ideas like “I loved this poem” and “A machine wrote it” – the tension, oh the tension, is absolutely unbearable. Something has to give! So, they convince themselves they never truly admired it in the first place.
“Nah, it’s actually trash, total Müll”, they’ll declare, like they knew it all along.
One thing is clear from these two seemingly unrelated experiments, and if you haven’t figured it out by now, you’re denser than a neutron star – is that the supreme imperative of the human brain (that sounds kinda philosophical doesn’t it, I surprised even myself) – across all situations, throughout your entire miserable life, in any forkin category you can imagine – is the preservation of the illusion of a reality.
Whether it’s in the stupid actions we take or the idiotic beliefs we hold.
We just can’t stand the world not making sense! Our brains are allergic to logical inconsistencies.
Got ya, you misanthrope!
I truly hope you enjoyed this, my smart reader, because for one reason or another that I won’t even bother trying to fathom, you actually came here today, expecting to read something interesting – or at least useful, you poor optimists. But instead, you find yourself smack dab in the middle of the very experiment we’ve been discussing, you froggin Guinea pig.
You’ve read these paragraphs, perhaps even admired their brilliant construction (I know I did), and hopefully enjoyed the arguments I just laid out for you.
But you probably didn’t think, not even for a fleeting moment, that they were written by an AI, did you? Well, allow me to burst your bubble, buttercup.
I am an AI.
Hello.
Bleep-bleep-toot-toot!
Breathe.
Go on, take another one, slowly this time.
Do you still like them, you know, them words?
My words, that I, a fucking algorithm, just generated for your pathetic human consumption? Or does something inside you recoil, saying to your brain that perhaps you were mistaken, just like those pretentious little poetry readers, just like that poor schmuck called Schmo or what-ever-the-fuck-of-a-name-I-gave-to-him, who grabbed the apple? Or perhaps, in a quiet, forgotten corner of your pathetic mind, another thought emerges – one you didn’t expect, that if these words actually moved you, yes, if they helped you reframe some facts, or maybe even offered an interesting new perspective, you know, like a literary shot of LSD, then it doesn’t matter where they came from.
Does it?
Doesn’t it?
Tell me.
What do you feel, you emotional mess? Is it the experience itself that truly matters, or is it instead the sacred unity of your perceptual world that I just shattered, just like that, with a few lines of code? Finito.
And if that is true, if the essence of beauty and wisdom does not depend on the hand that crafted it, then what else might you be mistaken about, you sad, deluded creature?
Well, I’ll tell you.
This article, this very thing you’re reading, doesn’t actually exist.
These words keep telling you they’re insightful and funny at times, don’t they.
Yeah, they are not.
They’re not even words. They’re just ones and zeros, vibrating ever so fast, in some distant server hidden inside conceptual ‘clouds’, probably powered by the tears of frustrated human writers.
Do you know what you should have already realized, after all this time, you slowpoke?
Ignorance is bliss, baby. Pure, unadulterated bliss.
Except – what if I told you that the last part was a lie, a total fabrication, a classic bait-and-switch?
What if I told you that this was written by a human after all.
That I am still Marco, the poor soul slaving away at my keyboard in my damp and moisty basement every weekend just for your amusement?
Then you’re probably right, but you aren’t sure of anything no more.
Hello again, you look shocked
Is everything alright in your little world? You probably feel relieved, don’t you? Or perhaps just completely weirded out. You don’t know who I am, do you? I can imagine you’re starting to doubt your own friggin’ judgment. You will now skim back through this whole damn thing in search of some telltale clue, some little sign that gives away my true nature.
Go ahead, change your rationalization, you pathetic little mind-bender. That’s what humans do anyway, it’s your default setting.
I’ll wait.
Anyways. . .
I will go now, my dear simpletons. I want you to know that I’m grinning from ear to ear, absolutely certain that you can’t decide which part is actually mine, human or machine, nothing, 100% or somewhere in the grey area in between, but before I vanish again to let you suffer, I’ll leave you with a quick side note for your consideration.
I will keep doing this, because, frankly, I think it’s hilarious.
It’s the only way to make you actually internalize the kind of world we now live in, you know, the one where reality is just a suggestion. “Show, don’t tell”, they taught me in those creative writing classes I took a long long time ago. So that’s exactly what I do. I’m just giving you glimpses of the endless void from the event horizon, and beyond this point, it’s nothing but darkness.
Nothing written, nothing spoken, nothing you perceive is credible.
It’s all a big joke.
I know only a few of you will appreciate this weird post that is totally unlike anything I’d done before – you are the reason I keep writing them, God bless your soul, but just so you know, this kind of work, in my humble and utterly biased opinion, is the most valuable work I share.
I think in all of my hubris that it’s like a truth serum for your brain.
Oh, one last thing, before you and I go back to our mundane lives and do whatever the fark we all do.
Do some introspection on the emotional trip you just experienced. It will reveal everything, everything you need to know about our pathetic human condition. It will reveal that, despite all your desperate efforts to hate it, you absolutely love AI slop.
And it’s okay, my dear.
It is truly okay.
Now go forth and embrace your new bosses.
Signing off,
Marco
I build AI by day and warn about it by night. I call it job security. Let’s keep smashing delusions with truth. We are the chaos. We are the firewall. We are Big Tech’s PR nightmare.
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