Since deleting the September blog and letting everyone know that I had done so, I’ve been thinking about why I deleted it. On the surface, I deleted it because it’s a fake, and I want to deal only with the “real thing.” Mabel Rose Thompson isn’t real. But someone asked me why I had deleted something that I enjoyed, regardless of its source. Well, that would be a logical question if I were dealing with whether I should mind an AI assessment of the quality of car models. I wouldn’t mind. So then, why should I mind if I find out that a particular piece of art I liked and wanted to share with others has actually been AI-generated. Would I still share it? I probably would, but I would make a point of telling the truth about its origins, and I would also value the piece of art far less because no matter how beautiful or interesting the art appeared to be, I would know that a soul hadn’t created it from feelings and insight that only the artist could have. It’s sort of like hearing a first-hand account from a person who has experienced something amazing versus reading a reporter’s account of the person’s experience. The two may share the main facts, but they cannot be the same, and the first-hand account has more impact and credibility.
As for Mabel Rose Thompson, she’s/it’s a great non-existent gal, and her/its advice seems spot on for the most part. Because it is a creature of AI, what it says probably comes from millions of scans of what has been written about the subject of aging. AI has not lived a life and is just collective knowledge rather than the account of one person’s experience and wisdom gleaned over a long life. If the advice is the same, anyway, why do I value the person’s experience more than AI’s account of it? I don’t really know, but I do. So, I’m bringing her back. Say hello to Mabel.
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But Mabel does exist. She just doesn’t exist in the world we expected her to exist in.The shortfall is ours and points out the limits of our gestalt and the real challenge of the “Digital Age”. We must grasp and embrace what this “Cambrian Explosion” of intelligence offers us.
Couldn’t I argue that she doesn’t exist anywhere? We could quibble over what “exists” means, so I’ll qualify the term by saying that, in this case, she doesn’t exist in our world of experiencing things physically, emotionally, and intellectually, all of which constitute human experience. AI is not human; it’s not an entity; it has no soul (in the human understanding of soul), and it doesn’t experience life or have to deal with life situations and relationships. All it can do is 1) gather together data on what billions of people have written and said and make decisions on which information is the most appropriate for a given situation, or 2) be trained by a human to respond to facts in certain ways, so its wisdom depends on how it was trained and who trained it. If I want to hear about what it’s like to be old, I’ll ask an old person, not a robot or a database.