THOUGHTS ON A.I. - by Jeremy
Pretty sure Noam Chomsky had this to say about AI. He said AI, at least right now, is not like robots, and re-creating the human mind 1:1, it’s plagarism software. I THINK what “consumer AI” does (currently) is it scans the whole entire internet for the thing you ask it. So if I ask ChatGPT “tell me everything you know about sailing.” then it scans THE WHOLE INTERNET for everything about sailing, then condenses it for you.
Is this a good way to learn, or merely a convenient way to learn? I guess it depends on who you are and what you’re doing and how invested you are in the subject. If you wanna be a professor of history then OK you should probably read some textbooks along with AI. But what if I just need to learn about something for a small project? What if I just need to learn the surface level knowledge? It feels like cheating, a devious privilege. There will be a time where people (I’m mainly talking about Americans here, or even Coloradans) will reject convenience because convenience makes our day-to-day lives easier but our spiritual lives duller. This AI thing will get worse. Many people will refuse to use AI or anything close or related to AI purely on principle, the idea of it.
The name and what is and isn’t AI is also confusing for me. But “AI” is exactly what it says it is: Artifical “Intelligence.” It can be a search engine, which is what ChatGPT is, but you have other things that are considered AI, like self driving cars. You couldn’t pay me to trust a self driving car. But I know a lot of people who would.
The internet obliterated trust. Does anyone actually trust the government, like 100%? Do you trust Hollywood and netflix to make entertainment you like? We scroll tiktok and see ragebait and get convinced our partners will cheat. We scroll through constant headlines. I ask ChatGPT to tell me about sailing, and it does, but I don’t trust it. It’s a “robot” so it’s not supposed to make mistakes but a human built it? A human with agendas? You search something on Google in 2025 and you get AI results first thing. They’re WRONG a lot of the time. WHAT THE FUCK. And now no one trusts themselves to do a good job, or get what they want in life. Some do. A lot don’t. A lot who do are completely faking it. They dont trust themselves to walk upright with confidence.
I imagine, before the millenium and then before the TV, the world seemed so much bigger. You grow up in Ketchum, Idaho in 1909 and that’s all you know, and you hear inklings, news from other places, and you know things, amazing, beautiful things, exist elsewhere, but you’d have to get a magazine, or hear a story, or actually travel. The Age of Accessible Information NARROWED the world for everyone. We live and think inside Corridors and Hallways. And I DON’T think people are STUPID. That is not the right word. People are very smart. They’re all around. Lots of people are smart here, dumb there. But we’re smartly living in these little neon tunnels.
There will be people who refuse to drive a car with touchscreen technology, refuse to ever put on a VR headset, will take a bat to the first amazon robot employee they see, will never own cryptocurrency... and there will be silicone valley dorks who LOVE IT. and that’s cool. I don’t think any less of people for committing a lot to what they think is the future – they’re right. But I don’t think less of people who don’t trust it either. The general sentiment perhaps is that the future writes checks that the future can’t cash.
