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7 . AI, Nausea, Postmodernism, Social Media
104 Plays1 year ago
I keep having more things to say about AI!
Todays episode is about psychic poisoning, depths vs surfaces, and AI art vs the human soul.
I keep talking about AI because I think the phenomenon of generative AI is illuminating something about consciousness; by automating things that we didn't previously imagine could be automated, it's revealing what cannot be automated. It's revealing an aspect of what it means to be human.
PS There's a section in the podcast about art history. My mum, Jayne Jones, is an artist and art teacher, and a lot of my art history knowledge comes from conversations with her. I only pretend to know what postmodernism means, while she has a degree in pretending to know what postmodernism means. So I'm sure she will be slightly horrified with how I've synopsized it in this episode, and I just want to say: any mistakes, distortions and oversimplifications are mine.
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Transcript
Berlin's Artistic Aura
00:00:17
Speaker
So we were in Berlin and Berlin is this amazing city. And one of the things that's amazing about it, not the only thing, one of the things that's amazing about it is it's like a, it's just a city that's just kind of like given itself over to art. It's just like said, art, take me. And art has gone, okay. And you know, it's just covered, like it's like the walls are covered in art and everything, like the people are like works of art and the, the, the um There are, you know, there are actual art galleries all over the place and there are the flyers for like the music shows are like these insane weird fucking shows like one man will stand on his head playing the violin while people read from the works of Virgil and like, you know, whatever. I don't know. Just like wild stuff. Everybody's doing this wild stuff.
00:01:11
Speaker
Yeah, there's music everywhere. And there's like visual art everywhere. And like weird had little cinemas and corners and stuff. And, you know, famously, a lot of street art, there's art on the ah old wall, there's art, there's these kind of little alleys that just have these crazy amounts of beautiful street art, just like that. And um that's really nice. It's really nice. When you've been living in America for a while, there's some, you know, American cities have some art in them. But I have not encountered an american city which is close to berlin i mean i don't think there are many cities on the planet this is not. Specifically throwing shade in america but,
00:01:50
Speaker
It's very nice. And so we were there and we were enjoying this and we were going and doing all kinds of touristy things and soaking up the art. And then at some point we were in a burger restaurant in Friedrichstein. And Friedrichstein is a kind of hip neighborhood, you know, kind kind of like the mission in San Francisco 10 years ago, or something like that, but it's bigger because Berlin is very big. And Friedrichstein has a lot of street art. And we were in this burger restaurant, just a random burger restaurant. I went to the bathroom in the burger restaurant and in the bathroom in the burger restaurant, it was just wallpapered with stickers.
00:02:25
Speaker
that people had made, and each sticker was like a little piece of art, like a drawing or painting or some, you know, some idea, some visual idea that somebody had come up with. And some of the stickers seemed like they were advertising things, but other stickers just seemed like somebody's cute design and they wanted to spread around. But the bathroom was just wallpaper, like every single surface was covered in these stickers. So there were, thousands of little tiny works of art, each one different. And while I was stood in that bathroom, I started to actually feel nauseated. Like I started to feel unwell with the amount of art. And I actually got full. And right before we were visiting Berlin, we had been living in Longmont, which is a ah town outside of Boulder. We've been living in suburban Longmont in
00:03:15
Speaker
the most soulless place I have ever been in my entire life. Incredible suburban Longmont. People like parts of Longmont. I'm not going to get in a fight about that, but where we were was just nothing. There's a big like suburban subdivision. There was not a single store. There was not a single restaurant, not a single coffee shop. And every single house was just this big beige box, just like miles of big beige boxes. It was so weird and so ugly. And then there was a field next to where we lived that we were not allowed to go in for reasons. And so we would walk longingly past the field and do our walks around the neighborhood, walking the dogs. You know, so for the first few days of being in Berlin, it was like, like water to a thirsty man, you know, like the op was just like, oh my God, thank God, like,
00:04:11
Speaker
We're somewhere that has a soul and it has a lot of soul. This is
Artistic Saturation and Reflection
00:04:14
Speaker
really beautiful and really exciting. And then there came this saturation point. I'm stood in this bathroom and I'm like. OK, I think I've had enough ah for a minute. I actually don't feel very well. And, you know, and then I was fine. I didn't didn't really upset me and I I left and the whole restaurant was kind of like the restaurant was like covered in these posters that they designed themselves like posters for the restaurant. So it was quite a lot. But at some point I went home and rested and looked at a white wall for a while and felt better. So this is not a critique of Berlin. I'm glad there is a place like that in the world.
00:04:49
Speaker
Next story. A few years ago, I had a ah particularly unpleasant series of Facebook altercations. It was over several days. It left me feeling bad, left me not feeling good. And it was just an unpleasant time. And I decided to to unplug so so and go. Lion hammock in the woods for a while. So that's what I did. Took my little portable hammock, went to the woods, went and lay in my hammock with some trees. And after a couple of hours, I was breathing, you know, I was lying still being with trees, just kind of recovering my own sense of.
00:05:26
Speaker
calm and regulation and connection with myself and peace.
Escaping Social Media's Grasp
00:05:30
Speaker
I did this for a couple of hours and what ah started to happen, I began to notice these random Facebook comments would pop into my mind. A comment would just run through my mind. And then another one and just these different posts that people have made, different things people had said. Some of them were the from the fights that were, had been happening and others were just like random posts. It wasn't, you know, it wasn't all like the material from the fights, which is everything from Facebook just started popping into my mind. And the feeling, what it felt like was my psyche off gassing.
00:06:06
Speaker
like releasing these toxins and attempting to return to its natural state. It was this really interesting feeling of like, each time a thought would, it was like, I wasn't like ruminating. I wasn't fixated on these thoughts as they were popping into my head, these comments from other people. They were just popping into my head and then they were kind of evaporating into the woods. So here's what I think is going
Mental Impact of Social Media
00:06:29
Speaker
on. And I think a version of this happens with visual social media and video social media, but we think it much more clearly happens with Facebook and Twitter and other primarily linguistic social media. So when you interact with people in real life or when you watch a video or listen to audio of someone speaking, there is a distinct sense that there is a person over there distinct from me.
00:06:57
Speaker
So someone's talking to me and they're telling me whatever insane idea they're telling me or, you know, normal thing, but whatever. Let's say they're telling me some insane idea. There are these psychic emanations that come with the words, like there's the words and then there's this energy. And because we evolved to deal with this, we evolved to deal with other beings physically present with us. There are kind of natural mechanisms and it registers like there's a distinct being over there, different from me, and anything that's coming from them towards me kind of goes into like a psychic filter. Just like there's something in our minds that says, do I want to let this in? How far do I want to let this in?
00:07:46
Speaker
Is this something I resonate with? Are they convincing me? Are they making a good point? Does it kind of match my own sense, my own ideas? What's the energy like that's coming with this thing? There's all of this screening process, which is available to us when we're physically in person with someone and you get to choose yes or no. You get to and let that kind of those ideas, that energy, that transmission, more deeply into your system, or you get to reject it, or, you know, or, or just let it in a little ways and kind of chew on it and maybe kind of hang out with it for a while. But there's all of this kind of choice and ah control. When you read text, when you read Twitter threads or you read Facebook arguments, in order to read the words,
00:08:36
Speaker
you You have to read them in your own mind, right? That's how reading works. And so the words register as your own thoughts. Now, like, of course, like, if if you were asked in that moment while you're reading this, you would say, no, these are my thoughts. I'm reading it. This is somebody else's thoughts I'm reading, right? but
00:09:00
Speaker
Subconsciously, the feeling tone of that is the same as reading your own thoughts. Energetically, they're indistinguishable. They're like there are these butterflies that have figured out how to smell like ants. And so when the ants find the little baby butterflies, instead of eating them, the ants take them into their nest and they feed them. So energetically, Facebook comments bypass our defense mechanisms and lodging our minds as our own thoughts. And so it gives us this, so it gives us this kind of psychic poisoning.
00:09:41
Speaker
Or maybe poisoning is too strong, but it's, it's like the psychic equivalent of drinking and it's okay to drink some a little bit sometimes and then give your body an opportunity to process it and clean it out. But when you're drinking all of the time, it starts to be corrosive and it starts to be more than your body can handle. And I think that there is ah an analogous thing happening psychically with this written social media.
AI's Role in Creativity
00:10:09
Speaker
Okay. Now we're going to talk about AI. This podcast is about the thing that I'm going to say now. And it was inspired by a Facebook friend, ironically, ah Christina, who was talking about AI. and
00:10:23
Speaker
her displeasure with it. And she asked some question about people's experience with AI. I forget the exactly, but and I gave a one line answer to them, which this is me now expanding on. But then I want to shout out another friend, it's Kevin. Shout out to Kevin, who was clamoring. He was asking me when's the next episode coming. But he has also expressed that he's not interested in that AI stuff. So Kevin, I hope you got this far. And ah you should be interested in the AI stuff. It's it's very important. And it's important because of what it illuminates about consciousness. That's what makes it so interesting for me.
00:10:58
Speaker
Okay, AI, we're gonna talk about generative AI that creates images specifically. There's other stuff going on, but ah images and and video footage actually. So this is this is like your um mid journeys and your Dali and stuff like that. If you haven't seen, you just you've definitely seen what this stuff is doing. If you haven't haven't played with it, it's worth playing with. It's worth going, i you know you can play with mid journey for free. I think you can play with Dali for free. It's worth playing with and just, getting a sense of what the technology is about, what it can do. Cause it can do some stuff and it's actually kind of impressive. So that's the first thing I want to say is that like, we're impressed by it. Like you see these images and you're like, whoa. And if you're not impressed by it, you're, you're doing one of two things, I would say.
00:11:46
Speaker
I'm not saying you have to like it, but but I think you you you're you're missing something or being disent disingenuous if you are not impressed by it. So if you're not impressed by it, I think you're doing one of two things. Either you're not paying close enough attention to what's happening and what it's doing and you haven't played with it. You should play with it and then you will be impressed by it. Or you're kind of posturing because you don't like it and you don't like the implications and there's something that feels bad about it. Now, I don't like it. I don't really like the implications, some of them, and there's something that feels bad about it. So I feel those ways, but I think you can hold both of those. You can be impressed with what it does as well as being uneasy about what it is and what it doesn't do. And what is impressive, what's impressive is it's really good at surfaces.
00:12:38
Speaker
and surfaces are easy to see. And so we see these surfaces and it's easy for us to see that this thing is, you know, it can make a drawing in seconds that I will never be able to make as good of a surface. I'll never be be able to do a human face as good as that. Or I don't know about never, but I probably, not i I won't, you know, I can draw a little bit and I've spent some time drawing and there's no way and it can do it in seconds. What would take me hours and hours and hours and wouldn't be as good of a surface. It wouldn't be as good of a representation of this thing.
00:13:17
Speaker
And so, and including styles, it can, it can mimic people's styles, right, as well. And again, it does a decent job of mimicking the style, just the style, the tone, or the kind of like that. Then people are getting really excited because of how good it's doing these surfaces. And we're like, well, I'm not good at that. And it's really good at that. So it must be capable of what everything that we can do. It's so close to just being this general AI, to being this kind of super intelligent being that's like a human being only smarter and better at everything. And we do that because it's how good it is at making these surfaces. But this is like the story. So there this is Muslim folk hero, Mullah Nazardin.
00:14:02
Speaker
this kind of like wise fool character. And ah there's a story about him that you probably know. I'm just going to tell it very briefly. He's there. He's he's rooting around under a lamp. It's nighttime. He's rooting around under a lamp. And his friend comes over and says, what are you doing? And Mullah Nasruddin says, I'm looking for my keys. I'm locked out of my house. I'm looking for my keys. And his friend says, okay, so you drop them somewhere around here. And Moolah Nasruddin says, well, no, I dropped them way down the street over there, but this is where the light is. And surface is where the light is. And so it's easy to find surface and the AI. So that's, this is kind of part of what's happening is we're like, Oh my God, it's so good at this surfaces. And it has no depth.
00:14:51
Speaker
So this is what's missing. And so we see it and we we we say, Oh my God, it's extraordinary, but it has become extraordinary just at surfaces. And that valuing of surfaces is a distortion. We're valuing surfaces because that's where the light is because it's easy to see, but there's also depths and depths are hard to see.
00:15:21
Speaker
That's just like you have to feel depths and feeling comes slower than seeing. And you can be wrong. It's easier to be wrong. Like when, when the AI makes a face just looks exactly like a human being face. That's easy to say, well, that's good. I can see why, you know, I can see that's, that's effective. When a Zen master makes a painting, which is just a single brushstroke and it's just a circle. Or Rothko makes this wall of color. And you look at that and you're like, I don't know. Is that good? Is that not, you can't just use your eyes. It's weird to say about a piece of art, but you can't just use your eyes to understand what's happening with that art. That's how a Rothko works. And it's so funny because you get Rothko on the internet and it's these like two foot by one foot image of some red and black.
00:16:20
Speaker
And it doesn't do anything. It doesn't communicate anything. And you're like, hu you know this is a famous painting. I don't know why. And you sit in front of a Rothko and it transmits something. There is a depth. You know, and you you might be following one or two camps here. yeah There's many camps, but like, let's just pretend there are two camps here. There's one, there's people like, Oh yeah. Amen, brother. Like tell me about that. I know about this depth, you know, hallelujah. Right. And then there are people like, what are you talking about? well Like, what, what do you mean by depth? Like that just seems like, like a kind of woo woo vague, unexplained concept. And I'm not going to go into like a huge amount of detail about depth.
00:16:57
Speaker
here because it will take us a little bit off track. I will soon make an episode about consciousness while going to depth in great depth. But for now, I'll just give you this. This is what I'm talking about when I talk about that. This is a line it's attributed to Ibn Arabi, who is a Sufi um mystic. So this is this is talking about that God sleeps in the rock. dreams in the plant, studs in the animal, and awakens in man. God sleeps in the rock, dreams in the plant, studs in the animal, and awakens in man. And you could replace God with depth.
00:17:43
Speaker
And it would be saying the same thing. Depth sleeps in the rock, dreams in the plant, stirs in the animal, and awakens in man. It's not as good. It's better when you say God. But for the purposes of this, this is what I'm talking about. I always say depth. It's a shame that that quote ends in man. This part of why I was looking up trying to find the original, like, did he say man? What did he say? um It's a whole tangent, but it's a shame that we don't have a better word for man as in mankind than.
00:18:17
Speaker
man we do have other words for it but none of them are as good as man it's just but it's sexist and that's annoying because poetically it's very satisfying but it's sexist gotta get in this it's it's it's uh it it annoys me very much can't you say humanity it's not as poetic you say mankind is not as poetic and it's also sexy i guess you say people it's not as poetic you god awakens in man anyway i'm sorry about that ah sexist detail of the English language. So that's what I'm talking about when I'm talking about depth and we will pass over that without saying more today.
00:18:55
Speaker
Okay. All this surface stuff is an expression of postmodernism. So micro art history review here, there was pre-modern art. There was a lot of stuff, the Renaissance, like everything that just the Renaissance, a lot of stuff, everything everything that happened before the 20th century would be considered pre-modern. You know, it's mostly, it's either people doing religious paintings and, or just kind of naturalistic trying to paint the things that they see around them. in as realistic a way as they could muster, which got better and better as the years went on. And we figured out more and more how to do that. That's pre-modern. Then you get modernism. And in modernism, people started to say, you know the that art ah the function of art is to transmit some universal truth. It's to go beyond these kind of details of these individual things. It's it's not about photo realism photorealism, especially when the camera photo realism, when the camera came,
00:19:52
Speaker
ah Painting it's like well, that's not that interesting anymore. It's not that interesting to do photorealistic painting me some people still do it and it's great It's very difficult thing to do but it's not as like creatively interesting for so many people anymore because now we just have a machine that can kind of do that and so So artists started to explore. Well, what's missing from those representations that there's actually, you know, where in a photograph and a photograph is still be beautiful. But like what's missing in that? And so they started to go from that surface into the depths and they started to look for, we want to be able to communicate something that is an ultimate truth or a foundational truth. Like we want to make something which is purely beautiful and to to be an exemplar of beauty.
00:20:45
Speaker
And so they so that's kind of what they were reaching for in this kind of modernism. And then you get post-modernism. And post-modernism is a very complicated thing. A lot of people have talked about post-modernism a lot, especially in the last few years. It's become ah understood as this value system. You have people talk about post-modern neo-Marxism and you know criticizing it through that lens and just like not liking post-modernism at all, wanting to go back to kind of a previous stage. Post-modernism originally, well, Kind of feels like there's two threads and I don't totally understand how they interact. But one, it was the term was coined by an architect to talk about architecture.
00:21:24
Speaker
But there's also this thread in philosophy, which is kind of describing this condition. And the condition is one of this kind of media saturation and that we've we have become, the the images become symbols and that, and also that like everything is relative. And so you can't reach the, the modern project of reaching for this kind of ultimate ground or this ultimate kind of pure truth is fundamentally impossible. And so then what the postmodern postmodernism in art and and visual art did is it kind of went the exact opposite direction. It said you actually can't do that. And so instead, let's do surfaces. And so you have Andy Warhol, right? Or you have ah <unk> Lichtenstein that did these big paintings of these
00:22:08
Speaker
comic book strips. And then in in cinema, you often get these kind of very self-referential, self-aware, like movies that knew they were movies and were talking about movies. So Scream, right? Scream is a kind of fundamentally postmodern idea where it's people, it's a horror movie about people that have seen horror movies and know the conventions, but they're still living in a world where those conventions are happening. And so they're kind of interacting with this thing. It's this weird, you know, or like Deadpool, right? If you've seen the Deadpool movies where He's turning to the screen and he's kinda, you know, he's he's telling you about, he knows he's in a movie and he's telling you about a movie, right? so and And what all these things have in common is that they're about symbols and surfaces.
00:22:55
Speaker
and these kinds of interactions interactions between symbols and surfaces. You'll notice if you look at the best things that people have done with the AI out so far, the best things that the people have done, as far as I can tell. with the AI is these are these postmodern mashups. So it's stuff like it's Harry Potter if they were dressed in Balenciaga, right? It's Dune directed by Wes Anderson. It's The Simpsons, but as a real flesh and blood 50 sitcom, which is this one is like super dense because The Simpsons was kind of a pastiche of those 50 sitcoms.
00:23:32
Speaker
Actually, in this example, you'd think that that would reduce the layers of iron. It almost does. If it doesn't, you can see the layers and they're faded over. They're like the mocks on a door that had stickers on it and then you peel it off. They're good. They're kind of entertaining. But here's the thing, a human artist had to do that, right? Like the thing that's interesting about them is the juxtaposition is is literally the thing that the AI didn't do. The AI just did what it was told. It was the artist that said, what if we get the Harry Potter characters and then we have them like dressed as Balenciaga models. And that's, you know, that's a fun idea. But the death came at the from the human. and And then what the AI did is it said, Oh, I understand about those surfaces. Let me just arrange those symbols and those surfaces. Right. So yeah, discarding all depth and all attempts at meaning postman art, instead dealt with combining surfaces. And so
00:24:29
Speaker
Generative AI art is the ultimate expression of this. It's the ultimate expression of this kind of post-modern project. So each image, if you don't know the way that generative AI works, is you show it just like every image that's ever been made. I mean, not quite, but you show it just an insane amount of images and you show it over and over again and This is the training. And while you're training it, you're saying, and this is why these things cost so much money and people can't kind of make them by themselves. Cause it actually takes like hundreds of thousands of hours to do this or hundreds of thousands of computer hours, but you're showing you these images over and over again, all different images.
The Psychic Noise of AI Art
00:25:08
Speaker
And then you show it a kind of corrupted version of the image. You say, try and fill in the gaps. And as it trains, you you reward it when it's better at filling in the gaps and you punish it when it was, and it gradually learns how to produce.
00:25:20
Speaker
from noise, each of these millions and millions of images. And so then when you ask it to produce a particular image, it's like it's filtering down. This is not really what's happening, but it's kind of like it's filtering down from every image ever made to to create a synthesis of a recombination of all of these surfaces. to create a surface which looks to it like the prompt that you gave it. So in in a sense, each image generated by AI is a recombination of every image ever made. So now I'm going to tell you an experience I had. And I had the experience. I didn't have this thought and then have the experience.
00:26:01
Speaker
The thought that I just shared was me making sense of the experience. And the experience was I started looking at all these AI images, just you know posted online. I played with it myself for a while. I started to notice feeling nauseated, feeling a nausea when I would see an AI generated image. There was literally something in my system that started to feel queasy. Like literally, I mean, literally physically nauseous or nauseated. I think this is why I think it's the same feeling that I was having in that bathroom in Berlin that is being flooded with the psychic emanations of too many people. And what's weird is that the in the images is not like in an AI image, it's obvious in the same way.
00:26:56
Speaker
That in that bathroom, it was obvious. This is like a thousand images made by a thousand different people combined with no rhyme or reason. And I'm just being flooded by them with the AI image. The surface of the AI image is a particular surface and it's a great surface. They do really good. We've talked about that, but where there should be depth. There is instead just this intense, hyper dense psychic noise of every image that's ever been created, but just a tiny little drop of each one. And when an artist makes a piece of art.
00:27:36
Speaker
Part of what they're doing is distilling, they're clarifying, and they're they're finding a depth which which has some coherence and it kind of lines up in some direction so that you can actually penetrate it a little bit and you can resonate in this space. Like when you say depth, there's a space. So there's actually a space within the piece of art that allows your psyche, your energy to enter it and and move through it and resonate and then kind of come back having visited. With the AI art, you say, well, there's a surface and then you you psychically try and enter the depth and instead it's just noise back there. There's no space. There's no refinement. There's no distillation. There's just pure static.
00:28:30
Speaker
And so then if you do that and then you come back, instead of kind of having explored some new space, it's like you just got blasted with like unrefined energetic noise. and it it gives me nausea. I'm curious for other people to to just pay attention to this. I mean, I might just be making all this up. You know, who fucking knows? Like maybe I just don't like it and I'm having, taking against it and having a bad feeling, but it doesn't feel like that. It it felt distinct. I wasn't expecting, i you know, I came to a point where I stopped liking it, but why don't I like it? why It gives me a particular feeling. Well, what's the bad feeling it gives me? It's nausea.
00:29:10
Speaker
it's It's subtle. I mean, I'm not like going to go throw up, but i it's but that's what it feels like. And so without this process that artists do with this distillation and this clarification, and the ah and whats what's interesting is you know an artist can make a ah piece that's visually incredibly noisy, but that has consciousness in it nonetheless, that has depth in it nonetheless. um But without this process, when you get this generative art, unfiltered that has like one little drop of every single image that's ever been made in it. It allows this accumulated psychic energy of everything to leak through and it's a, it's a psychic poisoning. So I think we are being psychically poisoned by this AI art. And this was what ah my Facebook friend said.
00:30:06
Speaker
is she said she was looking forward to when we start having AI free spaces, which will surely come. And I wholeheartedly agree that we need that for our psychic hygiene when spending time online. Okay. One more thought. So if you don't know, a few years ago, uh, me and my wife, Lindsay made a few episodes of a podcast, I think 10 in total, something like that, about 10 podcasts was called how to be an okay person. And, uh, it's great. I really like it for complicated reasons. We stopped making it, but it's out there. If you don't know about it and you like what I'm doing here, you should Google how to be an okay person. You should be able to find it or look it up in your podcast player.
00:30:51
Speaker
And ah enjoy it's different vibe, but it's good. There was a live episode. We recorded a live episode, which is long lost. it's I actually, I surely have the audio somewhere. way We went to a studio, we rented a studio and recorded with a live audience. You know, maybe like 20 people showed up. We said a bunch of stuff. It was about the the the gimmick of how to be an okay person was every episode was called the something. So it was like the grid, the bells.
00:31:25
Speaker
um The simulations, which was the first one that got a little bit awkward. And then later, I think we kind of gave it up a little bit later, but this one was called the juice. No, the sauce. Not the juice, the sauce. And but I still have to talk about the sauce at some point. The sauce is a great idea. We talked about it. Maybe I'll find maybe this will inspire me to go find an edit. i I was overwhelmed by the edit because there we hit there were a lot of mics. And so it's just anyway. ah But there's a live song we we improvise a live song at the end like literally improvise a live song at the end of the show ah Anyway, one of the things that we talked about in there and this was you know, maybe
00:32:04
Speaker
five years ago, something like that, is I said, you know, and at this time, yeah because this is pre any of this generative AI being kind of big and mainstream, but what we did have was Google in Gmail had started auto completing your sentences if you wanted. And I'm sure if you've used Gmail, you've seen this and I'm sure other email programs have a version of this. You're typing a sentence and it anticipates what the rest of the sentence is gonna be. And so then and then you can hit tab or something and it'll finish the sentence. And in that episode, I said, don't let it, don't let it finish your sentences. And what I do when it tries to finish my sentence is I deliberately find a different way of saying the thing that I'm trying to say. And what's annoying is then it'll try and figure out, oh, oh, you're going to that way? Okay, let me finish that sentence. And so, you know, at some point you have to give up and just, you know, sometimes you can do it. You can say in a sentence that it does not predict at all.
00:33:03
Speaker
But other times you have to, you know, but i'll I'll at least not take the first one. Somebody pointed ahead to me. I was talking to a friend about this recently. Ben, another shout out to a friend. We were talking about this and he kind of pointed out this is a little bit like email volume privilege. I don't have to send that many emails so I can get away with this. I think if your job involves sending a lot of emails, you probably, you know you might want to fight it on a different front, um but but I just want to talk about why That is, because it feels very important to me. Why it's important to me is because it's about poetry. So I want to talk about poetry a little bit. When I say poetry, I think there's a kind of like a conventional understanding that what poetry is, is it's it's the act of writing poem poems. Poems are these cultural artifacts. They're a short piece of language that in some ways heightened compared to natural conversation.
00:33:57
Speaker
or prose, it's this it's in some way heightened. For some people there are even more constraints, like it has to rhyme, or it should have some particular particular rhythmic pattern, some number of syllables, something like that. ah you know So these are formal constraints on the language. But even if you wanted a free verse and you don't care about these particular constraints, there's still a sense that like what a poem is is this kind of heightened language. And what poetry is is the act of writing poems, the act of producing these cultural artifacts. So I think that is a too limited understanding of poetry. And what poetry really is, is something that we all do to some extent. It's a very basic human activity. And poetry is the work of saying something for the first time.
00:34:54
Speaker
Poetry is the act of of making new language. And so formal poets are people that are pursuing the creation of new language as a goal. But we are all using language all the time. And sometimes we're using new language and sometimes we're using recycled language. So, you know, a lot of times we're saying things that we heard somebody else say, and we're just kind of repeating it. Or we're saying something that we said in the past and we're just saying it again because we like the way it sounded or kind of communicated something well that last time. And that's fine. And there are conveniences and, you know, you want to do both things. There are benign examples of this. We do it all the time, like literally all the language we use in some senses, other people's language, because you learn language from other people, right? Like,
00:35:41
Speaker
You're not born with your own language born with other people's language but then you do this thing that that artists do right like you do this thing where you synthesize so much input and then you find a way. To create a new output which has a new depth in it a new space in your consciousness. So it's not really other people's language. Like at some point you can make it your own. And sometimes you still do use other people's language and that's fine. Right. And you say, Hey, how's it going? Like I say, Hey, how's it going to people? A lot of times I didn't come up with those words. I don't need to have my own idiosyncratic way of saying, Hey, how's, how's it going? Hey, how's it going? It's perfectly fine piece of language. There are less benign.
00:36:23
Speaker
expressions of this like when people are indoctrinated in some set of ideas and you can kind of feel when they're just repeating the doctrine. And the doctrine is other people's language and they're just kind of repeating it wholesale. And there's something distasteful about that. And there's something kind of untrustworthy about that, especially when the ideas are big or there's a lot of them, but we can start to feel like this doesn't feel just as, as innocent as saying, Hey, how's it going? It starts to feel more like a brain virus. We're not going to go more into that, but, uh, it starts to feel more like.
00:37:04
Speaker
There is some larger entity that is putting its fingers up people's butts and moving their mouths. That's ah that's a topic for another day maybe, but but just notice that difference. So every time that you speak is an opportunity for poetry. And I mean, that I don't mean like it has to be pretty. Like I don't mean that it has to be like purple or like flowery or elaborate or using really long words or rhyming or any, it's not like that. It's just, you get to say something for the first time.
00:37:39
Speaker
Because every time you speak is a brand new moment and really the truth of this moment is its own unique truth and you get to say whatever it is that you're saying in this moment about this moment from this moment for this moment you get to say it for the first time. And even in an email, even in a work email, that's like not really a big deal, you get the choice to say something for the first time. And what what Google auto completing your sentences for is it says, don't worry about that. We'll say it for you. We'll say it for you and you can get on with something more important. I actually think it is important, even if it doesn't, even if it's not important, like to be given the choice.
00:38:27
Speaker
right and And you know, more and more with this AI stuff, and this is before I like this, this autocomplete thing predates the generative AI with the generative language AI more and more. The language that's passing between people is going to be someone saying, Hey, here's, here's the bullet points I want to hit. Like, please express this in language. And then the AI goes and says it. And even if the configuration of words that the AI is putting together has never existed before in time, that's different from saying something
The Essence of Poetry and AI
00:38:59
Speaker
for the first time because it's not really saying anything. It's just arranging words.
00:39:09
Speaker
It seems like a subtle difference. I really think there's a real proper difference in there. And then what's going to happen is the AI is going to produce the words and then, you know, the email is going to come over to to to the recipient and the recipient is going to have their own AI. And they're going to say, Hey, will you synopsize this for me? And then hey, I will consume it and return it back to those bullet points that the producer, uh, provided to their AI. And all of this is happening where the act of creating language is being taken from people. I just think that's tragic. I actually think that's really bad news. And we need to fight to keep that territory. And so that's why I say don't let Google autocomplete your sentences and find opportunities to say things for the first time in your words.
00:40:01
Speaker
because it's actually a way that you connect your soul with the world. And that's really important. That's what we want to be doing. That's what life is for. And so these moments of poetry are moments where you get to connect your soul, your depth to the world. And don't give up those opportunities lightly. Don't cede that ground to machine.
00:40:39
Speaker
Okay, that's what I wanted to say today. I hope you enjoy it. I have a little kind of business here at the end. Please let me know what you think. You can reach me if you go to partoflions.com. There's going to be contact information there. I'd love to hear from you. Give me your thoughts. If if ah if you saw this on social media, you can respond there. even though I talked about how it's bad news, but it's still better. It's good to be connected. It's still better than nothing. And just, you know, don't do too much, just a little bit. But this is a good cause to come to social media for. I would just love to hear your thoughts about this, hear how it's impacted you, hear how you disagree. Get in a fight with me about it or say, hey, man, how are you? This is the right stuff. So be in touch.
00:41:17
Speaker
Expect more podcast episodes. I know I took a long break. I had other stuff that I was doing. I still have other stuff that I'm doing, but I'm um' carving out some space to make some podcast episodes because I think it's good. It's good for me. It's good for you. And it's good for the world. So that's what I'm going to end with. I hope you're having a lovely day. Thank you so much for listening. Until next time, be well.
00:41:51
Speaker
you