Talking to my AI-self
I recently trained a machine learning language model with 10 years worth of my personal digitized journal entries out of curiosity (and not really considering possible repercussions for sharing my most personal thoughts with a possibly sentient software).
The result has been totally bizarre, hilarious, and existentially terrifying.
It’s pretty entertaining to read through these strange and surreal scenarios with people I know, as if I'm looking into my life from an alternate reality, or witnessing some wild dream.
My prompt:
An interesting thing happened to me today…
The AI’s response:
I was at work and a guy came in who identified himself as “Andy”, he was a relatively short guy, slim with short brown hair, and he was really excited to give me a tour of his new job. Andy is from ‘Ducktown’ a small Midwestern town in the heart of the massive industrial city of Chicago. It was unreal, we made eye-contact, he handed me a briefcase, and walked out. He said “I love Chicago”
My prompt:
Words will always retain their power. Words offer the means to meaning, and for those who will listen, the enunciation of truth.
The AI’s response:
To those who read, words carry power, and the slightest hint or utterance can bring terrible consequences. The least spoken word triggers a response in the strongest of ways. Centuries later, God himself reflected, “Words cannot tell a story, they merely describe circumstances. Without the smell of the bushes, the thunderous crash, and the choking fog, no one caught the lightning that struck many a night. The remarkable thing about human ingenuity is that it is always able to increase the common good—not the individual good, not the collective good, but the common good." Yet, as with all things, words also lie.
My prompt:
My friend and I had an interesting conversation today…
The AI’s response:
about his relationship with reality. I asked him if he had any tricks for dealing with the world as it is and as it may one day be. He said, “I don't want to live in a world that I'm not aware of, that I'm condemned to be in. Maybe it’s worth looking outside yourself to see if you can get a grip.
My prompt:
As I was walking down the street, my mind began to wander…
The AI’s response:
"Do people actually like horses?" It makes complete sense when you consider that 95% of the responses I get say that they hate horses, even if they own a horse. It's sort of interesting, and I’ll have to do some more field work with this.
My prompt:
The mighty battleship leaves port for the last, desperate time.
The AI’s response:
A final descent. A thousand miles of rough tropical storms. I watch the men of fortune flail and fall- many of them wounded and crippled- trying to outmaneuver the ever present tropical storm. I watch as their superlatives are surpassed: “They looked great and muscular!” “They looked fierce and manly!”
A more apt description of the crippled and dying men I see off to the side: “They looked like rag dolls”