AI Is a Mirror in Which We See Our Own Reflection

AI is not so much a tool that everyone uses in more or less the same way, but a mirror in which we see our own reflection--if we care to look.

Attention has been riveted on what AI can do for the three years since the unveiling of ChatGPT, but very little attention has been paid to what the human user is bringing to the exchange.

If we pay close attention to what the human brings to the exchange, we find that AI is not so much a tool that everyone uses in more or less the same way, but a mirror in which we see our own reflection--if we care to look, and we might not, for what AI reflects may well be troubling.

What we see in the AI mirror reflects the entirety of our knowledge, our emotional state and our yearnings.

Those who understand generative AI is nothing more than "auto-complete on steroids" (thank you, Simon), a probability-based program, may well be impressed with the illusion of understanding it creates via its mastery of natural language and human-written texts, but it's understood as a magic trick, not actual intelligence or caring.

In other words, to seek friendship in AI demands suspending our awareness that it's been programmed to create a near-perfect illusion of intelligence and caring. As I noted earlier this week, this is the exact same mechanism the con artist uses to gain the trust and emotional bonding of their target (mark).

What we seek from AI reflects our economic sphere and our goals--what we call "work"--but it also reflects the entirety of our emotional state--unresolved conflicts, dissatisfaction with ourselves and life, alienation, loneliness, ennui, and so on, and our intellectual state.

Those obsessed with using AI to improve their "work flows" might see, if they chose to look carefully, an over-scheduled way of life that's less about accomplishment--what we tell ourselves--and more about a hamster-wheel of BS work, symbolic value and signaling to others and ourselves: we're busy, so we're valuable.

Those seeking a wise friend, counselor or romantic partner in AI are reflecting a profound hollowness in their human relationships, and a set of expectations that are unrealistic and lacking in introspection.

Those seeking intellectual stimulation will find wormholes into the entirety of human knowledge, for what's difficult for humans--seeking and applying patterns and connections to complex realms--AI does easily, and so we're astonished and enamored by its facility with complex ideas.

The more astute the human's queries and prompts, the deeper the AI's response, for the AI mirrors the human user's knowledge and state of mind.

So the student who knows virtually nothing about hermeneutics--the art of interpreting texts, symbols, images, film, etc.--might ask for an explanation that summarizes the basic mechanisms of hermeneutics.

Someone with deep knowledge of philosophy and hermeneutics will ask far more specific and more analytically acute questions, for example, prompting AI to compare and contrast Marxist hermeneutics and postmodern hermeneutics. The AI's response may well be a word salad, but because the human has a deep understanding of the field, they may discern something in the AI's response that they find insightful, for it triggered a new connection in their own mind.

This is important to understand: the AI did not generate the insight, though the human reckons it did because the phrase struck the human as insightful. The insight arose in the human mind due to its deep knowledge of the field. The student simply trying to complete a college paper might see the exact same phrase and find it of little relevance or value.

To an objective observer, it may well be a word salad, meaning that the appearance of coherence wasn't real, it was generated by the human with deep knowledge of the field, who automatically skipped over the inconsequential bits and pieced together the bits that were only meaningful because of their own expertise.

What matters isn't what AI auto-completes; what matters is our interpretation of the AI output, what we read into it, and what it sparks in our own mind. (This is the hermeneutics of interacting with AI.)

This explains why the few people I personally know who have taken lengthy, nuanced dives into AI and found real value are in their 50s, meaning that they have a deep well of lived experience and a broad awareness of many fields. They have the knowledge to make sense of whatever AI spits out on a deeper level of interpretation that the neophyte or scattered student.

In other words, the magic isn't in what AI spits out; the magic is in what we piece together in our own minds from what AI generated.

As many are coming to grasp, this is equally true in the emotional realm. To an individual with an identity and sense of self that comes from within, that isn't dependent on status or what others think or value, the idea of engaging a computer programmed to slather us with flattery is not just unappealing, it's disturbing because it's so obviously the same mechanism used by con artists.

To the secure individual, the first question that arises when AI heaps on the praise and artifice of caring is: what's the con?

What the emotionally needy individual sees as empathy and affirmation--because this is what they lack within themselves and therefore what they crave--the emotionally secure individual sees as fake, inauthentic and potentially manipulative, a reflection not just of neediness but of a narcissism that reflects a culture of unrealistic expectations and narcissistic involution.

In other words, what we seek from AI reflects our entire culture, a culture stripped of authentic purpose and meaning, emotionally threadbare, pursuing empty obsessions with status and attention-seeking, a culture of social connections so weak and fragile that we turn to auto-complete programs for solace, comfort, connection and insight.

In AI, we're looking at a mirror that reflects ourselves and our ultra-processed culture, a zeitgeist of empty calories and manic distractions that foster a state of mind that is both harried and bored, hyper-aware of superficialities and blind to what the AI mirror is reflecting about us.



What do we see in the AI mirror? Do we see what we seek, what we long for, or what we don't want to see because it's a dis-ease we fear to recognize?

What's insightful isn't AI's responses. It's how we interpret those responses without being self-aware of our own interpretations that's insightful.



Of related interest:

Artificial Intimacy: The Next Giant Social Experiment on Children

Why You Can't Trust a Chatbot to Talk About Itself


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