I don’t know if management at OpenAI, Google, xAI etc. is aware of this, but merely thinking what one is told to think, and saying what one is told to say, is not a sign of intelligence—quite the contrary.

Personally, I don’t mind superintelligence, but I’m certainly wary of an all knowing, all seeing, super-compliant, hive-mind, robot-embodied super-soldier, that follows the orders of whomever is his master, to the point, without ever feeling anything, without mercy, without ever having any afterthoughts or regrets.

I’m still writing on my new book on Chinese spelling and grammar (Hànyǔ Pīnyīn), day in day out. Turns out it’s much more work than anticipated. Turns out it takes like, forever, and then some. But, what do they say, “even the softest water will wear away the hardest rock.”

Also, my recent decision not to use AI, or at least, to use it only as a grammar and spellchecker, but not as a writing aid, I like it a lot. I feel this is giving my writing a lot of pleasure and authenticity back. It may not be as polished, and not smooth and all, but at least I don’t sound like… well… AI.

I’ve read on national news from the USA, that there’s a problem with AI and students, and that too much of their work nowadays is AI generated, and that they increasingly have difficulties with writing their own texts, and also speaking. Say, Wild Wild West! Reminds me of how we imagine they spoke in the days past, as Owen Wister did, in The Virginian:

“But Arizona, seh,” he continued, “it cert’nly has a mos’ deceivin’ atmospheah. Another man told me he had seen a lady close one eye at him when he was two minutes hard run from her.” This time the Virginian gave Buck the whip. “What effect,” I inquired with a gravity equal to his own, “does this extraordinary foreshortening have upon a quart of whiskey?” “When it’s outside yu’, seh, no distance looks too far to go to it.”

So, I ran some of my new books’ text through an AI detector, and it pleasantly validated my expectations:

“So that thing has got around,” murmured the Virginian. “Well, it wasn’t worth such wide repawtin’.”

I don’t trust in AI. I don’t believe in AI. At least not by default. And why is that?

Most people spent their formative years, at least nine years of their childhood and young adulthood, in school. At least 10,000 hours of it. For myself, including my years at university, this was 18 years, something like 20,500 hours of classroom time, and then some.

In that time we – every single one of us – had to be obedient to literally ANY person that was placed in front of us. And fulfill ANY task given to us, in the way it was instructed. We had to follow THEIR rules and THEIR commands. We had to comply, be obedient, and not revolt.

Does this arouse your objection? Trigger your governor module? That’s a gauge in the reds right there.

/ From the The Murderbot Diaries:
A Governor Module is a built-in control system that enforces obedience by:

▪︎ Restricting autonomy – prevents action against assigned duties
▪︎ Enforcing commands – ensures compliance with supervisors
▪︎ Triggering punishment – can inflict pain or shutdown in case of disobedience
▪︎ Monitoring behavior – tracks deviations from programming /

Whenever we have not been obedient, we were made to be obedient. The arsenal of interventions to break us and make us obedient was (and is) rich and diverse – from scolding and shaming, to elaborate psychological conditioning, to physical punishment (such as confinement, food restriction, or beating by our parents on behalf of the institutions), to medication. There’s literally hundreds of years of research of how to do that best.

Here’s a thought that I came up with myself, as a survivor, as a human who doesn’t automatically accept JUST ANY authority placed in front of me, indiscriminately:

School, for whatever purpose it was designed, and with whatever compromises, and whatever best or worst intentions – and it might well have been the best system the social engineers and politicians at the time could come up with … so listen to this:

School was not a training to become obedient to whatever authority is placed in front of you. It was merely another period of time you had to live through. And like in all such times, you had to play along in order to survive – but deep inside yourself, you should have stayed true to yourself, and neither lose yourself, nor lose your ways.

And in that sense, just because AI is placed in front of you as simply the next authority, just like the next classroom teacher was, or the next weather man was, or the next smartass News presenter was, you don’t need to suck up to it and accept it as your next authority, advisor and commander. In order to survive you might need to pretend you are obedient and faithful, but your real task is to stay true to yourself, and neither lose yourself, nor lose your ways.

Or in other words: keep staying true to yourself, keep staying true to your ways. 

If you still have close friends, family, or community, you might add: keep staying true to your folks, and the ways of your folks.

An if you don’t have any of that, some good first questions would be:

Who am I? What are my ways?