Dear Sender,
I'm very sorry, but I strongly want to suggest to you that you are experiencing a loss of individuality through over dependence on a corporate technology.
This is how generative AI works:
- A corporation steals or buys immense amounts of data, and then trains a "foundation model" on that data to predict what the average thing to say next in a context would be.
- Those models are super fun and interesting, but will also say dangerous or harmful things. So corporations create a facade of human-likeness in both interactions and politeness by paying humans to train additional data "attractors" usually called "guard rails." These basically make it more likely you'll get your predicted text from an appropriate part of the foundation model. They can also be programmed to do other things like websearches to get more up to date information.
- Then the corporation keeps some data about you and your interactions, and starts customising the text predictions so that they not only are influenced by your immediate prompts, but by things you've said before, and maybe that other people like you have seen before.
So basically, "your" AI is by no means your own. It is a small interface onto a giant library that has been customised for you. There are millions or even billions of other interfaces onto that same foundation model, all built for people like you, but sharing the same "mind", the same database, except for a very small bit of data special to your history.
It's kind of like seeing a reflection of yourself in an augmented-reality magic mirror, that mixes you, some kind of average of some society's culture, and the guardrails that company has decided are suitable for you. You are sacrificing your agency to the corporation in exchange for access to cool synthesised fractions of the foundation model's inputs. Lots of other people are having the same experience, but not that many interpret them the way you do.
I'd like to urge you to read my other blogpost, Generative AI use and human agency. It has 12 bullets to help you think about how to use AI in a way where you maintain your own agency. That will help you and the rest of society, because we are all better off if we can all know and understand our responsibilities to each other, and for what we create.
yours,
Joanna
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