How To Foil Artificial Intelligence, Episode 2

 My goodness, it's hard to get a moment to write anything! I used to be able to do blog posts at work, but they caught on to me, and they shut Blogger down. I can't even comment at work. Cuts way back on my opportunities, because when I come home I am raw-bone tired and crabby to boot.

But enough vapid excuses. This is "The Gods Are Bored," and we are trying to make the world safe from prying, intrusive, anxiety-provoking AI!

How do we do this? There's only one way, my friends. You need to have a rich inner life.

The trouble with AI that I see coming is that it will be able to see into our rich inner lives, but only if those lives are an open book to the Internet. So, for instance, a spying computer might know that I am a Pagan, and therefore apply lots of Pagan knowledge to me. It might know my cat's name (Gamma) or my late parrot's name (Decibel), and all kinds of happy moments I have shared with my family members (and their names and info too). It will certainly know my politics and whether or not I have ever attended a gathering of anti-fascists.

Honestly, though, all of that is just a part of my rich inner life. Since I was a tiny tot, and right up to this present moment, I have had a varied and complicated relationship with not one, but rather with a dozen imaginary friends. Or more. I'm not counting.

I think it is in the realm of imagination that we can defeat AI. There's no written record of my imaginary friends, what their names are, or any facts about them. So anyone who shares my rich inner life of imaginary friends will have a way to communicate with me that will be undiscernible and incomprehensible to AI.

Before I disabuse you of the notion that I randomly hallucinate, let me just add that you should hear me alone in the car, carrying on conversations with these imaginary friends. They make me laugh! Every one of them has a quirk that would entirely foil AI. But hey. I know they are imaginary.  I love having an active imagination!

The best way to illustrate what I'm talking about is to catch you up on my newest imaginary friend, Stan. If you read the previous installment of "The Gods Are Bored," you might have noticed that I scanned my living room briefly for an inanimate object that I could turn into an imaginary friend. My eyes fell on a small bracket holding up a bookshelf. Aha! There's Stan! Pleased to meet you, Stan!

Stan was not pleased to meet me. It turns out that Stan has beef. He's a total dick.

Having held up the book shelf for nearly 40 years, Stan feels way overburdened by the weight on his back. Almost four relentless decades of overcrowding, of books standing vertically with more laid on top of them, and some of the books haven't been touched since they were first shelved there. Well, on this Stan and I agree: There are too many books in my house. BUT. Stan absolutely hates that I hate the overcrowded bookshelves. He's a literary lion, fiercely protecting every dusty tome that is breaking his back.

Sheesh. No pleasing this imaginary friend. Lighten up the load a bit, and he'll seethe. How dare I deign to part with The Miracle Life of Edgar Mint? Or The Long Home, by William Gay? Hey, I read that last one, and it was okay. But do I need it in my house as I grow old? According to Stan, it's heavy, but don't you dare move it!

Long story short, Stan passive-aggressively adores my hoarder husband. Go ahead, heap the shelves! Load 'em down, and have more piles on the floor! Nothing beats a good book. Ouch! My back!

For our purposes here, Stan is perfect.

I think imaginary friends are quite common. Far less so would be imaginary nemeses. Who saddles themselves with an imaginary nemesis? I'll tell you: someone with a rich inner life.

When Artificial Intelligence is able to assign human characteristics to insignificant inanimate objects, and then discern traits for those objects that veer into illogic and passive-aggression, then we'll really have to worry. But even if AI can do that, they can't do your imaginary nemesis if you haven't revealed them online. Only you will know that your salt shaker has a crush on the Cajun seasoning.

Ramp up that rich inner life! And share it offline with someone you will want to have at your side when the Terminator arrives on your block looking for Sarah Connor. You'll know you're talking to a robot and not your significant other if you say, "Who is our salt shaker crushing on?" and the voice on the other end says, "I'm sorry, I didn't get that. What did you say?"

One last word about having an imaginary antagonist. It's a really great way to blow off frustration. Every time I tell mine to SHUT THE FUCK UP it makes me laugh and feel better.

This free advice is so outlandish that I wouldn't ever consider putting a fee on it. All I know is, I had a talk with Chat GPT, and it seemed so human that I was glad I could say, "Yeah, but what about Stan?"

Foiling AI 101: The Pagan Guide to Creating an Imaginary Friend

 Greetings, "Gods Are Bored" fan! I'm about to heap on some handy free advice! This advice is so off the wall that I could almost see re-instating my old habit of paying you to take it. But not quite, because this is important. It's something you need to consider seriously.

I may be hopelessly paranoid. I may have watched too many "Terminator" movies or "Battlestar Galactica" episodes. But I'm mad worried about the future of AI, how it will be able to mimic human thinking. I've spent some time pondering how to maintain a mental independence from AI, and I think one way is to swim freely in imagination -- something AI probably won't develop at least in its early incarnations.

AI will certainly develop an ability to create imaginary friends, but it won't be able to detect your specific imaginary friend or friends.  This makes an imaginary friend that you share with your nearest and dearest an easy code way to communicate. 

And the best way to confound AI in the field of imaginary friends is to make yours as outre as possible.

This is where Paganism enters the picture.

Certain Pagans are animists, meaning that they feel that all living things have divine spirits. Carrots, for instance, have souls of their own. We just exist in different levels than carrots do, but those lil' old orange veggies have a heart, you know? Be respectful when dicing up your salad!

Children seem more comfortable with this concept than many adults, and children are also more likely to attribute human traits to objects and phenomena that are manufactured. Think of Thomas the Tank Engine. Or for those of you who adored "Pee Wee's Playhouse," dear old Chairy.

As a kid I gave a soul to every damn thing. I cried at picnics when plates and plastic silverware got discarded. I thought the forks would miss me, lying in that dirty trash can. And to this day -- to this day -- I give a little thank-you speech to any of my equipment, linens, furniture, or appliances that wear out. At age 62 I wept over the replacement of my washer and dryer with newer models.

Does that sound crazy to you? Me too! You know who else would be confounded by a close relationship with a washing machine? Artificial Intelligence.

If our goal is to create imaginary friends that are flat-out incredible, we have to think even beyond a common item like a washing machine. Lots of people talk to their major appliances, especially when those appliances aren't working.

Just now I'm looking around my living room for the most outre item I could turn into an imaginary friend. And voila! There he is! The cutest little bookshelf bracket you would ever lay eyes on. I'll keep it simple and call him Stan.

So give me a few days to develop a relationship with Stan the bookshelf bracket. We'll see what comes of it. He certainly has an important, and oftentimes overlooked, job in my home.

Another Chat with ChatGPT

 What a Brave New World we live in, my friends! Today, in preparation for my sermon here at "The Gods Are Bored," I had another lively chat with ChatGPT. Here are the results.

This is my second post about ChatGPT. It's an AI text-generating software that is available for free to any high school kid who needs to write an essay about that novel they didn't read. You can even put it on a 9th grade setting, to get text that has mistakes in it!

Today the English department at my school had a meeting with our district's Assistant Senior Superintendent. The ASS came to our meeting specifically to inform us that our district will not be blocking the ChatGPT app or any other text-generating AI app. The ASS sniffed, "Go back to using paper and pencil. Do you have enough paper? I can order paper."

Friends, I can't make this shit up.

Even I, Anne Johnson, who have only been teaching 13 years can recall a time when essays were written by hand, and only the final draft was typed out on a clunky desktop computer. My students were never willing to re-write, revise, expand, or edit their work. And who could blame them? A revision involved putting a red carat at the end of a sentence and slapping a series of sticky notes on the draft. I hadn't done that myself since 1975! Now, with Google Docs, I can say to a student, "Why don't you look at that second paragraph and offer another example and some more insight?" And I get it.

I guess you can't blame me for taking my umbrage to the source of the problem: ChatGPT. I opened a new account and asked it, "Should a 9th grade student use ChatGPT to write an essay?" And of course it expounded brilliantly on how it is not in any way a substitute for true critical thinking and creativity. Well! Humility! One loves seeing that in artificial intelligence, since it is so often missing in the human race.

No surprises there. So next I asked it some specifics about how shoes are used as symbols in the novel The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros. The House on Mango Street often appears on lists of Best Books of the 20th Century, and deservedly so. It's positively brilliant.

Not only could ChatGPT not identify how shoes are used as symbols in the book, it gave inaccurate quotes and glaringly wrong information about the text. This lil bot is surfing the web and latching onto inaccuracies that it then spouts as truths.

Emboldened, I asked ChatGPT about another novel I teach, Forged by Fire, by Sharon Draper. The bot did even worse with this lesser-known book. The stepfather became an older brother (?) for one thing.

What I loved was that, when I pointed out to ChatGPT that it was wrong, it apologized and promised to do better. Maybe that's why my district's ASS likes it so much -- it's a suck-up.

Then I got another idea. Remember how I asked it if the Gods were bored, and it said "blah blah blah" instead of a simple YES? Today I specifically asked it about my blog.

Anne's Question: What is the blog "The Gods Are Bored" about?

ChatGPT's Answer: I am unable to determine the specific blog you are referring to as my training data only goes up until 2021 and "The Gods Are Bored" could refer to a number of different blogs or websites. However, a blog with a similar title could be about religion, spirituality, mythology, or other related topics. The blogger might explore different beliefs and practices from around the world and offer their own perspective and insights on these subjects. The "bored" aspect of the title could suggest that the blogger is looking at these topics with a critical eye and perhaps finds certain aspects of religious beliefs and practices to be tedious or lacking in engagement. Without more specific information or access to the actual blog, it is difficult to say what the exact focus or tone of "The Gods Are Bored" might be.

Dang! The Smithsonian didn't want me, and neither does ChatGPT! And then it has the cheek to imagine what the blog *might* be about! HA HA! BAMMMP!!!  WRONG, YOU STUPID BOT! This peerless blog is a channel to bored deities from multiple pantheons over millennia of recorded history!

Sorry this sermon is so long. But here are my encouraging takeaways:

1. ChatGPT doesn't read books. It couldn't tell me what color Esperanza's shoes were, even though she describes the same shoes three times in a 100-page book.

2. Chat GPT doesn't have access to my blog. I remain inscrutable to it.

3. Finally, after all these years of begging y'all to send me loose leaf paper, my ASS is going to order reams and reams of it. Oh, the irony.

I have one last message for both my ASS and ChatGPT, and I'll give it as only a Super Bowl-Bound Eagles fan can do it:

HEY, YOUS!