August 27th, 2023

I devoted some time, as a present to a friend, shaping a book, as a co-creative gesture, taking his idea, and manifesting it.  As I complete this little Swedish Death Cleaning task, I suddenly feel lighter. This is the fashion in which I choose to archive the visual art journey.  I publish this in the future somehow, here, and also, on the internet archive. I feel lightness, and happiness, with this small gesture.

I had an email from my friend Fred, about ChatGPt, and I offer his excellent commentary, about my play with ChatGPT, just so I can find it! I set the intending to put this in a work, moving forward, the next booklet.

"I see you mentioned me and my "hate" for ChatGPT.

Let me clarify. I don't hate ChatGPT. If it helps you get your thoughts 

together I don't object to that.

I do object to imagining that it has some kind of actual wisdom or 

intelligence, to giving it credit as a "collaborator" or to otherwise 

thinking of it as some kind of entity. And I object strongly to the 

business model of both text and image-based generative AI programs that 

are all based on ripping off massive amounts of original copyrighted 

writing and artwork without permission or compensation to the creators.

I have learned enough about how it works to understand that ChatGPT and 

other text-based "large language models" are basically more complex 

versions of the predictive text models built into programs like GMail. 

In those when you type a word the program guesses the most likely 

following words or phrases based on what people commonly type. It is 

trained on massive amounts of text input. It has no actual experience or 

knowledge of anything other than text, no way of distinguishing between 

reliable and unreliable information, and no actual "intelligence" other 

than recognizing common linguistic patterns.

It often seems to work like a student plagiarizing a term paper by 

copying a source and then going through it with a thesaurus to 

substitute a lot of the words with similar words. I've seen many 

examples of ChatGPT text that look uncannily like that. Experts have 

described it as a "plagiarism machine".

When it is asked to imitate a famous author's writing style, it uses 

that author's texts as sources for its "predictive text" function. Thus 

it may use similar words and sentence structures, which give its 

generated text a superficial resemblance to the author it is mimicking. 

It has absolutely no understanding of the meaning behind the author's work.

Because the software works purely by imitating existing texts, without 

any underlying understanding of the mental process behind the words and 

without any actual experience of the world, it will always produce the 

most predictable, the most common, the shallowest ideas about whatever 

subject it is asked to address. That is what it is designed to do. If 

you are trying to produce reasonable-sounding bland content-free 

pabulum, it is the perfect tool for that.

In creative work, we should choose tools that harness our own 

creativity, our life experience, our powers of analytical and 

imaginative thought, and our organic sense of beauty. AI tools can be 

useful - for example, there are photo retouching tools that can replace 

a messed-up part of a photograph with imagery that matches the rest of 

the photo. That kind of thing can be very useful, replacing hours of 

tedious manual work. But in that case it's not doing the creative part 

of the work, just the boring part of the work. The problem I see with 

using AI in the creative field is that people are letting it do what 

should be the actual creative work.

The work that you are doing with ChatGPT does not change my view. I 

don't see it producing anything better than what I know you are capable 

of writing with your own skills - in fact, quite the opposite. None of 

this seems in any way up to the level of some of the writing you've done 

yourself."

Fred