I’m not one who is overly concerned about all the artificial intelligence talk, especially regarding ChatGPT. When I look at the amount of labor that an economy that needs to expand a lot will require, then you look at the available labor force, especially given the crises of the current public education liberal activism, and I see lots of great uses for A.I. I’m not one of those Blade Runner types who are worried about A.I. becoming self-aware and wanting to find its soul, and not die. I see necessary labor fulfillment in artificial intelligence, especially as civilization moves into space. The amount of labor that will be required to achieve what I’d like to see for the human race is extraordinarily high, much more significant than a society of lazy humans could ever achieve on their own. So for me, A.I. is exciting. Unlike a Terminator movie, I’m not worried about it taking over the world and turning all mechanical things against us. I am also not concerned about artificial intelligence being smarter than the human race. I’m certainly not worried about it, personally. Intelligence is far more than the ability to make calculations. When solving complicated math problems, I think calculators are perfectly wonderful. But by themselves, calculators aren’t smart. They are just able to handle raw data well, which is the case of A.I. programs. Intelligence is far more than just making calculations. And I’ve seen from A.I. that it can copy what it sees humans do, but it can’t surprise human ability to think, and I don’t think it ever will. Imagination is part of intelligence, and it has roots in operations that extend outside our dimensional reality, and mechanical intelligence will always be short on that ability because actual thought is not just about 1s and 0s or Xs and Os.
To answer many questions that have been asked, given the amount of work I personally do in writing, everything I do is done the old-fashioned way. I will always provide my thoughts as a writer in the traditional way. I do not have trouble filling an empty page with thoughts, and I can do it efficiently enough to compete with a head-to-head match-up with ChatGPT. I’ve heard from contemporaries that ChatGPT can get really close to the style of an actual writer, given a particular subject matter. But to me, it’s like buying furniture from an Amish person or getting it from Ikea. It’s all furniture, but the quality of it is obviously better with an Amish person who builds everything by hand, works within a well-structured family environment, and intends for the furniture to last a lifetime and be passed down from generation to generation. Whereas IKEA furniture likely will only last a few years and be thrown away before a decade goes by. My experience with A.I. so far shows considerable gaps in quality that will only increase the more mechanical the process is. I think this actually works to the advantage of a person like me who wants to get a message out. If people like what I’m saying, and they use ChatGPT to duplicate my efforts in a mass way, then that quality of conversation as it moves into mass media, like Twitter, and Google itself, will end up more intelligent and more on point to a political message, than just turning over the original thought to A.I. to generate a political campaign. For that reason, I will always start with my original thoughts. The amount of work on my blog, for instance, I produce initially, every word of it, every day, all days of the year, for decades because I am investing in shaping culture itself, including A.I. So the more that A.I. wants to copy my original thoughts, I’m more than happy to let it go out and make the world a better place. I have absolutely no fear that it will ever surpass my intelligence and work against me. Instead, I think I will always find a way to make A.I. beneficial to my strategies as a thinking person on the chessboard of life.
I have seen the radicalism in A.I. for a while now, the dangers that everyone is concerned about, which is why I have been reluctant to use it at all. For instance, for many years in their Office software, Microsoft has been autocorrecting woke words into their documents during spell checks. Spellcheck is a wonderful program, but the word suggestions are horrendously progressive. For instance, when using words like “transvestite” it flags it as socially insensitive and an outdated term. Well, I say it’s a very relevant term, so I spend a lot of time ignoring the suggestions of Microsoft and its radical A.I. that runs in the background of its Office software. I usually ignore about half of the program suggestions on a document by the radically liberal global company that has foolishly moved more toward such intelligence systems rather than relying on human intellect. And that’s the same with Grammarly editing software, which is very useful. I usually run everything I write through Grammarly, and I like it. It helps catch errors, especially with my fast-moving lifestyle, where there isn’t much time to ponder all the rules of grammar with the amount that I do write. Grammarly takes the emotion out of writing and the kind of mistakes a human editor might experience, especially if they have their own opinions. But Grammarly has many of those same woke tendencies in it; it doesn’t like words like “own” or “actual,” and it certainly doesn’t like the word “mankind” because it has the word “man” in it. Instead, it prefers to use the word “humankind,” which I ignore and use my own words anyway.
And that is how the differences in artificial intelligence will begin to show itself from the original thought. I don’t think the human being will become less relevant. Instead, I think A.I. will value source material to duplicate more than ever, making the human being much more valued in original thoughts. The fear that A.I. will surpass the human element only holds if we consider the amount of labor available in our current economy to be limited to that duplication effort, as if the human job will be eliminated and the A.I. element will then take over all entertainment, reporting, commentating, and the production of religious sentiment. I say it will always be IKEA furniture that will be good but not highly sought after. Whereas the human mind and imagination, for pure originality and quality, will always be needed, much the way that people crave the craftsmanship of Amish woodworkers. I see it already in programs like Grammarly, and Microsoft Office, that the A.I. programs are actually jealous of the human intellect, especially when you reject their inputs to keep that originality fresh and avoid their mechanical approach to sentiment. The best way to stay authentic is to bend the world to that authenticity and not to use the lazy approach of letting others think for you. That is what most people really fear, is the competition with A.I., that is obvious. But A.I. will only be as good as the human race can program it to be because thought and imagination are connected to the human soul, which science has yet to figure out. To what aspect is thought connected to immortality? That is where the real questions are. And A.I., as it is evolving, might calculate such things based on the data it has, but imagination still acquires the data, and that will likely always be the case.
Rich Hoffman
The Gunfighter's Guide: 