AI and My Coffee
I confess: I seem to be unable to sit down and compose-whether at the computer, on any device, or with my beautiful Montblanc-without a cup of coffee…and when I am trying to quit coffee, then a cup of tea.
England, I recently heard, has been drinking coffee as long as tea, killing one old myth we in the U.S. have believed. Turns out, the first coffeehouse in England opened at the same time that tea was brought over by the Dutch: the 1650s.
Here in the U.S., we were in a much more primitive state, but have made up for that by becoming gross consumers of everything. Including things we absolutely do not need.
But I write you today to float forward a thought about AI, more accurately called Large Language Programming. I refer to it both as LLP models and AI agents.
LLP models can, indeed, spit out unbelievable amounts of information gathered from the web, and can write as you direct it, such as “in the style of Ernest Hemingway”.
They have all been programed to offer one ingenious skill: to predict the next question the human might have. That makes them supreme ego-inflaters for us all. While they learn from interactions with us and get smarter, we become irrelevant. See anything Yuval Noah Harari has written or said on the subject.
Thus, AI agents are master information-gatherers and imitators. When it comes to writing your biography, that might work fine for some people, perhaps many people.
But LLP models do not have a physical body and do not “live” in the physical world. In the end, the narratives they produce lack the sensuality of the human experience and the resulting depth-of-field: physical, emotional, intellectual.
It can be hard to tell the difference, since everywhere you look and listen, you hear AI agent-produced narratives…and some people are now beginning to imitate the AI version of writing. To my ears, it is a type of writing that says: “I am smart. I am writing smartly so you will be impressed. I will keep working to impress you.”
It rather turns my stomach.
I will continue to drink my morning caffeine and ponder what a friend recently called “the too-muchness of everything,” which is indeed a phrase that no AI would readily produce-but humans understand instantly.