Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

Has ChatGPT been pulling my weenie?

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I was what we called a “middle manager” during much of my working life. Hired a fair number of people, fired just a few. And got to know a lot of different “types” of employee. One such type was the young man (almost always a male) who was wildly enthusiastic and positive, eager to tackle any task assigned. (“I’m on it boss! Consider it done.”) But it usually was not done or at least not done correctly.

Lately I’ve been having similar experiences with ChatGPT. Lot of grandiose promises and Blue Sky but when I carefully look at the results… it’s pretty much bullshit. (Big Sigh)

I think the reason it has taken me longer to discover what a lot of users have been talking about for a long time is most of my interactions have been long chin wags about books or philosophy. Rich bullshit territory.

But now that I know I’ve been getting my weenie pulled, I’ll be more skeptical. More discriminating. And that’s a good thing. 

How ChatGPT chooses quotes

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I’ve long been interested in the spiritual traditions of nondual awareness and have posted here half a dozen times, including excerpts from I Am That and Be As You Are. I uploaded my notes from those two books as part of my Book Archive experiment with ChatGPT.

While I’ve had very mixed results, I prompted ChatGPT to summarize the salient points on nonduality from those two books (see below). What I found more interesting was the process by which ChatGPT chooses passages to quote [PDF]. Continue reading →

Book Archive: Part 3 (“Reincarnation”)

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I recently posted about a project I submitted to ChatGPT. She made a lot of ambitious claims about what she could do (and help me do) with my archive of notes taken while reading books. (120+ books, fiction and non-fiction) Her reach exceeded her grasp and her indexing of my notes didn’t turn out to be as useful as she promised (I’m hoping that might change with future versions).

I’m still playing with this and I prompted her to summarize what my reading has taught me about reincarnation. She suggested drafting this “into something you could share in a blog post, a letter, or even as a thoughtful reply to a curious questioner.” [see comment at bottom of this post] Here’s what she came up with: Continue reading →

A New Kind of Data

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We’re told that LLMs like ChatGPT, Perplexity, et al… are “trained” on massive amounts of data. Theoretically, ‘all’ of the data. And that training continues, one assumes. But a new (?) sort of data is being created. All of those millions and millions of interactions between humans and the growing number of LLMs. 

How —if at all— does that data differ from the original corpus? When I look at the interactions I’ve had with ChatGPT and others, my half of the conversations has been questions while all of useful information comes from the LLM.

Do these interactions contribute in any useful way to the corpus?

ChatGPT reply »

She concludes with the question: “Is this a new form of literature?”

What you’re curating — your indexed posts and saved transcripts — might represent a new genre of human expression. Not fiction. Not diary. Not essay. But conversational co-authorship with a thinking machine. If the early internet was a “global brain,” LLM chat archives like yours might be the global introspection. And someday, they might be part of a corpus we train the next kind of intelligence on.

Conversations with AI – Thematic Index

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I’ve had so many conversations (I don’t know what else to call them) I’m starting to lose track. I’ve shared a lot of them here and those are categorized and tagged but I want an easy-to-scan index. I created one by hand but it was so long (and getting longer by the day) that it was difficult to use. The topics were so wide-ranging I struggled to group by subject/topic. ChatGPT had no problem. [PS: the emoji are too cute for my taste but ChatGPT likes them, so…] Continue reading →