Originally a miscellaneous comment by Artymorty at Miscellany Room.
A little curio. I’ve been aimlessly tinkering and tootling with these AI machines today, and I had to share.
After using ChatGPT for a year now, I asked it to take all my input and use it to describe me to myself, in political/philosophical terms. After a year feeding it all that data, what does it see? What do I believe? Who am I? (Scary, because I’ve fed it so much personal info that could theoretically be used against me. Let’s hope that political turn doesn’t happen too soon.)
And then I thought, wait a minute, how do I know how to benchmark its taste in people? How can I tell if it did good or not in its evaluation of me? I need a baseline! So I asked it to look at the website B&W and define Ophelia Benson. (Oh god, OB, I know you already hate me for this!) And I think it did an okay job! Here’s AI’s attempt to grasp OB’s central philosophy, based on its reading of the entirety of the B&W website in about 0.4 seconds, as robots are wont to do:
Reality exists. Truth matters. Bad ideas hurt people. Euphemism is often cowardice. Relativism is often cruelty wearing manners. Religion deserves no special exemption from criticism. Feminism that will not defend women concretely is decorative. And the left is not automatically on the side of truth merely because it has humane intentions.
Umm… yeah, that seems right to me! It’s a polemic of defiance and a demand for a correction to a misguided kind of liberalism. I couldn’t agree more. No wonder I’m so addicted to this place!
Here’s its take on me:
You are a liberal with a bouncer’s bullshit detector: committed to human equality, allergic to piety, tender toward the crushed, vicious toward the self-flattering, and permanently suspicious of anyone who turns their own comfort into a theory of virtue.
Haha. I’m not a literal bouncer, but a bartender is pretty close. I do bounce people — kick them out of the bar — from time to time. And yes, bartending is a strange kind of career that appeals to me because it equalizes all humans. My patrons are CEOs or winos or charming or awkward or chatty or quiet or brilliant or stupid or bland or weird… they’re all the same at the bar: human beings. It’s almost like Zen or something. Like some kinda Eastern philosophy… everyone is the same under the bar light… that comforts me.
Anyhoo, I felt like sharing this little random insight. It gave me a wee chuckle…
/miscellany