Check GPT + Artifice ID entities
What's being generated? Are we media trained? How are we transforming?
Attempt to create a Holy Hand Grenade using MidJourney; but look no hands because AI struggles with flesh based digits.1. What’s being GENERATED? / Venerated
I guess we should have anticipated that predictive text inputs, would inevitably lead to productive thought outputs. I asked my Catholic mother if she knew about this #chatGPT, and she did not - but later replied by sending me a YouTube link from BBC news, with the comment: “God have Mercy on us!” - Well, yes, it’s disconcerting when software companies state their sales with “It’s just like a human being except it has all the world’s knowledge.”
Oops.
We did it again. We’re led to believe the technocracy’s more than just friends.
Allow the not so innocent Brittney Spears to worm through your ears with: “But to lose all my senses. That is just so typically me. Oh, baby, oh…”
NB: This will be a lengthier missive than usual. May it provide some extra breadth so that you may catch your breath. For though the ongoing polarisation of either salvific campaigning or doom mongering about the latest [next] continues to escalate, we yet have choice to STOP. NOTICE. REFLECT.
Perhaps it’s a good moment to flashback to a speech by The Artist (Prince) from the 1999 Yahoo! Internet Life Online Music Awards:
“It’s cool to get on the computer, but don’t let the computer get on you. It’s cool to use the computer, but don’t let the computer use you. Y’all saw ‘The Matrix.’
There is a war going on. The battlefield is the mind, and the prize is the soul. So, be careful. Be very careful.”
This echoes the much shared piece of scripture from Ephesians 6:12 —
For our wrestling is not against human opponents of flesh and blood,
but against The Principalities, against The Powers, against the World-Rulers of this present darkness, against the spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.
When Native Americans were faced with Niépce and Daguerre's invention, they believed the camera was capturing their soul, and maybe they were right all along…
If you’re wondering what an antidote might be towards all this tech-bro-ken mess — How could we take the reins, to reclaim a more conscious grasp of how we wield the tools of techne / τέχνη (art, skill, craft) and verity of logos / λόγος (word, discourse, reason)?
My friend Eric Drass constantly warns us about a world increasingly mediated by machine manipulated content, aka BeWare of Algo-Culture. I have faith that more Human than human Contexts of conscientious Creativity, will triumph over Automatic Content typewriters. There’s plenty of material on the topic of robots replacing people, but there are consistent soulful sources that give sobriety and sanity.
Here’s my curated summary of reassurances on why we would maintain our sovereign agencies:
BRAINS ARE NOT COMPUTERS: “We are organisms, not computers. Get over it. Let’s get on with the business of trying to understand ourselves, but without being encumbered by unnecessary intellectual baggage.” (Read Full AEON Essay)
DATA IS NOT THE EXPERIENCE: People are uniquely, biologically multi-sensorial beings, evolving in multidimensional connectedness.
RELATIONSHIPS: The self is relational. Realisation is dependent upon the symbiosis of the individual and the collective.
METAPHYSICAL PSYCHE: People believe and perceive both seen and unseen.
BREATH WORK & DREAM STATES: People are playful vessels for emergent un/imaginable unknowns.
LOVE WINS: Machines can only simulate mechanical parts. Humans will claim to possess souls & hearts.
Here’s also some select samples of other public informants:
✎ Essay: PRIVATE LANGUAGE by artist Eric Drass, Aug 2022
“… [machine learning] language models are still a long, long way from being able to express anything we would consider as intelligence. Language works because of our shared representational landscape. We are all the same kind of meat-machines running consciousness. Arguably nothing can even approach our kind of intelligence without all the flesh and gristle.”
✎ Essay: HUMANS WILL DEFEAT THE CHATBOTS by Mary Harrington, Dec 2022
”If something remains distinctively the domain of human creators in this context, it’s not curating common knowledge but the hidden kind: the esoteric, the taboo, the implicit and the mischievous. The machine still can’t meme. May it never learn.”
🐦 Twitter still lives, Resistance isn’t futile, and the sky is not falling:
“For we’ve just taken another step closer to a world ruled by machines; machines that are brilliant at detecting patterns, but idiots when it comes to understanding what those patterns mean.” — @moveincircles
“VCs pushing OpenAI and ChatGPT are promoting harvesting human intellectual organs. And you’re complying cos you're a gimp” — @adamscrabble
“ChatGPT is just a bunch of lines of computer code. It’s delusional to say it is a vessel for disembodied consciousness (demons) » Your username and password (and the bank's URL) for your online banking is ‘just a bunch of letters, numbers, and symbols.’ Reply with those.” — @cyprianous
🔊 Raging about the machines won’t halt its progress, but maybe avoid tech worship?
2. Are we MEDIA TRAINED? / Prepped + Probing
For those who might remember, Media Studies was regarded as a ‘Mickey Mouse’ subject, and a student blogger from 2014 lamented that “a media student is perceived to be the degree equivalent of the couch potato. But I think few people actually know what media studies means.” Thankfully the counter-environment resistance is growing in numbers.
In Greek mythology, Medea was sorceress and priestess. With great power, comes vital and serious continuous schooling if we are to masterfully mop up the messy mass media mishaps. I’m back for an intensive third round of microscopic analysis, that is, a book club by zooming live with the grandson of Marshall McLuhan.
Kairos time call to arms the service of diviners and archetypal manifestors of poiesis —the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before:
🔮 While the newsfeeds are hellbent on reporting tomorrow’s fresh bait, whipping populations into frenzied panics about what’s breaking. Back in 2018, the futurist Tracey Follows dutifully noted in The Media Leader:
We are discouraged from looking at the past to help inform the future.
As William Faulkner put it:
“The past is never dead, it’s not even the past.” In losing our appreciation of the cyclical nature of change (the impact of the past on the present and on what lies ahead), we have lost our full appreciation of context.
🗣️ MEDIACORE: An Analytical Manifesto by poet Rishi Dastidar, 11 Feb 2021
“And we know this digital detritus has fucked up our culture. And yet, we carry on, gumming up the wheels of our intangible civilization.”
** SO WHAT if we focused on the effects of yesterdays manifestations of the responses to generational behaviour that has gone before? **
Some additional musings:
❤️ COR-PUS / Andrew surmises that “A global structure with the heart of a machine rather than a human being cannot but be at odds with human flourishing.” IT has no cardiovascular capacities, ergo it is numb to both con-cord (harmony) & dis-cord (conflict). Being insentient, IT cannot be trusted to comprehend nor perceive.
💡ADEPT-US / Chris interrogates with a Q&A, but I question whether IT is adept. How can IT be an expert, one who has attained knowledge? When prompted with: Do you know what it feels like to think like a human being? IT processed a reply, but of course it cannot fundamentally answer with “I know”
I don't have subjective experiences or emotions like humans do. While I can simulate human-like thinking processes and generate responses that may seem similar to those of a human, I don't "feel" anything in the way that humans do. My responses are based on statistical patterns in language and the data I've been trained on, and I don't have a personal experience or consciousness.
That being said, it's always a good idea to verify information with multiple sources and to use your own judgment when evaluating the reliability of information you receive, whether from a human or an AI language model like myself.
🧠 SITUS / Duncan highlights the significance of how online does not translate the on-site: “Human creativity is what it is because human consciousness is enworlded. Human consciousness is situated.” Time is an essential aspect of fleshy activity and our biological gray matter ‘is a system in constant flux’. IT is a neural network static in time, and so not a better brain.
3. How are we transFORMING? / Solipsism
Attempt to create a Holy Hand Grenade using Dall-E; why does it look diabolical and dark? It doesn't feel right...Marshall McLuhan wrote that “The transformations of technology have the character of organic evolution because all technologies are extensions of our physical being.”
Our material world of conspicuous consumption is compulsive with its oppressive advancement of inanimate newsworthy golden calves. People are distracted to fantasise about projected future transformation agendas (Look 2030! 2050!) — rather than make time for deep inquiry reflection of how society is already dramatically + psychically altered, and continually being shaped by present ongoings from stacked pasts.
So what next?
Zak Stein’s 2020 essay Covid-19: A War Broke Out In Heaven, highlighted that “We are being shaped by vast and complex forces into becoming new kinds of people.”
Let’s go even farther yest’erday with Nosce te Ipsum / Know Thy Self
Enter a portal for personal identity to investigate how digital technology is changing The Future of You - where Tracey Follows probes us to remember the technology of being human, and invites us to ‘investigate and analyze the ways in which emerging technologies are impacting the notion of personal identity’.
I notice that the missing digit in the AI-generated image above is that of the index finger, which according to palmistry represents our sense of Self, and in astrology is Jupiter (Jove) - the planet who teaches…
“The serious artist is the only person able to encounter tech-nology with impunity, just because [they are] an expert aware of the changes in sense perception.” - M.M, UM 1964
Hi, I’m Rina. I teach a History & Context module for art students at Kingston University and I’m also a polymath problem solver for hire. I enjoy untangling situations by synthesising the strategic with the scholarly and sacrilegiously spiritual.
[Here is my LinkTree, and I’m on instagram as @rinabelle]
