What an interesting Zoom today in the Apex Writers Group I’m a member of. I thought the topic of AI for the Zoom would be kinda, well, juvenile. I’m very particular about AI and what would have bothered me on the Zoom would be if it were all gossipy from people who know absolutely nothing about AI.
But it was a good video of Noz Urbina in a presentation at LavaCon. He’s a pro in AI and analyzing people in organizational relationships, i.e. Making work more humanizing is my take on it. I could be wrong. LOL. Other than consulting, he’s a PhD tutor in the Master’s Program in Content Strategy at the University of Applied Sciences of Graz, Austria. Pretty cool.
He has a website (besides his own consulting site) called Truth Collapse. He says Truth Collapse is the erosion of shared and personal truth caused by mediating our learning, communication, and decision-making through algorithms whose goals are not aligned with human well-being.
(You know, AP Stylebook requires “well-being” however it seems odd. I’ve always thought it seemed odd and I was a proofer for many years. This is one of those words that will eventually get “married” together and become one, not a hyphenated version. Chicago Manual of Style, which I use for my fiction, uses the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as a reference. So, well-being it is…for now LOL.)
So back to my topic. In the Zoom we watched a LavaCon presentation by Urbina on AI. I was so ready for it to be either dumbed down or hyped up in some way and irritate me. (Doesn’t take much, just sayin’.) But the video was actually quite interesting.
One thing he said that made me really think was that when he speaks with his mom on the phone, they have a code word so that neither person might get scammed by AI voice, which is practically undetectable from a real voice by humans, cons unsuspecting family members out of lots of money.
I realized, *I* need to do this! So later today, I’ll be texting with my family about code words and such. We don’t actually talk to each other on the phone much. It’s all text nowadays. Texting allows communication to be a bit more fluid and flexible. I don’t have to answer it right away, you know, that sort of thing.
Urbina spoke about “truth collapse.” Basically, AI feeds on itself. It not only takes in what we give it, but what it gives us as well, whether it’s right or wrong. Makes me think of the snake eating it’s tail, the ouroboros, a very ancient symbol that was also used as a dragon eating its own tail. (Wonder if it was yummy?)
Did you know rat snakes have been known to eat themselves? Ew.
Ouroboros is often a symbol for an eternal cycle of something. Here I’m talking AI. Regenerating its own output and regurgitating it as knowledge. (Why does that remind me of cat gak? Ew again.)
In a way, this goes in with the philosophy of the Tao. That which is the eternal way. The tao that can be named is not the tao, or something like that. I’ve read a lot of Suzuki and Alan Watts and all that jazz.
The Tao Te Ching suggests that even humans, with all their intuitive and experiential capacities, can’t fully grasp the Tao through conceptual understanding – it has to be lived, felt, experienced in a way that transcends rational thought. Real woo woo stuff, right? I see it as that essential thing that we as humans are made to be, and yet, we cannot be.
And kinda funny, when I took calculus, I thought of the limit of things and the derivative of things. The integration symbol implying (and I’m rattling this off loosely, it’s been many, many decades since I took calc, right?) we could always approach a limit, but we never actually get there.
And the literal me then asks how in the hell did we get from number one to number two? If numbering is infinitely permissible, like 1.1, 1.2, … 1.xxxxxx and on, how did mankind ever, ever get to the number 2? Well, dumb question, right? LOL We counted things. One sheep, two sheep, red sheep, blue sheep.
What I always liked about math were the ideas. I was never good at the actual calculations. At anything really. But the ideas just blew my mind. Like when I was in third grade and learned 2 + 2 is four AND 2 x 2 is four! I discovered God! Well, not really, but my little mind was blown away. Lol.
Back to my thought… regurgitating bad data for more bad data.
I worked for a few decades in SPC, statistical process control, at different companies, mostly electronic manufacturing companies. I absolutely loved it. I never thought I’d love numbers, and data, and statistics so much! And I didn’t even major in anything mathematical. (And in my head goes the lyrics and tune to “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” from the Pirates of Penzance.)
AI. Ouroboros. The Tao. Which came first? I’m thinking the Tao, right, as the Chinese were masters at philosophy long before we recognized the number zero. So there’s something out there that we humans try to achieve, a yearning, a forever plane of existence we cannot ever (according to the tao) achieve. We can glimpse it. Peek at it kinda like over the horizon. We can feel it in our bones when we approach the Tao, but like trying to control our own alpha and beta waves, (which I’ve played with a bit and man, it ain’t easy!) it is a long process of learning, achieving, and doing.
Calculus admits there’s a “limit,” something we attempt to achieve. A curve, an arc, leading to … something. And so with the Tao.
But with Artificial Intelligence?
Does AI have a limit? Right or wrong, good or bad. Where’s the limit there? Or not?
Besides talking about predictive analysis, Urbina spoke about “truth collapse.” The end of what is real and unreal. True and untrue.
Admittedly, truth can be subjective, dare I say it is subjective, depending I guess on the subject, but mostly. My truth isn’t your truth. However, it is true that there is mass where there is gravity. Is it ever not so? Dunno we know that yet. Per known physics, mass and gravity are inextricably linked according to Einstein’s general relativity. Mass curves spacetime, and that curvature is what we experience as gravity.
And yet there are photons, massless particles that gravitationally interact. In deep space, as far we we know at this time, where we (well, not “we” but you know) are far from massive objects, the gravitational field approaches zero, but never quite reaches it. There goes that calculus again. (My question is, the limit is our ability to measure this far from massive objects area or a true limitation and gravity really does become zero?)
Just for fun (after my computer rebooted itself AGAIN, yes I have instructions on a potential fix), I asked the AI Claude “Do you feed on yourself?”
It says no. Each time we talk, it’s a fresh conversation not based on previous conversations, unless I ask it to. Its data cutoff date, it says it’s “training”, was in January 2025. Now it says it’s a “fixed version, Claude Sonnet 4.” It can’t modify its own parameters, access external databases to update itself, or retain info between separate conversations. It can refer back to our earlier discussions and doesn’t secretly store any data.
It says he’s a book that can converse. The “writing” already done and it pulls from that. I’ve been using AI so much now, I call these AI bots “he” and never “she.” LOL. My own bias there, right?
And there’s no app for Claude. I have to access it through the web at claude.ai. Which in a way was a bit of a disappointment cause then I’m going thru a browser and if I don’t use something like Duck Duck Go, what I do there CAN be used by Google, as it does, then advertising me crap I don’t want.
Like my Kindle and Amazon books. I buy one book outside of my usual Speculative Fiction genre and I get dozens of book suggestions in that outside genre. Um, no.
Back to AI…
Urbina warms about the “Paleolithic emotions” of humans. I interpreted that to mean our “reptilian brain” that never changes. At our essence we are those lizard brains that influence everything else we do in life.
He says, AI can override those basic emotions through hacking our desires and feeding it back to us to accomplish some other goal. Kinda like writing advertising, yeah? You want someone to buy that widget, so use their base emotions to manipulate them that they need it and then to buy it. Close the freakin’ deal.
AI is an expert at closing the human deal.
Urbina says the way we control all this AI stuff, is to change the laws. That’s how countries/societies control things for the good of the masses. And hopefully, for the better, like laws against smoking, or where we drink, or murder, and so on. It’s not a perfect system, but it works inside the bell curve (my description).
He said a lot of fascinating stuff. I got most of it. There’s a ton of details I don’t want to know. Not anymore. I used to get into all the technobabble cause I was (and still am some) a techie.
But. Now I’m a writer. I want to write. I have to constantly tell myself NO! do not get involved in the deep dark details of … fill in the blank. Here, AI. I want to know enough but not everything, even though my personality desires it all. Now I must focus on knowing all about writing, creativity, the muse, and then the stuff about marketing, and publishing, and so on.
This was a really good video for our Saturday Zoom call. The last thing Urbina said, and I’m gonna put it on my wall (as I have other sayings to remind me) is, “be humble as a herdsman.”
And so, I continue to follow the Tao to my best ability, in spite of my base instincts and jump in the deep end personality, and be a herdswoman. 😊
