Artificial illusions
When I had time to kill at Charles de Gaulle Airport this summer, I asked ChatGPT-5 where I might find a nice meal. It confidently suggested a restaurant in my terminal and when I couldn’t find it, sent me step-by-step instructions on how to get there.
I still could not find it. Frustrated and hungry, I did a three-second Google search and discovered the restaurant had been closed for eight years.
I’m not only an AI skeptic because LLMs are error-prone and inconsistent. More deeply, I feel that behind the relentless AI push lie ideas about human life that are just not true for most of us — even if the minority for whom they might be true makes a lot of cultural noise.
These ideas are pushed by those in charge of AI companies. A cynic would say they hype AI because they’re financially incentivized to do so, but I think they also really do believe that this technology is amazing and revolutionary.
Below is a brief (and incomplete) list of what their beliefs are — though they obviously use different language — and, in italics, what I believe is likelier true. (I don’t deal with AGI here because I don’t think that we’re close to achieving it.)
Reality is mostly grasped via information. Reality is mostly grasped via emotion.
Creativity is primarily a matter of combining. Creativity involves but transcends combining.
We inherently know how to think; AI simply aids us. The ability to think is a painstaking, ongoing achievement; AI corrupts it.
AI helps us feel capable and connected. AI makes us feel submissive and alone.
Images, whether imagined or generated, convey meaning and feeling. Images that are merely generated convey the absence of meaning and feeling.