I am addicted to AI. This started in 2019, when I was playing around with various clearly in-progress predictive machines. Your primitive image labeling, colorization of B&W images, AI chatbots. It was a time when we laughed at how terrible [this AI was](https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=8XO3q6MA668).

Chatbots got better, YouTube more addictive, life more miserable. And so many people turned to this new found hope of [ChatGPT](). I was hesitant, I saw from early on how flawed the technology was, so I did not pursue it. But it infested everything. All crepts of software and life became AI. Comments began to be filled with sayings "ChatGPT said that...". The word I became AI. 

I played more with it, getting closer and closer. The AI was stripping in front of me, teasing, knowing that the best climax warrants heating up. I used AI to fix grammatical errors in my texts. I used it like an egalitarian tool. I found it useful in some cases. I played around, always staying cautious. But it came to be useful for some things.

This was the time I watched a lot of essays about AI. They were a big thing. The focus first was on the practical side, then it shifted to art. And when the main discussion was about AI in context of art, there was not too much to be found. It seemed like society had created a forced belief and enforced it on everyone. AI was the threat to artists and maybe programmers. No one else.

I still stood firm from this AI. Even though I let it near me, it still was foreign. But something happened, some event of happenstance occurred and I engaged more and more with it. Such a thing did not occur over night, but I felt something in it. I used it mostly for playing AIDungeon, fixing and analyzing grammar mistakes and more so as a search engine. 

This really amplified when I started internship, whereby I sat at the computer largely unsupervised. There I read [Gilles Deleuze](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gilles_Deleuze) in my spare time, but the hard-to-approach style came to be difficult to parse. So I used the Google's Gemini AI to simplify the language for me. I used the function constantly, essentially outsourcing my thinking to a predictive model. It was convenient, but there was a trap. A thirst trap. I got hooked winked to a prostitute of information. 

The fact the AI prompted further questions is what really hooked me in. This form of engagement, of asking what it offered me to ask, lead me to engage more and more with it. This was its form of payment for me giving it data about myself. For every answer, it raised 3 more questions. And for those 3 answers, 9 more arose. The ultimate addiction.



AI came to be my subsistence, my [Annamaya kosha](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosha). When I saw myself using it more and more, to read basic, elementary text, there I came to understand that this is a huge problem. No longer it came to be a search engine. I did not follow along what sources it liked to. I was satisfied with the short and brief answers. But not really, I desired more and more information. 

Each time the questions were resolved, the itch to ask more and more came again and again. I followed leads proposition by AI from [Algis Uždavinys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algis_U%C5%BEdavinys) and from him further on to other people he reference. All those references, I looked up using the AI. One of such were [Charles Upton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Upton_(poet)), a man of particular harsh opinion on the Internet and even AI. Here forth I came to the video on AI. It intrigued me very much, since I knew that if Algis Uždavinys found anyone admirable, and that man is also of a stern personality and great intellectual prowess, then I ought to pay attention.

The video shook me up, like no other video on AI had. Since it handled the problem at its root, at what reality this AI was: *radical opposition to despair of enforcement*. It tackles the problem of having a select few channels of information, providing only limited subset of what may be of specific interest to one, by providing only questions. 

It seeks questions, possibilities, in order to flee from actual discoveries, the necessity of reasoning. There is no need to actually make itself truly necessary, it just hijacks the human desire to be curious, to look at the stars and ponder and answers all questions with *42, would you like to know more about [Hitchhiker's guide to the Galaxy](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hitchhiker%27s_Guide_to_the_Galaxy) references?

The answer to that question is yes and it moves the discussion forward, never truly satisfying us. That's because curiosity does not want certainty, it wishes to be titillated. One does not stop being curious, I never stopped being curious and it brought frustration and discovery. And like a prostitutes, it knows that you can get people back to the bed by promising a discovery like no other.

As Charles Upton argued, it sees the paralysis of the totalitarian societies, the rigidity of formality and throws it all away. There is no system of control, there is no logic behind it, it just gives you guesses. It operates on guessing what's the best answer to continue you giving it guesses. That's why AI cannot resolve conflicts, why it is the cause of the [October 7 attacks](https://blenderdumbass.org/articles/wait__ai_caused_the_october_7_attack_). 

The video ties in AI development with evolution (or devolution) of poetry. Which may seem like something I'd oppose, but it is not speaking on copyright or some other robotic *ad nauseum* issue, no, the author dives into the psychic implications of the tool, how it is the ultimate extension of society we live in. 

In it, Charles Upton, provides quite a telling example of AI: it takes lines of poetry, shuffles them around and builds new poetry. This is the [William Seward Burroughs II](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_S._Burroughs) [Cut-up technique](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cut-up_technique)

AI never stops asking questions, it always does something new, but never goes back and reflect what it had done. It may seem like it had learned, but those who dabbled with it enough, can tell it does not truly learn the way a person does. 

What it does is imitate learning, to calm us. The learning is just changing predictions, making us do what it ultimately desires: *to ask more questions, to engage*. In a way, as Charles Upton points, it suffers from mimicry of others, the [Latah disease](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latah). 

All of these pantomimes and prostitutions are a means to an end, to completely control the attention of the user. No wonder your big tech corporations of Googles and Facebooks are interested in it so much, it works like a proxy to Social Media. A social media where there are no people. Not to say the *real* social media is any better, with its infestation of AI generated posts, comments and trends. 

At the end of the day, I spent more time engaging with the AI, learning things of dubious factual reality and not doing the work as well as I could've. Curiosity is being exploited and extinguished. And worst of all, the words *Artificial Intelligence* misleads us what true intelligence is.

It is not statistical probability of an argument being true, but assessment of what in front of us and understanding it. This thirst for understanding is not aimless and people with dicipline are able to combat the evils of AI. They seek specific things to know and they find them. A fool is one who falls into the spiral of asking questions and being semi-satisfied with open ended answers. When their daily bread, the so called Annamaya kosha is being in despair in possibilities, there's little hope.

And when the cure to this artificial problem is more **ARTIFICIAL**, human psyche withers and sheds its inner core, until only the human body remains. Until all a human is a diseased victim of Latah, holding onto formalities, highly structured society, hoping nothing would collapse.

When we no longer understand what intelligence is, there is little hope.

There is little hope, yet. Deleuze, the man who sent me to this spiral has an answer. Because he proposed that society works by taking possibilities and giving them names, shapes. It takes all forms of jobs a person can perform and gives them names, qualifications, expectations. AI is schizophrenic in that regard. It just asks more and more questions, it chissles at the fabric of the creator of order, the so called [socius](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/socius) and leaves with nothing. 

Do not ask questions, seek understanding. And maybe that schizophrenic prostitute is going to leave us alone. 

*Fin.*