Happy New Year – again!
Any of you that have read Jane’s adventures knows that a lot of the sub-stories revolve around Olive’s pursuit of being more and more human, and of course, the trouble she runs into as she does become more human.
But more and more lately, we’re seeing AI in the news. Now, I don’t know for sure if AI is the threat it sounds like it could be. In Jane’s world, it’s not much of a problem, but of course that’s because she has Olive and company to fix things.
More on a current timeline, though, is the simple concern that we’ll be left behind as artificially intelligent creatures begin to make art. Like writing books and making fine digital paintings. I haven’t seen any AI sculptors or the like, but I’m sure it’s not that far behind if, indeed, we do come out with something happening in that direction.
As Olive, Jean and Jess have found, however, being human is more than simply knowing how to answer simple questions.
Being human requires a learning of the pain, agony, joy and rapture that comes along with it. Jane warns Olive that being human is painful. It takes another book or two for Olive to really begin to understand what Jane’s talking about.
As you may or may not know, I do my own book editing. That means I have to go over practically every word in each of my books multiple times to see if what I said was not only what I meant, but will carry what I meant to you, the reader. Obviously, sometimes I fail in that, sometimes I succeed.
But, mostly what I’m looking at is that those words, those sentences, paragraphs and entire books are weighed against my human thoughts. When my grammar software kicks up a complaint about a ‘comma splice’, I have to make a decision as to whether I needed to break the rules in that sentence to deliver the exact flavor I wanted to convey.
Every comma, every period, every word in that book has been weighed against delivering exactly the story I started out to write.
I can promise you now that as we are at this time, and into the foreseeable future, AI won’t be able to make those visceral choices.
Even Olive couldn’t, at least as she was ‘born’.
Now, once Olive has lived a lifetime, or even a few decades, of being human? Well, at that point, she probably IS human.
Let’s meet back here in 10 years and see if ChatGPT is human yet, eh?