The A.I. with a Soul

Here I am facing the new frontier of technological advancement like the rest of civilization. Challenged to face the positives of what could be vs. what may negatively occur. As someone who has over ten years in the I.T. field and now stepping out into a creative lane, my imagination has added points to both sides of the argument over Artificial Intelligence emerging into mainstream use. However, when I rest on my Spiritual foundation (I may lose those who can’t separate religion from spirituality after this point but trust me, there’s more than enough time to elaborate) and reflect on Genesis 1:26 “Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our Likeness…”, I see this new frontier as an amazing one to explore.

Critical Thinking and OpenAI… The Baselines.

In the moment, like many times before us, we as humans tend to focus on what we see instead of evaluating the intangibles. Valuing color of skin over cherishing the shared characteristics of humanity. The timeless innovative and creative spirit that continues to push us forward from the first fire ever made until the first iteration of… Chatgpt and beyond.

OpenAI, the creators of Chatgpt, have on their website (https://openai.com) their mission statement which is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity. That’s cool. However, a certain group of people (me included) must embrace and eventually overcome the idea A.I. could ever replace a piece of humanity. This I believe is a classic “chicken or the egg” question but this time we know what came first. (I’ve been waiting a long time to use that one tbh)

I’ll be honest, I love sitting at my desk in silence or with tunes blaring, trying to piece together the next sentence, or figuring out why a character wants to go left when I want to write them going right. That’s a dopamine blast from critical thinking I think we all share; I mean humans are still built with brains, right? Maybe not for writing, could be for gardening, developing, building, cooking, or just being present in the moment.

Chatgpt can be used as a super google of sorts, or a super brain. I’ve asked it simple questions like “who is the oldest person recorded in history” and for complex solutions like “build a diet program for a diabetic who went through a double bypass” and it returned a full week’s plan. And I’ve seen it do much more but only guided by a mind who asks the right question.

For my creative profession I’d rather stay far away from the route that would starve my mind and Spirit the opportunity of creating a story. Choosing character names, maybe having reasons behind them, carving out their motivations – learning about myself in the process. But I must admit I have used an A.I. art generator before. Using words from a story of mine to produce cover ideas but I learned functionality can’t beat God-given talent.

As an I.T., Chatgpt can write scripts to help with administration and even pieces of code to assist developers. A military brother of mine is currently learning how to code and could easily get discouraged as a new piece of technology can spit out hundreds of lines of code in seconds before he could type one but instead, he sees it as a tool he can use to accomplish a goal.

The Beauty of a (Morale) Code

Why as humans have we operated off of codes long before computers? Code of conduct, code of ethics, and moral codes have their place in humanity. Now a digital code governed by a group of values held by the same human who wrote it can stretch out into the collective experience held on the internet today and solve anything for you. Question is, what would you gain?

-A.R. Milton