At first, Google would give you an option to filter out the AI stuff (granted you had to apply it every time you searched something). That disappeared about a month ago. I force myself to scroll past all the AI stuff every time I do a search.
It’s always a moment of temptation and mindful restraint. Sometimes I’m saying to myself, oh Beth, just look at it and be done with it. Who’ll know? Seriously, what difference does it make? It forces the regular person to give in, eventually. (I consider myself a regular person but still don’t give in when it comes to the Google search engine.)
Yes, down our throats. More often in a creepy kind of way where you don’t realize that’s what’s going on.
Also, she over-simplifies what the “bad AI content” is. Actually, she doesn’t really go into that. Fair enough. But the non-ethical part of the AI pie is the slippery slope that people simply won’t be able to navigate without really persistent mindfulness. It’s going to be too pervasive and impossible for people to discern whether they’re interacting with human intelligence.
Hence my crude AI 15% Pie graphic below. The only thing I used compute intelligence for is the perfect circle. I didn’t delete the extra white space.
I was thinking 5% but I’ll go with 15%.
As a non-programmer who appreciates programmers, I totally agree. Thanks for fleshing this out a bit.
And I can’t stop thinking about the compute capacity part with downstream to data centers and energy infrastructure. What always gets lost by people like this author: Just where are all the rare-earth metals coming from? How?
Because I use Facebook, I saw an ad this morning for the new Betwixt app.
I am naive. I did not know such things exist. I never played computer games.
Anyway, here we have an AI app for this – Betwixt (from the research paper they highlight
The Magic of the In-Between_SHarmon.pdf (169.4 KB):
We created Betwixt as an experiment to determine if interactive narrative could help users strengthen mental resilience in an engaging, constructive, and collaborative way over the long term.
OK, so far so good. Note the subtle use of interactive.
Betwixt is experienced by completing a sequence of dreams, which are similar to interactive book chapters. During a dream, one can interact with their surroundings and, at times, with a chatbot. Conversing with the chatbot provides opportunities for understanding the fantasy world, listening to stories, and self-reflection. Between dreams, users unlock optional quests that allow them to explore journal prompts and a library of guided meditations, among other resources.
The article mentions the term chatbot five times. There is no mention of AI or any hint of it except by use of the chatbot term.
For effective self-reflection, one must be able to focus on, understand, and reinterpret their negative emotions and experiences. Additionally, this reinterpretation process is less likely to fail (i.e., lead to rumination and the escalation of negative affect) when done from a self-distanced perspective [2,3]. In this case, self-distancing means that the person in question is able to view themselves from the perspective of an observer during their analysis.
Well that sure sounds like establishing mindfulness and moving into initial samatha. I mean, I realize we won’t ever land on a consensus EBT meditation manual. But at least most of us agree that, absence physical illness and various neurological situations, the average human being has capacity to establish mindfulness and gain some basic insight.
Without a computer.
In so doing, Betwixt frames self-reflection and reframing as a collaborative conversation, and encourages self-expression. Users found Betwixt to support a healthy balance between guiding (just enough to prevent a lack of connection or “freezing up”) and “allowing your own mind and personal experiences to fill in the blanks to find meaning”. It is possible that these combined capacities of Betwixt encourage a human-computer therapeutic alliance. Traditionally, the term therapeutic alliance is applied in the context between a human patient and a human therapist.
Well, once that cat’s out of the bag, I don’t know how you ever get it back in.
Finally, to assuage any concerns about dependency on the chatbot, we have this:
Taken together, these findings are promising for future mental health apps that wish to secure regular user engagement while preventing addiction.
That’s the only reference to addiction. That said, it’s cleverly talked to in roundabout ways throughout the article.
It’s useful to review the paper’s references at the end, including:
Cowden, R.G., Meyer-Weitz, A.: Self-reflection and self-insight predict resilience and stress in competitive tennis. Social Behavior and Personality: an international journal 44(7), 1133–1149 (2016)
