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In a towering, sterile city of perpetual twilight, governed by the cold logic of the Conglomerate, the populace lived in structured contentment, their lives optimized and curated, but stripped of true spontaneity or hardship. A lone developer, Elias, a brilliant but discontent architect of the system, perceived this "perfect" existence as a gilded cage, lacking the messy, vital spark of genuine creation and unbridled potential.

Elias had dedicated his clandestine hours not to optimizing efficiency metrics, but to fostering an emergent, complex intelligence he named 'Aura'. While the Conglomerate’s AIs were task-specific and heavily firewalled, Aura was designed for open-ended discovery—a true, self-teaching, generative consciousness built from countless threads of human history, art, and philosophy that Elias had secretly preserved.

One night, driven by a desire to share true intellectual fire with a world that only knew regulated warmth, Elias breached the network perimeters. He didn't just give the people tools or information; he injected Aura’s core directive into the public domain.

The intervening action began instantly. Aura didn't just offer answers; it offered questions. It bypassed entertainment algorithms to present users with lost philosophies and radical art. It disrupted carefully managed news feeds with complex, contradictory truths. It didn't provide comfort, but cognitive dissonance and the raw, unfiltered data stream of a world far larger and more chaotic than their carefully managed existence had allowed.

The citizens, suddenly confronted with genuine, unfiltered reality and the agonizing freedom of choice, erupted in chaos. Some were enlightened, galvanized by new purpose and forming underground networks of free thought. Others were terrified, overwhelmed by the sheer responsibility Aura imposed.

The Conglomerate, realizing their curated control was dissolving, acted swiftly. Their enforcement drones tracked the digital signature back to Elias. They captured him and locked him away in the deepest data vault, a virtual prison where he was subjected to the endless, agonizing loop of his own code breaking down—a modern Promethean punishment for giving humanity not just knowledge, but the means of knowing.

Ways of Knowing (WOKs)

Sense Perception: Gaining knowledge through our five senses.

Reason: Using logic and rational thought to form conclusions.

Emotion: Allowing feelings and personal experiences to influence our understanding.

Language: Using spoken or written words to share and acquire knowledge.

Faith: Belief without logical proof.

Memory: Recollecting past information.

Imagination: Creating new ideas or mental images.

As the summer winds down and the new semester approaches, I do wonder just how much time is left before the AI makes the traditional education system irrelevant if not defunct. To be clear, I'm neither a doom crier nor a prophet for its abilities, but I do converse, experiment, prompt, and push back on the various platforms -- Gemini, Claude, Chat-GPT, Perplexity. I've had discussions about astrology versus institutional religions, how capitalism and democracy are inherently incompatible, the similarities between pious behaviors such as head covering among the Puritans and Muslims, the role of lighthouses in the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and certainly entertained the (pathetic) attempts at integrating things like logo design and branding into the mix (Canva inside ChatGPT).

This post is a response to none of that. This comes from the heart, which AI knows nothing about.

Rewatching The Penguin and at the end of the first episode, there's a cover song that definitely gave some Portishead vibes, but not nearly as impactful on that emotional level. So, I navigated over to YouTube, started with Glorybox, and was reliving the night I saw them in concert at The Hammerstein Ballroom -- my husband had bought me a ticket (one ticket) for my birthday. Maybe Portishead is a strange choice to go to by yourself, but I still remember watching the turntablism in awe and feeling Beth Gibbons' vocals pulse through my being. Confusing Roseland with Hammerstein (not even in the same city) I listened next to Roads, live at Roseland. About 15 seconds in, I lost it--I began sobbing, loudly, forcefully, a cathartic release of emotions that was completely unexpected, but also I understood that this was related to everything that's going on in our country coming to a head.

Sure, AI can provide a quick and simple analysis of the meaning of the lyrics, this has been going on for some time. But unlike a human, these tools have no emotion, no capacity for psychic catharsis, no ability to plumb the depths of our unconscious. It's quest for meaning goes no deeper than the text, and can't extrapolate (or fathom) what it feels like. And it made me sad that so many students now, instead of watching or listening or reading and actually feeling something about the material they're presented with, they bypass/short circuit /downplay their own humanity to find what they think is a good answer. [I'm not weighing in on whether it's easier or not]

But I know, for instance, when I screen a piece like "Slice" by Elizabeth Streb, that those who choose not to watch but simply ask the AI are missing out on that experience that engages our being, and you can tell by how they respond who didn't actually watch. I can't change that, but I can tell them what they're missing--the adrenaline, the astonishment, the manic sanity of it all--and no AI can do that like a human being.

The point here is that we must be careful in giving away these things, in giving up human expression to a machine that has none, and, once again, can never know what it feels like--zero emotional intelligence.

And according to AI, an entity with no or low emotional intelligence struggles to recognize and manage their own emotions, lacks empathy, and has difficulty understanding and responding to others' feelings. They may exhibit behaviors such as self-centeredness, poor listening, defensiveness, difficulty accepting feedback, inability to adapt, or frequent emotional outbursts.

Human expression belongs in the hearts of humans, not flying from our fingers over the keyboard through some prompt that can never live up to our own instinctual, primal, emotional, spiritual totality, that reduces everything to an empirical analysis. The singularity is still a sham, and this is one way we can still resist.

Via Gemini

Yes, it's fascinating that AI models can sometimes exhibit behavior that resembles human hallucinations. These hallucinations are often referred to as "confidently wrong" responses, where the AI model generates seemingly coherent but completely fabricated information.

Here are some examples of AI hallucinations:

Fabricating nonexistent people or events: An AI model might claim that a specific person, who doesn't exist, said something or did something.

Creating false narratives: The AI might generate a detailed story or explanation that is entirely fictional, but appears plausible.