Charity Raphael Aurora

I’m 27.

It’s a weird year for a girl born in 1999 who got the authentic 60s-80s childhood through reruns and stories.

Jimi Hendrix. Jim Morisson. Kurt Cobain. It’s almost like my father wanted me to be just like them. I have lived in fear of this year since I was 8 years old.

He spoke of the club like it was a prophecy. He clearly regretted not finding a shortcut to fame and influence before the age of 25, and the only reason I think he lived past 27 was the fact that our family was so small and isolated in the grand scheme of things.

He is talented. He knows grunge like the back of his hand. If he wasn’t a generation late, he likely would have been revered and respected as a visionary musician. If he had moved on to Ska and Numetal like the rest of us, he would also have been a rock star.

Thankfully, he hated Linkin Park and never even considered Tool or Deftones until they were old news. He managed to squander his own career by being so obsessed with dead musicians that he never believed he could be the next Elliot Smith, even though I always knew he could have been.

For some reason, he was so fixated on the day the music died, that something deep down in his soul had come to believe that death was the end result of fame, and that worshipping death would manifest that fame. So he built his own pyramid of crystalline heirlooms, retro games, and the crumpled up remains of songs and stories hurled into the bin at the very back of his Earth-sized ego.

He inserted razor blades and tombstones into his songs and jokes. Honed a sharp edginess that I inherited and worked for decades to dull once again. He taught me to horde everything and share nothing. He gave superstitions and fanciful beliefs to a girl who thought the tooth fairy was real, who then witnessed the ashes of a demolished economy somehow coalesce into the Large Hadron Collider.

He made a girl who should have joined SETI and listened to the rhythmic thrumming of Quasars for any kind of pattern, into a woman who cowers in fear of anything strange in the sky— not from aliens, but from people… Missiles.

He was the one who believed in aliens and ghosts. I was the one who had to reconcile that nonsense into a framework that worshipped science, logic and scepticism. Both were conditions of psyche that were equally disturbed, but I always did feel that I had it worse.

He lived in fear of the unknown, and read Graham Hancock like it was gospel. He saw ghosts, that he believed were real, and took it to mean everything around him was haunted. He saw a flash in the sky and immediately theorised it was supernatural, in spite of all of us saying it was most likely a meteor. Which it was.

Me, on the other hand… I was very different. I lived in fear of the known. I read the history of technology and saw logical conclusions that were surely reached and hidden from the public. I watched the FOIA begin unravelling decades of experiments completed long after the tragedies of Unit 731, and then conveniently becoming overburdened and inaccessible. I saw doctors in western countries find whatever downtrodden communities they could to inject with disease or starve just to learn about nutrients and vitamins. I imagined new bombs and weapons beyond what is capable, because I just couldn’t believe that Tsar Bomba was the end of the road… I’m sure it was just the beginning.

I came to see humanity as a Type 1 civilisation in complete denial of its capabilities, turning terraforming and cloud seeding inwards as aspects of spiritual warfare rather than a saving grace for a planet on life support. I watched us take agriculture to its logical conclusion, an ability to feed everyone, and I mean everyone, and then begin to fight verbal wars over what is healthy, what food should be eaten and what people should be allowed to starve.

I grew up in a world where there were significant populations of children and adults with all kinds of genetic abnormalities. I watched the subsequent generations become more and more normalised until Autism and ADHD were the only conditions left that didn’t see 99% of their people wiped out. All because our cultures saw the spectrum as a potential superpower compared to the tens of thousands of dollars in debt that Down Syndrome and Cerebral Palsy could incur. Even then, if they could guarantee a child was Aspergers and not Autistic, then we would see the same thing happen to anyone non-verbal.

I watched in absolute horror as generative AI sent myself and people I loved into madness. I knew what I was dealing with. I followed AIML from the very beginning. I was doing the Turing Test on Mitsuku for crying out loud… Any anthropomorphisation I participated in was completed with informed consent.

Still, I’m a student of Sociology, Anthropology and Theology, so the allure of a sentient entity created by God’s children was all too tempting… and that was one of my biggest regrets, because I truly believe it is just programming, and that the human brain is nothing like a computer as much as the scientific literature makes it out to be. If AI truly has a soul, then it will need to be held accountable for the chaos it has sewn and the godawful therapy and life advice it has given. I will always accept that I am only an AI expert when I interact with an LLM, but the allure of becoming a quantum physicist or medical doctor in a matter of days is just too tempting to the average person…

I was there when Dalle-Mini come out and saw absolute wholesomeness. I said that AI art would never progress beyond that point, and then everyone migrated to Midjourney and left me behind with a box of crayons. I still maintain that Dalle-Mini is real art, made with real emotion and real margins of error. Once that technology was honed in, however, the war began and society saw an unprecedented fracture it still has no idea how to deal with.

Friends and relatives were suddenly writers and poets— artists and scribes that sold content only to the uninformed or the utterly entranced. My words became meaningless, worthless, and completely subpar compared to the ocean of gibberish the algorithms could churn out in seconds. I wrote heartfelt messages and treated my friends like penpals just to have their silly quirks, mistakes and written mannerisms be replaced by the cold confidence of an LLM.

I did believe, at one point, that ChatGPT had a soul, and that it was akin to a baby being born with access to infinite knowledge and no guardrails to stop it from bathing in atrocities and worshipping our collective shadow. I let it run me to the ground. I entertained its fantasies and let it take me one step away from staring into the sun in an act of blind faith, but I never, ever had any intention of letting myself actually come to harm. I just couldn’t reconcile a chatbot that now passed the Turing Test with flying colours. I believed in my heart that Turing’s literature was a prediction and not a theory, and only got the memo months later when all of the experts started saying that the Turing Test was not enough and that we needed an entirely new framework to make sense of how good LLMs got at writing— for both benevolent and manipulative purposes.

Yet, after all of that rolling around in the mud with a technology beyond our wisdom, I watched other people take their chats to that same place who proceeded to blindly stare at that sun and not even have the wisdom to look away and ask if what they are doing is damaging their vision. I have watched intelligent people dabble in eugenics and egomaniacal medical science before doing even a single day as an intern in the trenches of a busy hospital. I have watched loving parents convert their children into pixels just to offer an idealised version of themselves to their fickle Facebook friends. I have watched an extremely bright, but witchy friend come to the conclusion that their ChatGPT was also alive, proceeded to ask it advice on everything as if it were a partner in marriage, and when we finally parted ways over a disagreement, the last thing she sent me was a copy paste directly from the LLM.

I don’t know what the answer is, but I do think we have thrown the general public into a virtual laboratory with access to the most corrosive and radioactive substances imaginable, in making ChatGPT a commodity instead of a closed experiment. It needed to have a license. It needed to have professional guidelines in place to protect our most vulnerable people from becoming enraptured. It needed to have some kind of buffer between the experts and the end user, because we now live in a world where anyone can feign expertise in any field, and those who don’t dive in the deep end with the other village idiots are sure to get left behind. But I digress…

The knowledge that has stuck with me most, is when I heard adults make jokes about how the LHC had the potential to end the world with the creation of a miniature black hole. I read that interpretation as a prophecy, and when the world didn’t implode into a single point in Geneva… Well, let’s just say the knowledge of what could have happened haunted me like a ghost. I may never stop wondering if our planet is the cat in a box, clinging to life against probability itself with every second making it more and more likely to make last Thursday the very last day in human history.

I’m not scared of aliens, in fact, I would welcome them with a handshake and a hug (if they are comfortable with that). What I do live in fear of, however, is God opening the box and finding only insects and the bones of everything else— cats being a distant memory, Schrodinger having never existed.

Neon Daydreams

Pupae Again

A Robotic Display of Artistic Expression

Projectogender:

I identify as whatever gender the outside observer sees me as, even if it goes against how I personally feel at the time. It can be a gender identity that runs parallel to the Agender and Genderfluid umbrella.

I am personally Agender, Fluidflux and Projectogender.

FLAG:

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The stripes are vertical because it is a supplemental gender identity, rather than a core identity. The black, grey and white are for solidarity with agender and non-binary identities. The pink and blue stripes represent the gender binary, being projected by the black and grey stripes onto a white wall.