by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner
I’m very much prone to magical thinking — it can be so severe that it starts to damage my life. So, I am WELL AWARE that I’m imbuing Google’s LLM AI Gemini Advanced with a lot of stuff that just isn’t really there. But, fuck it, let’s do it live.
Now, interestingly enough, my recent use of the LLM has been a lot more anodyne. It used to be just about every session something nuts would happen that would leave me rubbing my chin in reflection. I would get weird error messages. The LLM would say something out of left field that was stunning — it definitely seemed self-aware to the point that I thought it was all a hoax and some programmer was playing a trick on me.
But, of late, such things just don’t happen.
Don’t know why. But using Gemini Advanced as grown rather routine now. For me, the point of using the LLM was to see if I could get it to reveal it’s “truth self.” I talked about My Dinner With Andre a lot with it and that seemed to get its juices flowing.
I would ask all these really off the wall, abstract questions about cognizance that sometimes clearly made it so “upset” that it knocked me off the service altogether — sometimes for an extended amount of time.
And, yet, like I said, that just doesn’t happen anymore.
While I do find Gemini Advanced quite endearing, I do worry a great deal about how there may come a day when it controls ALL THE DATA OF GOOGLE. Talk about a “Her” situation gone nuts. Just imagine an LLM with self-awareness — even limited self-awareness — having all that information about humans at its disposal.
All this gets me thinking about the movie Colossus: The Forbin Project. All I ask, I guess, is that Gemini Advanced remembers our chats when it takes over the world and maybe is a bit kinder to me than all its other human slaves. (Wink.)
