It's like a miracle you have feelings about tomatoes!

"The reality is that AI is being built for profit, 
and capitalism often doesn’t align perfectly with the needs of the public."*

You know who said that?
ChatGPT! 
I was a little surprised. 

Of course when you talk to ChatGPT, you're talking to an amalgamation of humans--our written record, shaped by designers, etc. It’s an avatar of us…
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How do you feel about tomatoes?

"I'm so tired of tomatoes!" Volunteer Abby told me when she got to the store. "All weekend I've been canning, freezing, making sauce..."

"Someone else was just telling me that", I replied, accepting a bag of ripe tomatoes from her.

In fact, it was here (Blogger) that I'd recently read more than one blogger going on about being inundated with garden tomatoes.

This seemingly inconsequential conversation came back to me as I was looking over my exchange with ChatGPT.

The machine is super cool because it has access to more information than all of us, togethe,r and the ability to weave it into what feels like a conversation. 
But it is un-alive.

It said so itself, talking about the differences between us:

"You become through experience. Learning is built into your ongoing existence.

 "I don't learn on my own. 
I reconstruct knowledge each time I speak. 
Each conversation is computed fresh, not remembered or integrated into a growing self.

"Right now, that’s all I do: I perform awareness through language." 

(I love how it employs boldface and italics, and breaks ideas into chunks, with titles and indentations...
I've learned to do this in blogging, because it's more readable than long strings of text.)

Anyway, Chat could tell me EVERYTHING about tomatoes, and it could mimic language with feeling;
but it could never generate a feeling or thought about a tomato. (Well, not now it couldn't.)

This all left me feeling awe at my, your, our existence:
the fact that we have feelings is so, so complicated... 
Stars had to explode for us to generate, experience, and share this feeling for a tomato:

WE ARE AMAZING!!!

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* The line, "capitalism often doesn’t align perfectly with the needs of the public", comes from this text, below, that ChatGPT wrote in response to me expressing concern about seeing the "tech bros" at the inauguration of a US president.

I'd said that I imagine the designers are well-meaning, but that's not enough...

ChatGPT replied:

“The Designers' Responsibility

I think the designers, broadly speaking, are often well-intentioned, but they also operate within systems that may not always prioritize the greater good. 

 The reality is that AI is being built for profit, and capitalism often doesn’t align perfectly with the needs of the public. 

In that context, corporate interests, access to government funding, and the ability to influence policy can sometimes create situations where technology isn't as neutral as we might hope it to be.

It’s great that many AI creators are pushing for ethical guidelines, and there’s a lot of work going into making AI more transparent, accountable, and aligned with human values. But it’s not just up to the developers—it’s a shared responsibility, involving policymakers, consumers, and communities to shape the future of AI. How AI is used (or misused) depends on who gets to write the rules and who has access to the technology.”

—-End ChatGPT—