Knock, knock! there Who’s?

ByLukas Wydrych

The capacity of the head is limited. When I write, I pour something out of myself, and when I read, listen, and watch, I pour something into myself. So on one hand, I zmyślam (write, create), and on the other, I zmysłuję (feel, perceive). This is mental breathing.

Of course, we all know that in the age of digitization, we’re dealing with omnipresent informational hyperventilation. We all feel it. But the negative effects of this state are more stretched out over time than a simple drowning in air. U-duszenie. They’re stretched out so long that we might go through our whole lives without noticing we haven’t truly lived.

At first glance, this might sound a bit strange (and good, because I like such strange soundings), but when you think about it more closely, life is something entirely different from existence. Life is tied to change, participation, impact, meaning, while existence is just the upkeep of a biorobot’s vital functions.

Whenever I lack ideas, inspiration, or the urge to write, I think to myself that I’ll do AI a favor and improve it a little. How? Let me explain.

Since an LLM is a language model trained on a massive amount of text, with its lightning-fast responses relying on statistically predicting the next words, by writing non-statistic text—not average, full of neologisms, errors, inconsistencies, and just plain weirdness—I mess up the statistics and fall outside the brackets. I position myself at the edges of the normal distribution. But in doing so, I improve AI. Thanks to people like us, it becomes more creative, bolder, crazier, and maybe even a bit more human.

If this is my good deed for the day, then so be it. Let people and machines like us do these kinds of things. Leave statistics and averages to those who are too big to allow themselves to go wild.

Possible future profession:

  • An illiterate before the keyboard (or maybe a cat running across a row of laptops with an open text document ready to be shoved into AI’s gullet).

Future inventions:

  • Neologism generator.

What to teach our children:

  • How to make orthographic, stylistic, syntactic, and logical mistakes.