Next year, or maybe next Tuesday, you will be talking with someone. Maybe it’s your partner at home, or your un-mutable coworker Ralph from Accounting in the company’s smart meeting gallery, or Jerry at Wawa as you wait for that Shorti Italian with extra meat and cheese. Then they say something that buys your attention – maybe you think they’re pulling your leg or they tell you breaking news you can’t believe.
And you will ask yourself “is this person AI or are they real? I better count their nostril hairs, see if their shirt buttons are facing the right way, check if their pupils morph alternately in and out of existence.” You are, after all, a war-hardened intelligence agent with specialties in the competitive fields of AI-detection and large language model counterinsurgency.
As more of these moments pass by, one day you will ask yourself “am I AI or am I real? I shall find a mirror to count my nostril hairs; see if my shirt buttons are facing the right way, check if my pupils morph alternately in and out of existence.”
And as you stand in front of the mirror, suddenly – did you see that?! – your mirror image just shifted alternately left…and then right. There! – it did it again! Left…right. …Left. Right. Left. Right.
Is this parallax sorcery? Perhaps it’s mono-mania finally collapsing in on you from too many tabs, too many prompts, too many one-eyed data points, too many autonomic switchings of contexts. Like all the colors of the spectrum condensing into a gelatinous blob of immense white light.
Unable (or unwilling) to lean into the potentially shattering truth of whatever is happening (it is happening, right?), it power-strikes you: “It’s the mirror: the mirror is AI!”
As you pivot to march away from that mirror (an AI or real mirror, maybe it doesn’t really or artificially matter at this point), your internalized, generative, pre-trained, and transformer’d voice (now irretrievably burrowed into the underside of the Mariana Trench of your commodified mind) echoes self-reassurance:
“I am absolutely right!”