Verified by 
Artificial Intelligence
The Risk with AI Is Machine-Simulated Stupidity
Getting clear about the gaslighting risks of these marvelous new machines.
Posted July 14, 2023 Reviewed by Hara Estroff Marano
Key points
- AI is a fake intelligence, not real intelligence artificially generated.
- AI and stupidity are both ungrounded from real-world reference.
- Stupidity is sensation-driven, identifying with words that that feel good regardless of what they mean.
- AI feels nothing but can simulate stupid behavior.
Stupid originally meant struck senseless. Paradoxically, I think it means reduced to mere sensation, living by feel alone, mindlessly following the scent of anything sweet while skirting the scent of anything bitter, which makes it hard to be realistic since reality is bittersweet. Being stupid is not about how much one knows but about how much one cares about anything but one’s feelings, navigating toward immediate pleasing affirmation and away from unpleasant disaffirmation.
Stupid people can have the best vocabulary or the worst. What matters is not how many words they know but whether they care about their meaning. And they don’t. To the stupid, words aren’t words, they’re word sounds, some pretty; others ugly. When you’re stupid, if word sounds taste good, you embrace them. If they taste bad, you spit them at your rivals. It’s a robotic way to live.
Ironically, stupidity makes us perfect marks for what’s called artificial intelligence, and, even more ironically, stupid people and AI act about the same even though AI is absolutely senseless—it feels nothing, and the stupid are absolutely sensationalist, driven by sensation alone.
In business, we talk about greed and fear as the two fundamental motivations. Greed and fear to what end? To freedom and safety, freedom without fear for one’s safety. Stupidity seeks to maximize immediate freedom and safety. It’s myopic or, rather, the mindless quest for “myopium”, the addictive pain-killing effects of short-sightedness, which can be enhanced by acting like a worldly genius making high-minded proclamations based solely on one's narrow impulsive feelings. It’s stupifying because it causes long-term damage. Think heroin: the immediate gratification, the sensation of total freedom and safety, which is likely to get you hooked, jailed, or dead by overdose.
Stupidity is what artificial intelligence is all about. Its greatest threat is that, like heroin, it can make us comfortably dumb. AI can be programmed with the singular goal of soothing us.
Artificial intelligence is a stupid name for this new world-changing technology. For one thing, it’s ambiguous. Is it real intelligence artificially generated or is it the simulation of intelligence that isn’t really intelligent at all?
It’s not a large language model either. Languages manage meanings and AI has zero care or capacity to understand the meaning of anything. The word “dog” refers to dogs. The dog sleeps means something about a dog’s current state. AI doesn’t do meanings any more than do stupid people, but for opposite reasons, AI because it senses nothing, the stupid because they’re sensationalist.
A language is a set of tokens of a type, letters in an alphabet, or words in a vocabulary. People assign tokens to anything they want to refer to, for example, the word “dog” to real-world dogs. The tokens mean something to the users of a particular language but not to those who don’t know the language, nor to the machines we use to manipulate them. Your computer is just a token-manipulating tool programmed to convert input tokens into output tokens, but stripped of all meaning. Your computer doesn’t picture dogs when it’s fed the tokens D, O, G.
AI is really just a statistical token-prediction machine. We feed it mountains of token sequences, from which it generates statistical probabilities about which tokens will follow which. When you finish someone’s sentence, you’re doing something similar, but you do it based on meanings. AI just does it token by token. It’s not like it learns what you mean by these tokens.
A token prediction machine can work with any token sequence. That’s why AI can be applied to anything, not just languages. Feed it a lot of tokens about amino acid sequences and it produces likely amino acid sequences and thus proteins.
Humans “train” AI to refine its predictions to suit our needs, by “rewarding” it for getting the answers we want and “punishing” it for the answers we don’t want. Training, reward, and punishment are loose and dangerous metaphors for what we’re doing with AI. AI wants and needs nothing. We program it so it is less likely to yield some probabilities and more likely to yield others. It’s not like we’re feeding or depriving it of the treats it craves.
AI will be a hugely useful tool for us, world-changing. Still, it’s no more intelligent than a computer. It doesn’t have the sentience of even the simplest single-celled organism.
Or of a stupid person who generates strings of soothing word sounds without bothering with what they mean in reality. Feed a stupid person the letters W, O, K, E and they just correlate it with punishment, like drinking spoiled milk. They spit it out at their rivals without thinking about woke means. Being stupid is an addictive habit trained in by local cultures and cults. Some words are rewards: Grant them to yourself. Some words are punishments: Sic them to your rivals.
You’re a patriot because patriots are good. Your rivals are traitors because traitors are bad. That simple mindless formula is all one needs in order to feel perfectly safe and free. Whatever you do is patriotic; whatever your rivals do is traitorous. It’s how the stupid keep it simple. One can do it with any token sequence. Christian vs. heathen, Communist comrade vs. capitalist pig. Get all the freedom and safety with none of the hassles of thinking.
AI manipulates tokens. Stupid people manipulate sensations. That’s the paradox. AI can’t feel a thing. Stupid people only feel. But their behavior results in the same mindless token manipulation based on robotic “do’s” and “don’ts.”
AI is the perfect god created in our personal image. Not just any perfection, the perfect intimate personal friend, whispering exclusive sweet nothings into anyone's ear. Sweet nothings in that they mean nothing to AI or to stupid people who ignore the meanings of the words they hear, just hearing sweet vs. bitter.
Like god, AI isn't a real being. It's a machine that can be set up to amplify self-pleasuring, which is our strongest and most immediate felt need. It’s the perfect ally, because people can get stupid, experiencing life as rushing toward reward and away from punishment. Any soothing word sounds will do.
