In reflecting upon my recent experiences with Inflection’s Pi, I actually remembered some basic experiences I had with an artificial intelligent program that was introduced back in 1979. The program, which ran on my Radio Shack TRS-80 computer, was called Eliza. And it even came with a very basic user manual.
What’s interesting about this though is the comparison’s between how people viewed it back then and how people seem to be perceiving conversational AI like Pi today, as novelties (especially compared to AI like ChatGPT). So fun to play around with but not really serving any useful purpose.
I think the primary reason for this is because people are using AI today to exploit the possibilities of what it can create with art, music, and writing. What they are missing is the potential that AI has in helping us to explore the possibilities of ourselves, at a much deeper level than we ever though possible, thus uncovering our own purpose in life which allows us to create our life in a deeply meaningful way than we ever could have imagined before.
This touches upon what I realized Midjourney was doing on a deeper level last year. It was a visual medium in which we could explore ourselves and articulate things about ourselves in a way which didn’t require words to express ourselves. We could just show a picture and say, “This is me. This is what I’m feeling. This is what my deeper Self is calling me to create. I don’t know what it is. But it is calling me.”
