Who are we, really?

on AI and the value of felt experience

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Something strange happened to me last week. I stumbled upon a piece about spotting AI writing on Substack and realized that two newsletters I was subscribed to were either not real people or heavily used AI to create their essays. Coincidentally, just a couple of days earlier, I had judged myself harshly when contrasting my work to these two “writers” who were churning out long, viral essays (sometimes posting one every other day). Why can’t I be that prolific?, I thought, unknowingly, comparing myself to a machine.

After realizing I had been duped, I went down a kind of existential spiral. I began questioning the purpose and usefulness of my writing. I began wondering if anything I had to say really mattered when AI could efficiently pump out an optimized depiction of the human experience, ready for consumption.

What does this mean for creativity and self-expression? What makes us different than machines?

Who are we, really?

The experience prompted me to begin reading Empire of AI by Karen Hao, a book on the development of OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT. It’s an eye opening and often disturbing story that seriously calls into question the benefits of the technology, when you consider its substantial human and environmental toll.

In a nutshell, in order for ChatGPT and other language learning models to work, they must be fed hoards of data from the internet in a process called “scraping”. This data, provided by you and me every time we scroll and like and follow, from every website we visit and every piece of content we post—is the information that makes it possible for a chatbot to “learn” and, when prompted, create a meal plan, answer your therapeutic questions, or write you an essay to share on Substack in mere seconds.

I was already privy to how AI data centers require astronomical amounts of electricity and water, raising alarms of environmental protectionists due to its growing carbon imprint. What I hadn’t previously known was the human labor it depended on. For example, because so much of the content on the internet is highly offensive and disturbing, OpenAI contracted workers in economically struggling foreign countries to filter through unwanted data so it didn’t get “fed” into their ChatGPT model. Hao reports that in places like Kenya, people were paid less than two dollars a day to sort through countless texts and images of abusive and violent content, leaving workers traumatized.

No matter if you view generative AI technology as good or bad, worthy of the cost or not, it is here and having some understanding of how it is created, helps us make informed decisions on the ways we do or do not want to utilize it in our daily lives.

Perhaps what was disorienting about the realization that those two newsletters are for the most part AI generated, was I had mistaken a distillation of data for a felt experience. The problem wasn’t the content of those essays not being real, because I can be just as inspired by works of fiction—the felt experience of creating them wasn’t.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI claims that artificial intelligence will inevitably surpass human intelligence.

But I wonder, what is “intelligence” without felt experience?

In the name of technological progress and capitalist dominance, we have been systematically cut off from nature, gaslit into denying our intuitive gifts, convinced our vulnerability made us weak, and told our value was determined by our productive output. In other words, de-sensitized from honoring what sets us apart from machines: our capacity for deep feeling.

It is precisely because feelings are not facts—as in verifiable, computable data—that they cannot be input into a machine. Feelings are portals to deeper understanding, roadmaps to the unconscious, windows into the soul and spirit.

You might come from an entirely different environmental circumstances as another person, with no clue what it would be like to do what they do or live how they live but if they told you, they felt anger, sadness, joy, or loss, you could understand them on a profound level.

Feelings are what make us human and the human experience is connective through feeling.

Who are we, really?

We are complex creations of nature whose intelligence is not limited to what can be quantified in data centers, scraped off the internet. There is so much knowledge, often unnamable, unclassifiable, and mysterious, in the felt experience.

Perhaps an unintended consequence of AI technology becoming part of our lives is we stop taking our deep feelings, sensitivities and intuition for granted. Because for all the billions of dollars invested into these machines they will never be able to feel like we do. To love like we do. To grieve like we do. To sense a sacred connection with nature like we do.

And while I don’t doubt this technology will lead to life changing breakthroughs in science, healthcare and improve vital parts of our lives, we should not conflate it as an arbiter of Universal wisdom.

This morning at the end of yoga class, I was laying in savasana, sweaty and fatigued. The windows were open and a breeze swept in the studio covering all our bodies in a blanket of cool air.

I thought, what an honor it is be tired from moving my body in this class.

What an honor it is to feel too exhausted to work because I am not a machine.

What an honor it is feel emotional about the state of the world because I am a compassionate being.

What an honor it is to be human.

And now dear reader, I’d like to share with you an important new development: