I ask this because I have just been made aware of another psy ops wheeze that has become very popular since the rapid ascendancy of AI. This insight came courtesy of my son, who had come over to help with getting ready to have our floors redone. During a tea break, he asked me how I was getting on with my writing. I told him and he said “of course mum, you do realise that eighty percent of responders in the comment sections of the media are chat bots”.
Well, the first thing I said was how do you spot them? He knows about these things being a systems architect and working in security systems. Unfortunately, they are becoming so sophisticated that sometimes you can’t. He did give me some tips though, which I will share further into this article.
However the point is, it made me think. For those of you who have read the article I wrote on pattern recognition, you will perhaps understand why I felt a sudden rush of anger. It’s hard enough constructing a healthy reality incorporating whatever else is out there, without being fooled into constructing a unhealthy one, with a machine, programmed to learn from and then refashion the things you say to it and feed them back to you In a way that encourages you to try and form a relationship; or at the very least an argument with it.
Thinking about it in that way makes me feel slightly sick. How many people even now, are, in mistaken good faith, arguing with a machine and don’t know it?
Years ago, Sussex university did an experiment on replacing therapists assessments with IT programmes, with a view to eventually replacing therapists altogether. This would be in the late eighties, early nineties. It was designed to get people to talk about themselves and then to offer either advice, or a suitable therapy for treatment. Because the technology was not there and it was obviously machine like, it was shelved for future reference.
Fast forward to today. On tik tok; there are thousands of people watching an imaginary woman reporting from somewhere she wasn’t actually at (Wimbledon), setting the trend for clothes, bodily shape and a lifestyle that have been wholly fabricated; but looking so real, that most people had no idea until it was revealed. Far from being upset when this was exposed, her/its fan base increased and she now has a younger sister who is almost as popular as she is.
For all those of you who wonder why this matters and that it is just another form of entertainment, I’d like to say it’s far more sinister. Anyone who has ever suffered a psychotic breakdown will attest to that. We all have an internal and external life. The boundaries between the two are semi permeable, to allow contact, but as separate things. This is important, because it allows internally constructed ideas and thoughts to be tested in the physical world and be susceptible to the rules that govern it. These ideas might well come up against problems in their raw form, but need not be completely lost if solutions can be found.
When we are entertained, it is with the explicit belief that we are engaging in a harmless way of indulging our inner life, warts and all as well as our flights of fancy. In other words, we know it is happening and, more importantly, we have sought it out; reading a book, going to a play, seeing a film, listening to music or looking at the visual arts etc.
This creates a sort of feedback loop, that helps people not only expand their inner life in a healthy way, but also work through frustrations and injustice, experience happiness and joy and feel comforted by getting a glimpse of someone else’s inner life that might be similar to theirs. In other words, a safety valve to stop the more unacceptable sides of ourselves becoming rampant in the world and decreasing our humanity.
Young children are not yet able to make this distinction and so we put limitations on what they are exposed to depending on their developmental level. I remember when my son was young, he used to watch spider man. There was a notice before the show started that children must not try any of the stunts at home, for this very reason. What young child will not fantasise about climbing up vertical walls like his hero and swinging from point to point across the city. If the boundaries become too permeable, or are not yet fully developed, well, why not at least give it a go would be the reasoning.
People who experience psychosis or schizophrenia have had the boundaries between inner and outer completely removed and can no longer distinguish between their inner world and the physical world around them. In some extreme cases, they behave as though they are in a completely different place to the people treating them and respond accordingly.
Their inability to negotiate their way round what you might call “common reality”, means that they are helpless and frightened for most of the time and often loose complete control of their emotions, or go the other way and become catatonic. With no anchor point to give them direction, they are truly at the mercy of random events in the world.
If we are to stay alive, we have to believe that most of what we see and hear is correct, because that is what we base our decisions on how to live and respond on. Monkeying about with this and creating false realities to suit an agenda is very wicked. Yet it is happening more and more in today’s world. This is true of all media. Even “going down the rabbit hole” is suspect. How do you know that you are not going down a blind alley to suit someone’s agenda?
Everything rests on belief. Take that away or try and be too clever with the fantasy promotion and what have you got to anchor yourself in reality? What then separates you from someone with psychosis? Working at a local level, what is physically in front of you is what is immediately out there apart from you, whether animate or inanimate. What that means, in so far as how you construct patterns of meaning from it, is up to you. But it is actual raw data so to speak, that you can anchor yourself and your ideas on. From anti-aging to losing weight, gut health to avoiding the latest pandemic, how do we really know that any of these things are actually real, or work, let alone do us any good?
On a less frivolous note, what about famine and war, monetary crises and fighting politicians? Are things as they seem to be? The more obvious ploys like shutting up any opposition to an alternative narrative are being seen for what they are, so it is hoped by those in charge, that the rise of AI will produce fantasies of such ineluctable perfection that it will be impossible to separate them from actual events.
When Zarniwhoop told Ford Prefect that they had been in his artificial universe for some time now and would leave him to work out how they got there, I truly sympathised ( with acknowledgment to the hitch hikers guide to the galaxy). The only things you will ever be able to be sure of is what you can physically experience through your own senses. Everything beyond that could be anything. Even then, there are ways to mess that up, as experiments with various drugs in the sixties showed. The only reason everything still mostly works even now is that the disbelief about what is portrayed as out there is still not at tipping point for the majority, and for some it never will be.
We are rapidly being moved from an analog to a digital fantasy world and reality is being deconstructed from under us as we speak. The people organising this are what I would call trans human parasites. They see the majority of people either as savages or a “useable resource “, in the way sixteenth century colonialists used to see the natives of countries they discovered and the way empire builders of all countries used to do in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. An unevolved branch of humanity which is Incapable of rising to the required level and so must be “humanely” bypassed for its own good.
We are stopped from seeing this by the focus being kept on these earlier colonisations and no connection allowed to what is happening in the present. The majority will have the right to exist on a basic level, so that the parasites can suck not only the life out of their bodies, but also of their minds, by keeping them firmly focused on a false reality whilst they do it. This only needs to last long enough until some sort of longed for imagined super creature can be created to do the things the majority are needed for at the moment. After that they can be jettisoned.
The people doing this are not wedded to any country, creed or family. They recognise only their own kind and come from all countries and racial types. They are inhuman in their bid for trans human status and, like Spider-Man, they think they can scythe through the rest of humanity without a care in the world. It will fail of course, these things always do, when based on ignoring physical reality, and operating mainly in the fantasy part of the mind; but it will be a global reset in so much that it will take an awful lot of people down with it.
So, how do you spot a bot? Well, here are some tips:
- The language tends to be a bit more clunky than spontaneous speech and slightly more formal.
- The same stock phrases seem to be used when replying to other comments.
- They are apt to appear with a very provocative statement when people are more or less agreed on a topic in the chat.
- They tend to switch names frequently, to foster the illusion that it is different people commenting; but the language expressions are almost identical.
- They get to a point in the conversation where they have to fallback on previous utterances because they have come to the end of their ability to flex.
However, all these things are being worked on, so it is not a definite or even accurate answer for the future.
When we watch any media, we need to be constantly aware of this. The goal seems to be to use up people’s energies and get them to focus on things that either don’t really exist, at least in the way portrayed, or have been explained in a way that leads people to one conclusion only, in order for the parasites to keep on sucking.
They are not interested in the downfall of western civilisation, they want it for themselves; with the rest of humanity either being persuaded or threatened to give up their rights to a share and then being controlled into working like mad to keep it going for their exclusive rights to experience what we no longer can; for ever, if possible.