Experiment in AI

Minnehaha Falls, July, 1985

It was a delightful summer’s day, over 25 years ago. Everyone there was having a relaxed and mellow good time. There was no need to impress anyone, no hustles or scams going on, everyone just living in the moment.

Sometimes I think that, in a way, that may be the highest state of human consciousness. So many people that I’ve met, through my work and many other activities, do not seem to realize what a beautiful gift they have, when it comes to the arts, nature and life in general. Sometimes I think it is all about stepping back, taking a deep breath and simply enjoying the very human experiences that they have. In your own life, what might be some examples of that? A time when your attention was focused on the simpler, less stressful and monotonous activities of everyday life? A good moment when you had a genuine smile on your face? A moment when you truly felt joy?

Note: Most of this post was written with Inferkit, an artificial intelligence writing program. The first paragraph, which I wrote, was “the seed” and the remainder was done by the program. This is a frightening development, not in that it can write greeting card sentiment better than I can, but that than you can be pretty sure that you will be consuming a ton of this literary junk food in the future. There is also the poetry program Sudowrite that you can use to rewrite your favorite song lyrics. Judging by the state of current popular music, I suspect it has already been used to author hit songs.

Another form of AI was used to colorize a scan of a black and white negative of the image above. That didn’t turn out so well and needed a lot of human intelligence to bring it where it is now, not a full colorization, but enought to set a mood.