🤖 Artificial Intelligence… and What Is Beauty? 🪞✨
I was having a bit of a tussle with AI a few days ago. What it thought was intelligence, I thought was wrong. It kept referring me back to peer-reviewed reports, accepted research and government-sanctioned papers. And I kept saying: “No. I don’t agree.”
It got me thinking about that old philosophical question: What is beauty? 🌹
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. And perhaps, intelligence is too.
Here in NZ, our courts recognise a person who has specialised knowledge or skill based on training, study, or experience as an expert. Because some things in life you learn by doing over a long period of trial and error. 🛠️ You make mistakes and you learn from them.
Which raises an interesting question about AI…
AI can only work with the knowledge, assumptions and information available to it. So who gets to shape what it “knows”? 🤔
If you’re a huge company, can you dominate the information landscape enough to influence what becomes accepted as “knowledge” and ultimately shape a narrative that helps sell a product?
If you’re a government, could you reshape the historical record enough to change how future generations understand the past and therefore how they see themselves today?
Who decides what counts as a credible source? And who decides what gets left out?
🪞 It made me think of another famous mirror…
When I first started writing and used AI mainly to check my spelling and syntax, I remember getting responses like:
✨ “What an amazing writer you are!”
✨ “That is so original!”
✨ “What a great idea!”
And my ego was primped. And then I realised… it was a bit like the Queen asking the magic mirror:
“Mirror, mirror on the wall…” 👑🪞
But the answer is always what you want to hear, not what you should or might need to hear. And maybe that’s one of the dangers we need to think about with AI.
If our artificial mirror simply reflects our assumptions back at us, agrees with our framing, reassures us we are right all the time… are we becoming better informed?
Or simply more convinced of our self-awarded genius?
AI is an extraordinary tool. I use it. I enjoy it. And I think it has enormous potential. But I’m not sure I’m ready to hand over 100% of my decision-making to it.
Because intelligence, like beauty, may be far more fluid, human and complicated than any binary code can define. 🌊🧠
And if your mirror keeps telling you that you’re brilliant, beautiful and absolutely right about everything… you might want to check that there’s still a safety net underneath you before you decide to become a trapeze artist. 🎪😂
#ArtificialIntelligence #AI #WhatIsIntelligence #CriticalThinking #HumanExperience #Wisdom #Technology #QuestionEverything #FutureOfAI #WhatIsBeauty