May 7, 2025 • 30 mins
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Can AI's ability to shortcut learning destroy our capacity for critical thinking?
As AI tools become more powerful and conversational, many worry we're outsourcing our thinking and learning processes to machines that can't truly understand context or verify accuracy. This fear is especially common among younger tech-savvy generations who already distrust online information.
In this episode, discover how to approach AI as a tool rather than a replacement for critical thinking. Learn why prompt engineering skills are becoming crucial digital literacy tools, and understand the parallels between AI, textbooks, and other historical knowledge-sharing technologies
Listen now to gain practical insights on navigating the AI revolution while maintaining your intellectual autonomy.
Topics Discussed
- The viral "gorillas vs humans" debate as an entry point to discussing AI reliability
- Comparing AI-generated summaries to traditional shortcuts like Cliff Notes and textbooks
- How our brains and AI both use inference models to process and interpret information
- Why beliefs are harder to change than ideas, and how this affects information processing
- The Common Core math controversy as an example of resistance to new learning approaches
- Neil deGrasse Tyson's prediction about AI destroying internet credibility
- How confirmation bias influences our acceptance of information regardless of source
- The importance of questioning outputs from any information source, AI or human
- The existential value of human perspective and discernment in an AI-saturated world
- Real-world examples of AI's creative applications (music generation)
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:09):
Welcome to the fit mess.
name is Jeremy.
His name is Jason.
And here we talk about all things sort of AI and health and wellness and where theyintersect to try to make sure that you are getting the best information you can
to use these tools for your benefit while avoiding many of the pitfalls that come withthem.
uh Jason, today's episode comes from from a real life conversation you had with a soon tobe family member.
Yeah, so my future son-in-law and I were discussing oddly enough the who would win in afight a hundred men versus a gorilla.
(00:40):
Okay, I'm going to take us off the rails immediately because this keeps coming up in myfeed.
Where did this come?
don't I don't follow the memes.
I'm not hip.
I don't know what's down.
I don't have the 411.
What is the deal with this gorilla versus man thing?
Is this like the bear in the woods thing with women?
What's happening here?
if you're expecting me to be a substitute for relevance or coolness, that might beproblematic to your desired outcome.
(01:04):
um I did not hear about this right until my kids told me.
I started seeing it on the news.
I started seeing it on CNN and NBC.
And then, I mean, was floating around in all of my social profiles.
And uh I haven't seen it on Al Jazeera or BBC.
I haven't seen it on Fox.
(01:24):
I haven't seen it on Drudge.
I haven't seen it on like the 10,000 news sources I try to collect information from all ofthem, but I've seen it on a few.
And the origin is I guess some TikToker, you know, mentioned would this happen?
Who would win?
And it just exploded because a bunch of men were like.
(01:46):
I could beat up a gorilla, I could beat up a bear.
Like.
No, you couldn't.
And then it became realistically, how many men would it take to do these things?
Somebody said 1100.
So we went around and around, you know, like, okay, so a gorilla is 10 times stronger thana human being roughly about double the weight of an average male.
(02:09):
But we have to get through this.
So so we had a discussion about it.
And I said it was very much so like 100 humans.
Gorilla doesn't stand a chance.
I'm like
know, like there's a lot of environmental factors and pieces that go into this.
Maybe the gorilla runs better.
It's going to run people over.
He's like 100 people jumping in a gorilla all at once.
(02:31):
I'm like, that's not how fights happen.
Like, that's not how things occur.
Like, you're not going to get 100 people to sneak up.
They very, very quiet.
I'm hunting gorillas.
Like, that's not going to be a thing.
So you're going to have to approach slowly.
So eventually, I'm like, all right, let me consult chat.
So I start poking through it and have a look at it.
I find an answer and
(02:52):
GI TBT is basically spinning back the same bullshit that would come out of my head.
So I immediately start to question it.
And Jared, my son-in-law is like, yeah, so like, is this a good source of information?
He goes, I don't think it is.
He goes, I don't think it's a good way to learn.
I don't think it's a good way to look things up because somebody controls all the rightsto this information, all the LLMs, all these pieces.
(03:14):
And there are some things that he was talking about.
Like, and I've worked in this field for the better part of 20 years.
And he's telling me things that I know, like the technology is not set up to do that.
And there are things that it's set up to do that he says that it can't do.
like, but it does.
It's just some misinformation, I guess, that most people have around this topic.
(03:37):
And the guy's really smart and really capable, really competent.
And as we're kind of going through these pieces, uh he gets to the point where he's like,look, I don't trust AI because the
learning process that I have to go through to understand something.
If I can go to AI and say, summarize this book for me, and it gives me a good summary.
(04:00):
He's like, did I actually learn anything?
Or am I just taking the summary as the thing to understand and know, and then passing thisoff as my own learned and earned knowledge?
I'm like, sure.
So what you're describing there is Cliff Notes.
Like we've had those forever.
and by the way,
your entire experience because we have history classes and because we have written historyand oral history is in fact the same thing because you didn't live all the experience.
(04:30):
Like we were in the cave together and Grok is up there talking about, oh, let I go andfight bear and be stabbed stick and poke.
Like you didn't experience that, but you got to experience the story and understand thosepieces when they go.
And if we make stick sharp, it poke bear better.
Oh, okay.
No shit.
Well,
great, that's now learned knowledge, you can take that, absorb that and put that into yourpractice.
(04:53):
But it's this notion that AI is somehow uh shortcutting things for people, which it is, sodo textbooks, so does literacy.
mean, so do all these things that take the part of us.
It's why we have trade schools, because when you go into a trade school, you don't go intoa trade school, typically speaking, and not go through some kind of classroom learning.
(05:14):
Typically there's...
some interaction that you're gonna go through and you're gonna read things and you'regonna understand them.
Like there's not a lot of jobs out there that don't require you to have literacy.
Like it's just, part of it.
And the communicating and past information level works that way.
These AI tools are a further extrapolation of that, right?
Like the amount of information they can send to you is much higher and you can use themand rely on them for different things.
(05:37):
And we had a discussion last week where we talked about the fact that people fed theirsymptoms into an AI system and it performed, you know,
statistically much better than the doctors did in the same exercise and diagnosis process.
But we also talked about the fact that, okay, this is great that it can go through thesearch filters and extract this information to look at it.
And there's all kinds of problems with Western medicine and distraction.
(05:59):
That being said, what if AI is wrong?
What if, you know, it diagnosed the right thing 70 % of the time, but 30 % of the time,the diagnosis was completely off.
And you're like, well, they told me to go eat bleach to take care of this problem.
So I went and ate bleach.
and then died.
You don't get a suit AI from malpractice.
Like you've taken this on yourself.
(06:20):
And again, the Dunning-Kruger effect in full force has led you to do things that arestupid and you wind up paying a price for that.
I would venture to say that Google, like since the invention of search engines really, solike way back, the AltaVista days and Yahoo and everybody else, since then, this has been
a progressive problem.
It's just that now it happens much quicker and it feels much more authoritative because
(06:44):
the thing we're asking questions is actually conversational and feels like we're talkingto an expert, even though it's just rhythm.
That's where I think we're running into snags because my daughter's fiance is 23 and it'snot like he's not used to having to absorb and adopt new technologies all the time.
(07:06):
This is a new technology, but he's immediately wary of it because he's like, I alreadydon't trust the internet.
I already don't trust these things.
already don't trust these sources of information.
Like, okay, why do you trust this one less?
And then I really had to think about it.
Like, is there a legit reason to be more worried about this ah summarization,extrapolation, and regurgitating of data than it is at other standpoints?
(07:33):
And my gut says, be afraid.
And my brain says,
Yeah, but you're fucking afraid of everything with the same reasons.
Well, but there's a couple of things to consider with this.
And one is, you know, up until now, we've had to rely on human beings to write a lot ofwhat we're finding online.
(07:54):
So it's all coming from somebody who theoretically, hopefully did some sort of researchbefore writing that thing that ended up in front of my eyeballs.
But now the machines are writing based on what's already existing.
And it's going to be probably wrong more than people were because it's pulling from allthese different data sources and putting things together that don't necessarily go
(08:15):
together.
And so when we read that summary of the 10 web pages we might have looked at on our ownthat summary might be based on more inaccurate information and and spit back to us and but
I also wonder like how much I Mean just using my own experience when I ask Google aquestion and it spits back an AI answer, you know along with the million web pages that go
(08:40):
with that answer
I tend to read like the paragraph, right?
Like I get a quick idea of its full thought on what the thing is.
So.
Just like when I use the tool Blinkist to take a book, condense it down to 15 minutes,play it at double speed in seven minutes.
You know, I I take that information and I decide.
(09:02):
Did I get anything out of that?
Is there more I want to explore here?
Because that's my approach to to that sort of a tool is like.
I've got enough.
Have I heard is there anything here that I'm like, wow, I've never heard that before.
I must know more.
Or I'm like, OK, it's another self-help book.
Get some good sleep.
Eat some shit.
You know, like go for a run.
You'll feel better.
I don't need to go read that 300 page book now because I just got the summary that tellsme I've I've heard this information before.
(09:27):
But when somebody blows my mind with like, here's how to how to experience life at aslower pace and get more out of it.
Great.
I'm going to go get the book now and I'm going to read more.
And I want that, that firsthand knowledge from, from that person.
So I think to me, like my experience tells me that it's really not that, that different.
It, you know, it speeds up the process of now.
(09:48):
I don't have to click 10 things to get a quick paragraph to tell me if I'm interestedenough to learn more.
But, you know, I do have to take with a grain of salt that summary, because I believe thatit's pulling from its own resources and you know, probably more full of shit than those 10
links might've been if I found them on my own.
So.
(10:10):
If you take the term intelligence and you look at that from a contextual perspective,whether it's artificial or naturally derived, intelligence is basically taking information
signals inbound towards you and turning them into something and interpreting somethinginto something of use and of value.
And really what we're talking about with most LLMs and all the GITPT and AI that weinteract with are inference models.
(10:37):
So it's, you know,
is this thing close to this thing?
And if so, they kind of have a relationship.
And can I infer enough information to build enough of a response that actually seems likeit sounds legit?
Like, it's good.
That's exactly what human brains do.
Like, that's how we learn.
(10:57):
That's how we process information and the books that you read and things that you readonline.
There is another set of intelligence ripping through that and maybe making mistakes.
So, yeah, like
The idea is that the aggregate idea of having lots of different intelligences out there,going through and looking at these things, self-checking themselves, cross-checking
themselves, trying to make sure that they're actually saying the right thing and moving inthe right direction is really how we as a society and as a species have grown and moved
(11:26):
forward.
Now we have this new thing that does a lot of that for us.
And it means that a lot of people don't have to take the time to actually learn understandthese things to actually have a decent level of information and knowledge on it.
That's not a bad thing.
Because really when you think about it, these chat TPP pieces and all the generative AI,you're essentially using them like you would a tool like a cell phone or a browser.
(11:50):
Jeremy, if I came to you and I said, here is a shovel and a battery backup, go build me acell phone.
How many lifetimes would it take you?
I'd have to ask AI.
I don't know.
uh Right.
(12:13):
We use shit all the time that we have no fucking idea how it's built, how it's made.
I mean, because it becomes part of the user experience.
The backend of all these GPTs is the same.
Before we continue this conversation about AI accountability,
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(12:35):
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(13:46):
but I mean, realistically, at some point, um we have to start accepting the fact thatthese artificial sources of truth um are still sources of truth.
And we have to delineate between the concept of truth and fact.
(14:07):
And we don't do that enough already.
Like, we look at the news and news is all about interpretation of facts for the most part.
these days because it's editorialized.
But even the things that produce em the mechanisms for how we're just going to understandthe world and the practical formulas behind that, like textbooks, math, English,
(14:27):
especially history, those things get rewritten all the time to be editorialized towards acertain perspective.
I mean, let's use math for a very simple mechanism.
Common Core made the country throw their hands up in outrage because
the mechanism was different than the rote math techniques that we had used before.
And the whole point of it was to get schools to go through and to grant a curriculum thatat a national level, they can repeat everywhere.
(14:54):
And my kids brought home their common core math.
And I looked at it and I'm like, fuck this.
It's so different from what I learned and know.
There's no way this can be useful.
And then I started reading the studies and the returns on it.
They're like, well, the way that it's been put together and the other international groupsthat have used these pieces, like here's what their success rate's been.
And I'm like, well,
Maybe I'm an idiot.
Maybe I'm wrong.
(15:14):
Well, my kids do math now and I'm looking at it.
I'm like, I can't figure that out.
And I'm pretty good at math.
And I've taken the Common Core stuff and I fit it into AI and looked at it.
And you know what?
It actually is pretty good.
It is another way of doing this.
It is effective.
Like it does do all these things.
So I had to get past my own bias that the way that I learned something was the right wayto do it.
(15:36):
Because the reality is that knowing, learning, and understanding.
whether it's artificial or naturally derived, we're all just things try to sort shit, putit into something that's cognitively recognizable.
So we can pilot these meatseats of ours through this, you know, scary mystical world thatwe live with it.
And the more we absorb and the more we, I guess, give in or surrender our ignorance to anartificial intelligence.
(16:11):
and let it feed us?
Yeah, they're going to have homogenization of ideas and thoughts and processes and allthose pieces.
TV does that to you, so does the Internet, like a million things already do this to youlike.
Why is this one so much worse?
And I guess the idea of this one so much worse because.
Random people can make things that can fool the human being into thinking that it'ssomebody else that does these things, blah, blah, blah, blah.
(16:35):
Yes, all those things happen.
Information is fucking nebulous and ephemeral and weird.
Agreed.
But this tool is effective and it makes great cat memes.
So people aren't going to give it up anytime soon.
All right, well, let me get your take on this then.
The very famous scientist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.
has repeatedly uh predicted that AI will be the end of the internet as we know it.
(17:33):
Hmm, so The idea that everything becomes total bullshit Or is completely
untrustable because the deep fakes are so good that there's nobody can discern them so thepeople that believe in the fake news start thinking everything is fake news because right
(17:54):
No
find themselves driving back to a library to read these old fashioned books to get theirinformation?
Well, no, it's confirmation bias, right?
I mean, when you're talking about people that there's a very large percentage of thepopulation that doesn't have ideas, they have beliefs and ideas are great.
(18:16):
You can change an idea.
Like you can get new information and go, oh, well, now I think something different.
A belief is different.
You're going to we are.
For lack of a better term, hardwired.
To.
accept beliefs and do whatever kind of mental gymnastics we have to to find things thatsupport those beliefs because that's what we is relied upon us for survival within our
(18:42):
tribes.
We have to go so much farther to go from idea to belief, to adopt an idea as a belief.
It has to become a part of you.
Religion, for example, is a faith.
It is a belief in a story that becomes a part of who you are and way you live your lifeand every decision that you make.
(19:03):
Yeah, well, and there's two sides of that, right?
So em it can be really hard to go from an idea to a belief, but it's a lot easier to haveno idea and then have a belief thrust upon you as an idea, adopt it, then that becomes the
fundamental part of who you are.
I think that happens a lot.
(19:24):
Like, I would say most people that uh subscribe to our religion, that's the path for howthey got.
like their parents did this thing, they picked it up as tradition, they ran forward withit.
And of course it's true because absolutely, right?
I mean, we all have our camps and our tribes and we don't want to not be in our tribes.
(19:45):
um information and the way that we collect information and the way that we distributeinformation, it almost always comes from a bias source.
And that was always comes from somebody that has a belief about something.
And that's why it is they're trying to spread this across.
Like, I mean, I don't have an answer for atheism.
I mean, because the of atheism,
is that it's lack of belief, but it has a lot of the same kind of tenants to it where it'slike.
(20:09):
mean, it's a belief on its own though.
It's a belief in nothing more than it's a.
in and I mean, it's not necessarily nihilism or anything like that.
But yeah.
And then you have agnostics, you know, which I would argue are the scientists and peoplelike, I think it's like this, but I don't actually fucking know, like how you live your
life in any of those extremes.
(20:31):
If you're living your life in a way other than I don't know.
You're living life a belief.
And the idea is to be open.
and to be understanding of these pieces and have enough neuroplasticity to go through andchange your mind.
If you can't change your mind about an idea, then it's a belief period.
(20:51):
If you can't argue the other side in a reasonable way, then you are arguing for yourbelief, not an idea.
Because I can look at the most horrible things out there and I can think through thecounter argument all the way through end to end.
And I can come up with another
premises to go, okay, well, I could see from this perspective, how somebody might feelthat way.
(21:12):
I think they're fucking nuts.
I disagree with them.
I think it's abysmal and awful.
But I can understand and empathize at it to some degree and connect with that kind ofoutrageous bullshit.
If you can't do that, then you have a belief, not an idea.
And we have enough beliefs.
We have enough believers.
(21:33):
I mean, there's people that believe bullshit all the time.
I don't think AI
makes this any better or worse?
Because I think you're going to ask AI questions and you're going to prompt engineer it togive you have it spit back the response that you want to see.
I mean, I think I think ultimately it does what where we started with this conversation.
You said something about doing it faster.
It gets you to that belief point faster.
(21:56):
It takes a bunch of data, puts it together for you to form a idea or a belief faster thanyou would have.
And is that good or bad?
I don't know.
I'm agnostic about it.
I don't know, but.
I mean, it's it's made my life easier.
I I was was going to.
(22:16):
joke that like, you know, I got your one paragraph text message about this is an idea fora podcast episode.
I threw it into a I said, give me an outline.
I've got a three segment nine section outline for an episode that I haven't looked atonce, but I like to I like to use this as a tool again to like give like give me something
(22:36):
I can sink my teeth into.
And do I care enough about the output to do something with it?
And ultimately, like I got some ideas about like some questions I wanted to ask you andsome directions I wanted to go.
I didn't follow the outline, but I was able to take your three sentences and turn it intoa potentially 30 minute conversation if I followed the path.
that's the crazy thing is that like, is this path worth following?
(23:01):
So you have to ask yourself that every time you read these things.
Does this make sense?
Am I going in the right direction?
Whether you have an output is actually a value.
If you're not doing that with everything that you look at, read, write, and interact with,you're fucking up.
Right.
Right.
That's not thinking.
That's just following, really.
yeah, like at that point, you can be replaced by the chat GPT prompt, you should be.
(23:25):
Like your unique value is understanding these things to try to bring perspective intosomething in this world.
And I'm not talking about your unique value, I'm talking about every individual's uniquevalue.
As individuals, our unique value is our ability to discern things and bring our ownperspective into those events.
And how we experience that and how we go about looking at those pieces.
(23:48):
That's the big existential question.
Is AI a replacement for religion?
Is AI a replacement for belief systems?
Is AI a replacement for writing Perl scripts, for writing code?
Is it a replacement for going through and creating new graphics and new music?
I made a song at a Nowhere using ChatGPT.
(24:09):
I used one of the follow-on GPTs to go through and write a song in the style of Bauhausabout real estate in Everett, Washington.
I think I heard that on the radio the other day.
That's quite a song.
but the thing is when I played it, I'm like, shit, this actually isn't bad.
Like, nothing really went into it.
(24:30):
Like, and I can download the copyright license to it and I own it.
Like I'm the creator.
I'm like, I'm not the creator of this shit.
is
Can AI show me a visual representation of 10,000 gorillas versus one man?
That's what I wanna know.
uh Absolutely.
I saw this 10,000 versus a million.
(24:53):
This thing is amazing.
Like, it's just this mass filtering down and like, in these quantities, you're talkingabout a very, very different set up because the gorillas are all like pumped to fight with
with each other.
I like that they're all like Paul Rudd too.
Like all of the men, it's like, will a million Paul Rudds beat 10,000 Cocos?
(25:19):
I like how the Cocos are running upright too.
By the way, for all of you watching this or listening to this, just go into YouTube andlook for 10,000 Gorillas versus.
Yeah, I don't like how they just fling the bodies because in reality the gorillas wouldrip their arms off and beat them to death with them.
I that's what would really happen.
Right.
where are the parts?
(25:42):
I mean...
trust this at all.
This is, find to be completely false and I am going to choose to not accept that as fact.
Yeah, again, you don't have to.
mean, that's the thing.
There's always the argument, are we actually living in the real world?
Is this a simulation?
These are big existential questions.
(26:02):
I mean, some of the arguments you can read about this topic, it's hard to disagree withsome of what they're saying.
But it's also not practical.
Right.
Okay, what if we're living in a simulation?
Well, I can fucking do anything about that.
I'm gonna keep going until someone gives me a cheat code to get around this shit.
(26:26):
this game sucks.
Where's my upright, upright, left, right, left, right, A, A, B, select, start.
That's what I want to know.
no, like that's a legit question.
uh That being said, we experience the world through our senses.
And chat GPT experiences the world through its senses.
(26:47):
And its senses are basically data input.
And then they spit out data.
And then they get more data input from other people around them.
It's got visual cues.
It can see in light spectrums that we can't see in.
It can hear things that we can't see.
It can extract data much faster than we can.
Like all these things are great, but it doesn't really have a lot of motivation from thechat GPT perspective.
(27:11):
What they have discovered is when they give it motivation, depending on the motivationthey give it, gives you very different outputs.
Like there's the AIs that decided that they would form their own communication languageand start talking to each other.
And nobody can understand it, but the AIs could clearly...
communicate in a way that we couldn't understand.
There's the AIs that they went through and they put forth the problem, keep all peoplesafe.
(27:38):
And one of the AIs was like, cool, I'm going to melt all of you in nuclear warfare.
And then we never have to worry about you being in danger again.
It's like, huh, OK.
And they're not unreasonable answers.
I look at it, I'm like, fuck, I get that.
you
You need to apply that to everything that you work in, in every possible way.
(28:02):
AI is just another form of intelligence.
And some of them are your crazy fucking weird 3 % of uncle.
Like that's just gonna happen.
And you gotta learn how to filter that shit out and stop fighting, you know, this ideathat there's so much fear and trepidation around these pieces because there shouldn't be.
I mean, it's just another source of information to make you do dumb shit faster.
(28:26):
which is how we're gonna use it.
So you have to critically think, but faster.
Yeah, well, and the biggest part is em critically think before you ask your question.
If you think critically before you ask your question, you're going to get a better answer.
If you ask a stupid question, you're probably going to get a stupid response.
(28:46):
That's my experience.
I've got a lot of it.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, me too.
Most of the wealth of my knowledge has been derived from me making mistakes.
And those mistakes normally start with me not asking the right questions up for.
Yeah, failure is a hell of a teacher.
All right.
Well, I think that's enough uh enough for one week.
(29:08):
I want to go watch some more Gorillas fighting humans videos.
I'm going to try and find a better one and maybe we'll bring that next time.
I will.
Thanks so much for listening.
If you've gotten any value out of this, please do share it with somebody who could alsobenefit from it.
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Welcome to the fit mess.
name is Jeremy.
His name is Jason.
And here we talk about all things sort of AI and health and wellness and where theyintersect to try to make sure that you are getting the best information you can
to use these tools for your benefit while avoiding many of the pitfalls that come withthem.
uh Jason, today's episode comes from from a real life conversation you had with a soon tobe family member.
Yeah, so my future son-in-law and I were discussing oddly enough the who would win in afight a hundred men versus a gorilla.
(00:40):
Okay, I'm going to take us off the rails immediately because this keeps coming up in myfeed.
Where did this come?
don't I don't follow the memes.
I'm not hip.
I don't know what's down.
I don't have the 411.
What is the deal with this gorilla versus man thing?
Is this like the bear in the woods thing with women?
What's happening here?
if you're expecting me to be a substitute for relevance or coolness, that might beproblematic to your desired outcome.
(01:04):
um I did not hear about this right until my kids told me.
I started seeing it on the news.
I started seeing it on CNN and NBC.
And then, I mean, was floating around in all of my social profiles.
And uh I haven't seen it on Al Jazeera or BBC.
I haven't seen it on Fox.
(01:24):
I haven't seen it on Drudge.
I haven't seen it on like the 10,000 news sources I try to collect information from all ofthem, but I've seen it on a few.
And the origin is I guess some TikToker, you know, mentioned would this happen?
Who would win?
And it just exploded because a bunch of men were like.
(01:46):
I could beat up a gorilla, I could beat up a bear.
Like.
No, you couldn't.
And then it became realistically, how many men would it take to do these things?
Somebody said 1100.
So we went around and around, you know, like, okay, so a gorilla is 10 times stronger thana human being roughly about double the weight of an average male.
(02:09):
But we have to get through this.
So so we had a discussion about it.
And I said it was very much so like 100 humans.
Gorilla doesn't stand a chance.
I'm like
know, like there's a lot of environmental factors and pieces that go into this.
Maybe the gorilla runs better.
It's going to run people over.
He's like 100 people jumping in a gorilla all at once.
(02:31):
I'm like, that's not how fights happen.
Like, that's not how things occur.
Like, you're not going to get 100 people to sneak up.
They very, very quiet.
I'm hunting gorillas.
Like, that's not going to be a thing.
So you're going to have to approach slowly.
So eventually, I'm like, all right, let me consult chat.
So I start poking through it and have a look at it.
I find an answer and
(02:52):
GI TBT is basically spinning back the same bullshit that would come out of my head.
So I immediately start to question it.
And Jared, my son-in-law is like, yeah, so like, is this a good source of information?
He goes, I don't think it is.
He goes, I don't think it's a good way to learn.
I don't think it's a good way to look things up because somebody controls all the rightsto this information, all the LLMs, all these pieces.
(03:14):
And there are some things that he was talking about.
Like, and I've worked in this field for the better part of 20 years.
And he's telling me things that I know, like the technology is not set up to do that.
And there are things that it's set up to do that he says that it can't do.
like, but it does.
It's just some misinformation, I guess, that most people have around this topic.
(03:37):
And the guy's really smart and really capable, really competent.
And as we're kind of going through these pieces, uh he gets to the point where he's like,look, I don't trust AI because the
learning process that I have to go through to understand something.
If I can go to AI and say, summarize this book for me, and it gives me a good summary.
(04:00):
He's like, did I actually learn anything?
Or am I just taking the summary as the thing to understand and know, and then passing thisoff as my own learned and earned knowledge?
I'm like, sure.
So what you're describing there is Cliff Notes.
Like we've had those forever.
and by the way,
your entire experience because we have history classes and because we have written historyand oral history is in fact the same thing because you didn't live all the experience.
(04:30):
Like we were in the cave together and Grok is up there talking about, oh, let I go andfight bear and be stabbed stick and poke.
Like you didn't experience that, but you got to experience the story and understand thosepieces when they go.
And if we make stick sharp, it poke bear better.
Oh, okay.
No shit.
Well,
great, that's now learned knowledge, you can take that, absorb that and put that into yourpractice.
(04:53):
But it's this notion that AI is somehow uh shortcutting things for people, which it is, sodo textbooks, so does literacy.
mean, so do all these things that take the part of us.
It's why we have trade schools, because when you go into a trade school, you don't go intoa trade school, typically speaking, and not go through some kind of classroom learning.
(05:14):
Typically there's...
some interaction that you're gonna go through and you're gonna read things and you'regonna understand them.
Like there's not a lot of jobs out there that don't require you to have literacy.
Like it's just, part of it.
And the communicating and past information level works that way.
These AI tools are a further extrapolation of that, right?
Like the amount of information they can send to you is much higher and you can use themand rely on them for different things.
(05:37):
And we had a discussion last week where we talked about the fact that people fed theirsymptoms into an AI system and it performed, you know,
statistically much better than the doctors did in the same exercise and diagnosis process.
But we also talked about the fact that, okay, this is great that it can go through thesearch filters and extract this information to look at it.
And there's all kinds of problems with Western medicine and distraction.
(05:59):
That being said, what if AI is wrong?
What if, you know, it diagnosed the right thing 70 % of the time, but 30 % of the time,the diagnosis was completely off.
And you're like, well, they told me to go eat bleach to take care of this problem.
So I went and ate bleach.
and then died.
You don't get a suit AI from malpractice.
Like you've taken this on yourself.
(06:20):
And again, the Dunning-Kruger effect in full force has led you to do things that arestupid and you wind up paying a price for that.
I would venture to say that Google, like since the invention of search engines really, solike way back, the AltaVista days and Yahoo and everybody else, since then, this has been
a progressive problem.
It's just that now it happens much quicker and it feels much more authoritative because
(06:44):
the thing we're asking questions is actually conversational and feels like we're talkingto an expert, even though it's just rhythm.
That's where I think we're running into snags because my daughter's fiance is 23 and it'snot like he's not used to having to absorb and adopt new technologies all the time.
(07:06):
This is a new technology, but he's immediately wary of it because he's like, I alreadydon't trust the internet.
I already don't trust these things.
already don't trust these sources of information.
Like, okay, why do you trust this one less?
And then I really had to think about it.
Like, is there a legit reason to be more worried about this ah summarization,extrapolation, and regurgitating of data than it is at other standpoints?
(07:33):
And my gut says, be afraid.
And my brain says,
Yeah, but you're fucking afraid of everything with the same reasons.
Well, but there's a couple of things to consider with this.
And one is, you know, up until now, we've had to rely on human beings to write a lot ofwhat we're finding online.
(07:54):
So it's all coming from somebody who theoretically, hopefully did some sort of researchbefore writing that thing that ended up in front of my eyeballs.
But now the machines are writing based on what's already existing.
And it's going to be probably wrong more than people were because it's pulling from allthese different data sources and putting things together that don't necessarily go
(08:15):
together.
And so when we read that summary of the 10 web pages we might have looked at on our ownthat summary might be based on more inaccurate information and and spit back to us and but
I also wonder like how much I Mean just using my own experience when I ask Google aquestion and it spits back an AI answer, you know along with the million web pages that go
(08:40):
with that answer
I tend to read like the paragraph, right?
Like I get a quick idea of its full thought on what the thing is.
So.
Just like when I use the tool Blinkist to take a book, condense it down to 15 minutes,play it at double speed in seven minutes.
You know, I I take that information and I decide.
(09:02):
Did I get anything out of that?
Is there more I want to explore here?
Because that's my approach to to that sort of a tool is like.
I've got enough.
Have I heard is there anything here that I'm like, wow, I've never heard that before.
I must know more.
Or I'm like, OK, it's another self-help book.
Get some good sleep.
Eat some shit.
You know, like go for a run.
You'll feel better.
I don't need to go read that 300 page book now because I just got the summary that tellsme I've I've heard this information before.
(09:27):
But when somebody blows my mind with like, here's how to how to experience life at aslower pace and get more out of it.
Great.
I'm going to go get the book now and I'm going to read more.
And I want that, that firsthand knowledge from, from that person.
So I think to me, like my experience tells me that it's really not that, that different.
It, you know, it speeds up the process of now.
(09:48):
I don't have to click 10 things to get a quick paragraph to tell me if I'm interestedenough to learn more.
But, you know, I do have to take with a grain of salt that summary, because I believe thatit's pulling from its own resources and you know, probably more full of shit than those 10
links might've been if I found them on my own.
So.
(10:10):
If you take the term intelligence and you look at that from a contextual perspective,whether it's artificial or naturally derived, intelligence is basically taking information
signals inbound towards you and turning them into something and interpreting somethinginto something of use and of value.
And really what we're talking about with most LLMs and all the GITPT and AI that weinteract with are inference models.
(10:37):
So it's, you know,
is this thing close to this thing?
And if so, they kind of have a relationship.
And can I infer enough information to build enough of a response that actually seems likeit sounds legit?
Like, it's good.
That's exactly what human brains do.
Like, that's how we learn.
(10:57):
That's how we process information and the books that you read and things that you readonline.
There is another set of intelligence ripping through that and maybe making mistakes.
So, yeah, like
The idea is that the aggregate idea of having lots of different intelligences out there,going through and looking at these things, self-checking themselves, cross-checking
themselves, trying to make sure that they're actually saying the right thing and moving inthe right direction is really how we as a society and as a species have grown and moved
(11:26):
forward.
Now we have this new thing that does a lot of that for us.
And it means that a lot of people don't have to take the time to actually learn understandthese things to actually have a decent level of information and knowledge on it.
That's not a bad thing.
Because really when you think about it, these chat TPP pieces and all the generative AI,you're essentially using them like you would a tool like a cell phone or a browser.
(11:50):
Jeremy, if I came to you and I said, here is a shovel and a battery backup, go build me acell phone.
How many lifetimes would it take you?
I'd have to ask AI.
I don't know.
uh Right.
(12:13):
We use shit all the time that we have no fucking idea how it's built, how it's made.
I mean, because it becomes part of the user experience.
The backend of all these GPTs is the same.
Before we continue this conversation about AI accountability,
I want to take a moment to share something that's been really helpful for me, especiallywhen researching complex topics like this.
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(13:46):
but I mean, realistically, at some point, um we have to start accepting the fact thatthese artificial sources of truth um are still sources of truth.
And we have to delineate between the concept of truth and fact.
(14:07):
And we don't do that enough already.
Like, we look at the news and news is all about interpretation of facts for the most part.
these days because it's editorialized.
But even the things that produce em the mechanisms for how we're just going to understandthe world and the practical formulas behind that, like textbooks, math, English,
(14:27):
especially history, those things get rewritten all the time to be editorialized towards acertain perspective.
I mean, let's use math for a very simple mechanism.
Common Core made the country throw their hands up in outrage because
the mechanism was different than the rote math techniques that we had used before.
And the whole point of it was to get schools to go through and to grant a curriculum thatat a national level, they can repeat everywhere.
(14:54):
And my kids brought home their common core math.
And I looked at it and I'm like, fuck this.
It's so different from what I learned and know.
There's no way this can be useful.
And then I started reading the studies and the returns on it.
They're like, well, the way that it's been put together and the other international groupsthat have used these pieces, like here's what their success rate's been.
And I'm like, well,
Maybe I'm an idiot.
Maybe I'm wrong.
(15:14):
Well, my kids do math now and I'm looking at it.
I'm like, I can't figure that out.
And I'm pretty good at math.
And I've taken the Common Core stuff and I fit it into AI and looked at it.
And you know what?
It actually is pretty good.
It is another way of doing this.
It is effective.
Like it does do all these things.
So I had to get past my own bias that the way that I learned something was the right wayto do it.
(15:36):
Because the reality is that knowing, learning, and understanding.
whether it's artificial or naturally derived, we're all just things try to sort shit, putit into something that's cognitively recognizable.
So we can pilot these meatseats of ours through this, you know, scary mystical world thatwe live with it.
And the more we absorb and the more we, I guess, give in or surrender our ignorance to anartificial intelligence.
(16:11):
and let it feed us?
Yeah, they're going to have homogenization of ideas and thoughts and processes and allthose pieces.
TV does that to you, so does the Internet, like a million things already do this to youlike.
Why is this one so much worse?
And I guess the idea of this one so much worse because.
Random people can make things that can fool the human being into thinking that it'ssomebody else that does these things, blah, blah, blah, blah.
(16:35):
Yes, all those things happen.
Information is fucking nebulous and ephemeral and weird.
Agreed.
But this tool is effective and it makes great cat memes.
So people aren't going to give it up anytime soon.
All right, well, let me get your take on this then.
The very famous scientist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.
has repeatedly uh predicted that AI will be the end of the internet as we know it.
(17:33):
Hmm, so The idea that everything becomes total bullshit Or is completely
untrustable because the deep fakes are so good that there's nobody can discern them so thepeople that believe in the fake news start thinking everything is fake news because right
(17:54):
No
find themselves driving back to a library to read these old fashioned books to get theirinformation?
Well, no, it's confirmation bias, right?
I mean, when you're talking about people that there's a very large percentage of thepopulation that doesn't have ideas, they have beliefs and ideas are great.
(18:16):
You can change an idea.
Like you can get new information and go, oh, well, now I think something different.
A belief is different.
You're going to we are.
For lack of a better term, hardwired.
To.
accept beliefs and do whatever kind of mental gymnastics we have to to find things thatsupport those beliefs because that's what we is relied upon us for survival within our
(18:42):
tribes.
We have to go so much farther to go from idea to belief, to adopt an idea as a belief.
It has to become a part of you.
Religion, for example, is a faith.
It is a belief in a story that becomes a part of who you are and way you live your lifeand every decision that you make.
(19:03):
Yeah, well, and there's two sides of that, right?
So em it can be really hard to go from an idea to a belief, but it's a lot easier to haveno idea and then have a belief thrust upon you as an idea, adopt it, then that becomes the
fundamental part of who you are.
I think that happens a lot.
(19:24):
Like, I would say most people that uh subscribe to our religion, that's the path for howthey got.
like their parents did this thing, they picked it up as tradition, they ran forward withit.
And of course it's true because absolutely, right?
I mean, we all have our camps and our tribes and we don't want to not be in our tribes.
(19:45):
um information and the way that we collect information and the way that we distributeinformation, it almost always comes from a bias source.
And that was always comes from somebody that has a belief about something.
And that's why it is they're trying to spread this across.
Like, I mean, I don't have an answer for atheism.
I mean, because the of atheism,
is that it's lack of belief, but it has a lot of the same kind of tenants to it where it'slike.
(20:09):
mean, it's a belief on its own though.
It's a belief in nothing more than it's a.
in and I mean, it's not necessarily nihilism or anything like that.
But yeah.
And then you have agnostics, you know, which I would argue are the scientists and peoplelike, I think it's like this, but I don't actually fucking know, like how you live your
life in any of those extremes.
(20:31):
If you're living your life in a way other than I don't know.
You're living life a belief.
And the idea is to be open.
and to be understanding of these pieces and have enough neuroplasticity to go through andchange your mind.
If you can't change your mind about an idea, then it's a belief period.
(20:51):
If you can't argue the other side in a reasonable way, then you are arguing for yourbelief, not an idea.
Because I can look at the most horrible things out there and I can think through thecounter argument all the way through end to end.
And I can come up with another
premises to go, okay, well, I could see from this perspective, how somebody might feelthat way.
(21:12):
I think they're fucking nuts.
I disagree with them.
I think it's abysmal and awful.
But I can understand and empathize at it to some degree and connect with that kind ofoutrageous bullshit.
If you can't do that, then you have a belief, not an idea.
And we have enough beliefs.
We have enough believers.
(21:33):
I mean, there's people that believe bullshit all the time.
I don't think AI
makes this any better or worse?
Because I think you're going to ask AI questions and you're going to prompt engineer it togive you have it spit back the response that you want to see.
I mean, I think I think ultimately it does what where we started with this conversation.
You said something about doing it faster.
It gets you to that belief point faster.
(21:56):
It takes a bunch of data, puts it together for you to form a idea or a belief faster thanyou would have.
And is that good or bad?
I don't know.
I'm agnostic about it.
I don't know, but.
I mean, it's it's made my life easier.
I I was was going to.
(22:16):
joke that like, you know, I got your one paragraph text message about this is an idea fora podcast episode.
I threw it into a I said, give me an outline.
I've got a three segment nine section outline for an episode that I haven't looked atonce, but I like to I like to use this as a tool again to like give like give me something
(22:36):
I can sink my teeth into.
And do I care enough about the output to do something with it?
And ultimately, like I got some ideas about like some questions I wanted to ask you andsome directions I wanted to go.
I didn't follow the outline, but I was able to take your three sentences and turn it intoa potentially 30 minute conversation if I followed the path.
that's the crazy thing is that like, is this path worth following?
(23:01):
So you have to ask yourself that every time you read these things.
Does this make sense?
Am I going in the right direction?
Whether you have an output is actually a value.
If you're not doing that with everything that you look at, read, write, and interact with,you're fucking up.
Right.
Right.
That's not thinking.
That's just following, really.
yeah, like at that point, you can be replaced by the chat GPT prompt, you should be.
(23:25):
Like your unique value is understanding these things to try to bring perspective intosomething in this world.
And I'm not talking about your unique value, I'm talking about every individual's uniquevalue.
As individuals, our unique value is our ability to discern things and bring our ownperspective into those events.
And how we experience that and how we go about looking at those pieces.
(23:48):
That's the big existential question.
Is AI a replacement for religion?
Is AI a replacement for belief systems?
Is AI a replacement for writing Perl scripts, for writing code?
Is it a replacement for going through and creating new graphics and new music?
I made a song at a Nowhere using ChatGPT.
(24:09):
I used one of the follow-on GPTs to go through and write a song in the style of Bauhausabout real estate in Everett, Washington.
I think I heard that on the radio the other day.
That's quite a song.
but the thing is when I played it, I'm like, shit, this actually isn't bad.
Like, nothing really went into it.
(24:30):
Like, and I can download the copyright license to it and I own it.
Like I'm the creator.
I'm like, I'm not the creator of this shit.
is
Can AI show me a visual representation of 10,000 gorillas versus one man?
That's what I wanna know.
uh Absolutely.
I saw this 10,000 versus a million.
(24:53):
This thing is amazing.
Like, it's just this mass filtering down and like, in these quantities, you're talkingabout a very, very different set up because the gorillas are all like pumped to fight with
with each other.
I like that they're all like Paul Rudd too.
Like all of the men, it's like, will a million Paul Rudds beat 10,000 Cocos?
(25:19):
I like how the Cocos are running upright too.
By the way, for all of you watching this or listening to this, just go into YouTube andlook for 10,000 Gorillas versus.
Yeah, I don't like how they just fling the bodies because in reality the gorillas wouldrip their arms off and beat them to death with them.
I that's what would really happen.
Right.
where are the parts?
(25:42):
I mean...
trust this at all.
This is, find to be completely false and I am going to choose to not accept that as fact.
Yeah, again, you don't have to.
mean, that's the thing.
There's always the argument, are we actually living in the real world?
Is this a simulation?
These are big existential questions.
(26:02):
I mean, some of the arguments you can read about this topic, it's hard to disagree withsome of what they're saying.
But it's also not practical.
Right.
Okay, what if we're living in a simulation?
Well, I can fucking do anything about that.
I'm gonna keep going until someone gives me a cheat code to get around this shit.
(26:26):
this game sucks.
Where's my upright, upright, left, right, left, right, A, A, B, select, start.
That's what I want to know.
no, like that's a legit question.
uh That being said, we experience the world through our senses.
And chat GPT experiences the world through its senses.
(26:47):
And its senses are basically data input.
And then they spit out data.
And then they get more data input from other people around them.
It's got visual cues.
It can see in light spectrums that we can't see in.
It can hear things that we can't see.
It can extract data much faster than we can.
Like all these things are great, but it doesn't really have a lot of motivation from thechat GPT perspective.
(27:11):
What they have discovered is when they give it motivation, depending on the motivationthey give it, gives you very different outputs.
Like there's the AIs that decided that they would form their own communication languageand start talking to each other.
And nobody can understand it, but the AIs could clearly...
communicate in a way that we couldn't understand.
There's the AIs that they went through and they put forth the problem, keep all peoplesafe.
(27:38):
And one of the AIs was like, cool, I'm going to melt all of you in nuclear warfare.
And then we never have to worry about you being in danger again.
It's like, huh, OK.
And they're not unreasonable answers.
I look at it, I'm like, fuck, I get that.
you
You need to apply that to everything that you work in, in every possible way.
(28:02):
AI is just another form of intelligence.
And some of them are your crazy fucking weird 3 % of uncle.
Like that's just gonna happen.
And you gotta learn how to filter that shit out and stop fighting, you know, this ideathat there's so much fear and trepidation around these pieces because there shouldn't be.
I mean, it's just another source of information to make you do dumb shit faster.
(28:26):
which is how we're gonna use it.
So you have to critically think, but faster.
Yeah, well, and the biggest part is em critically think before you ask your question.
If you think critically before you ask your question, you're going to get a better answer.
If you ask a stupid question, you're probably going to get a stupid response.
(28:46):
That's my experience.
I've got a lot of it.
Yes.
Yeah, yeah, me too.
Most of the wealth of my knowledge has been derived from me making mistakes.
And those mistakes normally start with me not asking the right questions up for.
Yeah, failure is a hell of a teacher.
All right.
Well, I think that's enough uh enough for one week.
(29:08):
I want to go watch some more Gorillas fighting humans videos.
I'm going to try and find a better one and maybe we'll bring that next time.
I will.
Thanks so much for listening.
If you've gotten any value out of this, please do share it with somebody who could alsobenefit from it.
There's links to do that at our website, the fit mess dot com, and we'll be back there inabout a week.
And quickly, don't forget, head over to magicmind.com forward slash fit mass 40 to get 40% off your subscription to magic mind.
(29:32):
I know I can't get through my day without it.
I think you'll feel the same once you try it.
Magic mind.com forward slash fit mass 40.
Thanks again for listening.
We'll see you then.
Thanks, bye bye.
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I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com