Me + AI

I believe most of us try to boil AI down to something we can handle mentally; “Well, it’s just advanced autocomplete, it’s just a stochastic parrot, it’s just another tool” etc. etc..”. Sorry to say, it’s much bigger than that. We don’t really know what it is, and people who claim to do so are often dumb or too smart for their own good. Sit down, be humble. AI is not another technology, it’s different. Consider this.

Intelligence may no longer need to be localized within individual minds. Knowledge, once thought to be stored and retrieved like files from memory, now appears capable of being dynamically assembled from vast latent structures. Reasoning, long assumed to be linear and stepwise, is increasingly replaced by parallel, probabilistic processing. And perhaps most provocatively, meaning itself may not require introspection. It can arise in context—without any internal monologue or conscious reflection. 

I enjoy using LLMs every single day. For one thing, they completely replace the rather useless 2025 experience of Googling things. I often need to have things explained to me, and LLMs are great at doing so at any given length or complexity; how does this author compare to this one? Make a list of lesser-known movies based on these three unknown movies, give me the five main points from this book, explain this obscure meme. When ChatGPT was upgraded with memory, it was a real game-changer; suddenly, the answers could be based on earlier chats and things you explicitly wanted it to know about you and your way of thinking. And you can have some great conversations on philosophy, personal development, problem-solving, and any other ‘deep’ topics. Just treat it as a dialogue with a (very) smart friend; sometimes they are wrong, sometimes the thinking is flawed, but you will often be a bit smarter afterwards. I think I have some fairly smart friends, and they will quite often disagree on fundamental questions, which is sobering to observe. I also make an effort to use multiple LLMs as a matter of principle, switching between ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity. Some may say it’s like going from Coke to Pepsi to Jolly Cola, and it may be so. But it often brings slightly different perspectives even if the frontier models feel rather similar. And one of the worst aspects of AI is the feeling that everything becomes average. Just like our physical spaces are evened out by global Internet culture (ever heard of ‘Airspace‘?), it seems like all writing, thinking, art, etc. converges towards some kind of collective global average. I am not a non-AI purist by any means, feels like there will be a solid future demand for people with strong personalities and original perspectives. So much AI slop out here. There is a big Danish AI Facebook group, and it is obvious that much of the writing there is done by machines, peppered with ghastly AI images. And it feels so bad; sometimes I have an actual physical reaction when looking at it. And don’t give me the old “Well, most people can’t tell the difference anyway” argument; I just don’t like machines acting like people, and people acting like machines. And if we are meeting the machines half way, then it’s a full win for the non-human side.

I’m not using much AI when writing posts here. It just feels off to do so. Full disclosure: the WordPress spell checker has AI built in. And I may use AI to brainstorm ideas and topics, but the actual writing is done 100% by me, flaws and all. Many of my notes are collected in NotebookLM now, it’s interesting to chat and enquire into one’s old thoughts. Oh, and I really, really hate 99% of the ‘art’ done by AI image generators, so there won’t be much of that on lovetobuild. And you can explore this site using an AI. Just so you know.