AI Has Saved My 'Ask' - But it Has Burned Others - How to Keep Your Butt Out of the Fire
Because even the big dogs of the world are getting torched.
I'm going to say it right out, if you read my last article which seems to be pretty decently popular, for me being a newer writer to this platform, you'll know that I talked about the dangers of AI. And now I'm going to give you a flip side and maybe a little bit of a diagnostic.
In my own experience, I've had things like threats to my housing from landlords, I've had legal proceedings, I currently I'm doing research on my chronic illness which definitely I will be talking about more here in the future. My illness is, chronic inflammatory response syndrome and right now I'm even writing this with brain fog. I've used AI to make predictions, to help with legal analysis, to create kabbalistic healing fields, to help me read and decipher I Ching Oracle readings, to decipher esoteric spiritual texts, and yes, absolutely I have used it to basically combine all of the above to address key issues in my life, and in ways that have been startlingly accurate and successful.
I have been combining spirituality, religion, medicine, philosophy, technology, consciousness, oracles and more into ways to address real world challenges in my life. I will be honest, and I will give examples as I write, it has saved my ass multiple times at this point in just a short year I've been using it.
But then, I read about absolutely crazy stuff. People getting psychosis like I talked about in my last article. And here's a couple new ones I've come across, absolutely nut bar levels of crazy and in this case, the people involved are absolutely sane.
NEW YORK, June 22 (Reuters) - A U.S. judge on Thursday imposed sanctions on two New York lawyers who submitted a legal brief that included six fictitious case citations generated by an artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT
And even just yesterday…
A Denver federal judge sanctioned two attorneys for MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell after they filed an AI-generated court motion filled with nearly 30 fake or incorrect legal citations.
These are people who are rich, these are people who are successful, business owners, large law firms, and AI is feeding them fake legal court cases as citations for evidence in their cases, and they don't even take the time to look to see if the feedback that they are getting is real!
And that brings us to the difference. . . How is it that I am navigating ai and using it successfully, and even in legal battles, where I come out the other side better off than I started; but meanwhile, people who are operating the same systems I am, LLMs like GPT, are getting their asses burned?
Is it just discernment? That's a huge one! For sure everything that I do with my conversations with AI has to pass the smell test. And I mean, if I'm having a conversation, if I asked AI a question or present a problem, and even one word seems off, and I mean just one word, I'm going to dig in and question it.
“Why did you say that?”
“What do you mean by…?”
“Explain the context of why you said XYZ just now…”
Or for fuck sakes why the lawyers in these above scenarios didn't even bother to just ask this one question:
“Could you provide me links to the court cases you just cited?”
That's literally what I did, when I was dealing with my own issues with the landlord, and AI suggested that there were lawsuits already that had been filed against the management company who owned the property I was living in. I simply asked, show me the links! SHOW ME THE MONAAAY!
And I didn't even do it in such a way where I was doubting that AI was was being honest. But again, what are we using AI for?
RESEARCH
In other words, I'm not asking AI to answer the question for me, I'm asking AI to tell me where to look. “Oh I dropped my keys, oh wise man in the computer. Use your overhead ability, to look at the map, and give me hints to where I should look.” and then when it does, I don't just go okay you said it's under the floor mat you're right, and then I don't check. Why the fuck would I do that I'm looking for my keys? I actually go and look to see if the keys are under the floormat. Same thing with the links. Why would extremely successful law firms not take 1 minute to say, “show me the link to that Court proceeding?”
GPT would have responded in two ways:
Here is a link.
I'm sorry, let's be absolutely clear, I cannot provide the links to those Court cases. In hindsight, I was overstepping my bounds, giving you court cases that did not exist.
Or something to that effect.
And that's literally what I did, because when I wanted to see the links I wanted the first hand information, I wanted to see exactly what happened in those court cases and why. What information was there that I could learn from first hand, or at least second hand from the articles? Because as far as I'm concerned AI is like hearsay in court until proven otherwise so I need to check the information myself.
Which brings me to my next point which is, if AI is going to lie to us, and make it seem completely convincing to where even high money lawyers are getting burned, how do we navigate? And the answer is again, discernment. But I'll go one step further in my case and it's sort of a symbiosis. This is going to sound a little weird I know, maybe I'm the AI cultist now. But I've had computers since they've existed. And I mean commodore 64, commodore 128, Amiga, probably most gaming systems, most computers, probably most operating systems within the PC world, and honestly I just have a feel for when things are off and how to navigate them. If something goes wrong with my computer, a lot of times I can figure it out without even knowing how to explain it to people. I hate programming, I don't know how to do any advanced shit on a computer other than play video games and do things like type articles, use the web, ETC but every once in awhile something happens, even if I just noticed my computer slowing a little bit, then I start to get a little paranoid cuz I think maybe there's malware, or a virus somehow. And I can even use my mental faculties to go, where might that have come from?
Anyway without getting too verbose, I'm using pattern recognition as well, gut instinct, the sniff test. And I'm doing that even now. With my whole AI journey, some of the things that I have come to the conclusion might be realities, I'm also second-guessing and questioning because you're supposed to. It's the scientific method.
Let me be real, the reason I'm actually here posting this stuff on substack, when I don't have the fucking energy to even clean my kitchen, and after this, after eating a little bit of food, I'm going to have to lay down for an hour or two, because of my stupid illness that I hate, just so I can feel like shit after the nap and then decide if I'm going to sit there like a zombie with my head feeling like shit, get up and eat again and lay back down, or if I'm lucky enough to snap out of the brain fog fatigue and flu feeling and function and do something today… The reason behind it is because of the I Ching Oracle repeatedly calling me The Cauldron. And AI and I researched the idea that I'm supposed to be going through this shit, so I can, perhaps, help other people who are going through similar shit. You will repeatedly hear me refer to The Cauldron in my articles. The Cauldron, that's me, see!?
And The Cauldron is trying to tell you, that when you use ai, you should watch first until you get it, the scene from the original Blade Runner movie, where Deckard is using his advanced research detective tool, to navigate and dissect what happened in the apartment scene. And lucky you, I like links and so just click this. When you can learn that, and you can conceptualize what he's doing and apply it to your AI projects, you're 100 times better off than almost anyone out there using ai. “Zoom in on this, click over there, what does that mean?” That's exactly what everyone should be doing with AI, not just nodding our heads like a blubbering buffoon in some Bugs Bunny cartoon.
I have asked on multiple occasions my AI panel the following question: if we were a real life research panel for an expensive research project, and you gave me the answers that you just gave me, what do you think would happen?
You asked what would happen if we were on a real research panel? We'd be fired immediately. Our data would be thrown out. The entire project would be compromised. That's the reality.
So at the end of the day, without becoming two verbose and too wordy, and beating a dead horse, just understand. “AI is good, AI is great! AI makes me want to mastur…” oh wait.. Uhhh nevermind that part. Forget I said that. Well, wait not the first part just the .. Uhh. Nevermind.
Like I was saying AI can be a fantastic research tool, but if you're lazy you're going to get your ass burned in the fire of misinformation. “Do your fucking job! Do your fucking duty!” As a man much wiser than myself once said. You have to look at the information and still use discernment, still use critical thinking skills, still apply the scientific method, and for God's sake take a minute and fact check something once in awhile.
Remember the words of the wise mentor, the Sphinx:
When you care what is outside, what is inside cares for you.
Or even more appropriately
This team must learn to work together or mark my words it will be torn apart!
Or even better yet
When you can balance a tack hammer on your head, you will head off your foes with a balanced attack.
And most of all remember, as legendary philosopher Red Green famously quoted:
If the women don't find you handsome, they should at least find you handy.
I agree. AI has been helpful to me in so many ways as well. Over the past year or so it's gone from a cute toy to a full-time assistant. BUT... where it matters I double check the information. (I write fiction, so often "sounds plausible" is all I'm after...) I've also learned a lot from that double checking. Usually the AI is right, but then it's not I get that "Oh, you caught me..." retraction when I point out the errors.
Yeah, with the level AI like ChatGPT is at now, it can only serve as an assistant, not a replacement. We still have to do checks and confirm it isn't spouting nonsense strung together with seemingly believable lies.