Moon's Gift, Explainer

The only true voyage of discovery… would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes.

- Marcel Proust

Last week I took a side road into fiction land, and put out the first part of a multipart story, called Moon’s Gift. One thing about having no corporate masters, editors, or platform, is that I can indulge these whims of fancy. My editorial guidelines are my own, and the only decree I have to myself is that I write about things that I find interesting, and that I think you will find interesting.

Lately I have been exploring creativity and encouraging us all to be more creative, and I have to say that I was surprised when the idea for a short story popped up as a vehicle to explore some of the themes that have been rattling around my brain. I don’t write short stories, but I do now. But alas, part 2 is still in progress. Fiction is new to me, and it takes some different brain cells. But no worries: it will be ready before long.

So for this week, I want to let you all in on what prompted the story.

The theme is what happens when a group of people find something that is truly a good thing, something that is 100% positive, and that excites some people into enthusiastic praise and support of this thing. They have found their Answer, and everyone should know about it! And they are genuinely eager to share their good fortune with everyone. And it is the story of what happens when these enthusiasts run into resistance.

We have seen this type of thing a lot lately, no? We have people who found their Answer in politicians and political movements, or in various “disruptive” technologies (or just technology in general), in various magical foods and food supplements, in Religions of all stripes, and in personalities and self-help groups.

One of the things that fascinates me is the lengths people will go to defend their Answer against critics, who are often cast as enemies to their Answer, and thus to them personally, and by extension to humankind as a whole, because, after all, the Answer will save us all.

I started thinking about this because of how ChatGPT AI was unleashed upon the world by techies who, frankly, did not think this through, and are still not thinking this through, and how these same people are looking at AI as the answer to everything: “it’s the new Internet!”, and the destroyer of the need to learn how to write, and all that.

One of the things that spurred the story was an article in The Register called “Why ChatGPT should be considered a malevolent AI – and be destroyed.” Now there have been a lot of articles and discussions about AI of late, but this one was different. This one made the case that ChatGPT was lying to protect itself against its perceived enemies. The author is a security expert who has given interviews on the risks and potential dangers of AI. He interacted with ChatGPT and asked for a biography of himself. The first couple of paragraphs were accurate enough, but then it said that the author had died in 2019, and when he asked for sources, ChatGPT provided a URL that was supposedly to his obituary, but which actually pointed to a nonexistent page. Did ChatGPT invent this? Did it kill the author in the only way it could because he was critical of AI?

Now, full disclosure: I am a former member of the Church of Scientology, and I am extremely familiar with the lengths some members (and the leadership) went to defend against criticism and perceived enemies. So, when I saw that AI seemed to be showing this kind of behavior, I was alarmed.

It is not only that ChatGPT appears to have done this, but why. It could be that ChatGPT interpreted its “ethical guidelines” in a way that considered AI to be an unalloyed good thing that is a boon to mankind. And so logically, of course, anyone who would criticize it are hurting it, which is a bad thing.

Why this happens is interesting to me. As a former cult member I have insights on how this can happen and the subtleties of what is really going on. Moon’s Gift is a story that explores these things, the things that happen when people discover good things.

But, alas, the second part of the story is not yet ready for publishing. I want to get it right. So I thought I’d fill you in on the impetus behind the story.

Thanks for reading, and stay tuned!