My longtime friend, Jim Carlough, shared an article on LinkedIn recently. The article is from Psychology Today. It’s called, “Why You Shouldn’t Outsource Your Intuition to AI”. And it says this, in part:
AI is brilliant. It can analyze vast amounts of data, generate poetry, build business plans, or summarize psychological studies in seconds. I use it daily and I think it’s one of the most powerful tools of our time. But AI doesn’t have a heart. It doesn’t feel the weight of a decision in the gut. It doesn’t carry ancestral Trauma or spiritual resonance. It doesn’t know what lights up your soul or what haunts your dreams. That’s your job. We’ve confused intelligence with Wisdom. But wisdom requires more than pattern recognition. It requires context, embodiment, and alignment.
Right. And from a psychological perspective, all of that is certainly true. But there’s more than psychology at stake here.
Shortly after I read the article Jim shared, I saw this post from a young man on LinkedIn:
Does anyone have a theory as to how Grammarly got so bad? Like it started out of the gate shockingly good…industry standard for a solid amount of time…and now it just makes some absolutely absurd suggestions and it’s eroded my trust in it beyond use.
Grammarly was always bad. The very idea of it is bad because what’s at stake here beyond psychology is each of us as individual, sentient beings. And each of has an individual tone, style, voice, and what Henry Miller called the miracle of personality. Try to imagine AI writing this:
If now and then we encounter pages that explode, pages that wound and sear, that wring groans and tears and curses, know that they come from a man with his back up, a man whose only defenses left are his words and his words are always stronger than the lying, crushing weight of the world, stronger than all the racks and wheels which the cowardly invent to crush out the miracle of personality. (Henry Miller)
I did try to imagine it. I couldn’t do it. So, I installed Grammarly on my computer, only for the time it took to let it edit water down, drain, dull, neuter, and flatten what Henry Miller wrote. This is what it spit out:
Sometimes we read things we don’t like. When that happens, we might gripe about it or something. And we might recognize something is bugging the man who wrote it. Maybe he had a bad day at work or stubbed his toe. Or maybe he lost an argument with his wife, or his mother-in-law, or both. Who knows? All we know is he’s miffed. He probably feels weak and invisible. And he has to get it off his chest.
As soon as Grammarly spit that out, I uninstalled it. I ran CleanMyMac five times. I searched my hard drive to make sure it was gone. I hung a clove of garlic and a silver cross around my neck. I ate a big plate of fish because it’s reputed to be brain food. Then I took a shower and prayed for forgiveness.
This quote from Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories has always described the function of Grammarly perfectly, and it extends to AI in general:
Running the boiled chicken through the deflavorizing machine.
Grammarly and other AI-powered applications aren’t and never will never be capable of tone, style, voice, and personality. They’re only capable of aggregation, curation, regurgitation, and homogenization. That’s why the alleged intelligence in them is called artificial.
AI may process data, but it can’t interpret it. It may identify patterns and execute rote tasks, but it can’t think. It may analyze structured problems, but it can’t create. It can’t experience emotion, navigate ambiguity, or make subjective, value-driven decisions. It may appear to possess intelligence, but it lacks Consciousness, intuition, and the ability to understand. It simulates reasoning, but it doesn’t reason. It doesn’t adapt unless it’s reprogrammed. And The Manchurian Candidate has already been made … twice.
That’s the truth. Everything else is just an AI-generated attempt to psych us out.
