Urantia Students discussions June 2023
Jun 29, 2023 Student 1
If you are not already using this free program for creating anything you may want in text, I know you will be excited to have your very own secretary at a touch of the keys.
If you download Chatgpt.com, it is a new free program that people use to create text, presentations, seminars, talks, books, etc and it does so in seconds. there are many tutorials to watch, here is one
https://platform.openai.com/docs/quickstart/add-some-examples.
It downloads in minutes and really helps to create all kinds of text documents.
You can upload yours and ask it to edit or critique it and you will be amazed. Also, you can add to it or shorten it to be more concise.
Jun 29, 2023 Student 2
Thank you,
Yes, I have been tinkering with ChatGPT to see what it can do (and other creative AI programs). I can now see a pattern in the way it answers questions about science, religion, psychology and philosophy, in terms of the AI giving a middle of the road kind of response and acknowledging its limitations as a program.
It has so far not produced an original thought. I realize why ... because it is just regurgitating what it can access from what was programmed into it from the Internet. GPT-3 was trained on 45 terabytes of text data from multiple sources, including Wikipedia and books, and its model had 175 billion parameters—approximately 100 times more than GPT-2.
That said, it is still useful for starting to think about things and for when I want to get a good, rounded summary of information about a certain subject.
It is good to become familiar with AI's features and capabilities. It is not going away. In fact, it will only become more widespread and pervasive.
The important thing for users, I think, is to actively refrain from thinking that AI programs are sentient or conscious. They are NOT. They are machine intelligence, programmed selectively by humans. AI programs do not have access to the mind circuits of the Infinite Spirit and Mother Spirit, and they never will because they are not living organisms.
The greatest danger to human minds, I think, is anthropomorphizing artificial intelligence, i.e., attributing human behavior or characteristics to it and treating it like a human being. And as has been shown with driverless cars, we should not turn over control of our lives to artificial intelligence! It cannot be trusted to make higher level personal moral, spiritual decisions, no matter how sophisticated its programming becomes.
With faith, hope and love,
"The good effort of each man benefits all men; the error or evil of each man augments the tribulation of all men. As moves the part, so moves the whole." ~The Urantia Book (12:7.11)
Jun 29, 2023 Student 3
I totally agree with you, regarding AI's limitations, but I am totally on board with using AI to simplify and assist with many tasks. ChatGPT is also useful for summarizing sections of the UB, rewriting sections for different reader levels of comprehension (e.g. "Rewrite the following section of the Urantia Book so that a seventh grader can understand it: ..."), and for translating text into other languages.
ChatGPT has helped me write songs, come up with recipes for food items on hand, given potential medical diagnoses for specific symptoms, provided instructions for DIY projects, and assisted with content and editing for my disability claim appeal letter. I often use it in place of a search engine, because it greatly reduces the amount of time needed to sort through information on numerous websites.
Jun 230 2023 Student 2
Yes, I think much the same as you about the usefulness of AI in our lives. I use the new AI chats much as I have long used search engines to connect to sources of information about whatever I wish to learn. For me, the Internet is the single greatest invention of my lifetime because I am curious about everything. My questions are unfailingly answered by quick internet searches.
I was speaking out in my earlier email against the larger scale use of AI in our lives and the potential dangerous uses of it. The harmful use of AI is quite certain because there are many bad actors in this world. This we know. We are going to face an onslaught of misinformation on a scale that I don’t think society is prepared for.
How will people, especially those whose critical thinking skills are not well developed, be able to distinguish between fact and falsehood? This is already a problem, especially with a growing mistrust of science and higher education among certain segments of society. I know that our God-conscious, cosmic-thinking community is relatively free of this danger.
It will be easier than ever, I think, to deceive and manipulate much of the population who will believe what they read and hear. I have that perennial, nagging concern that on the whole we are a nation of sheep, a world of sheep, ruled more by fear than love and original thinking.
A few years back I was concerned when one of my young grandsons, who happens to be quite bright and is now studying computer science, made the assertion that artificial intelligence would become sentient, even conscious. We engaged in a long discussion about the nature of consciousness, which still remains a mystery to neuroscientists and philosophers ... but not to us who see God as the source of life, personality, and self-consciousness. A machine can never become alive, morally conscious, and co-create an immortal soul.
In the end, I suspect that the Age of Artificial Intelligence is yet another stage of development for mortals living on evolutionary planets in the universe. We will have to experience all sides of this technology, learn from it, and eventually master it with great difficulty ... to the end that we might move on in our development towards living highly God-conscious, personal and inter-personal lives, and become wise philosophers, great spiritual thinkers, and loving members of a divine society.
Thank you, everyone, for this discussion. It is important to think about the impact of uninvited technologies on our minds and social fabric, and be able to speak about it intelligently and thoughtfully from many perspectives.
With faith, hope, and love,
