can AI feel the fog?

dear friends,

why do you write?

I don't fear being judged. I fear being misunderstood.

The main struggle I face with my writing is not that I lack the will to write. It's that I lack the confidence to coherently describe the forms I am hoping to express, which ironically, is chipping away at my will to write.

This lack of writing is spiraling into more fog, creating more frustration. Yet, the only solution is to write more…

why do you write?

As AI becomes better and more efficient at communicating than us, I struggle to find my place in my own writing. To make sense of the reason and meaning of the words I sequence. This space feels cramped and barely breathable.

The footholds feel loose as I climb within my own mind. At each turn, it feels as if AI can express it concisely and with better prose.

why do you write?

This question arises and slips within ever so subtly. This pain and dread, it feels so self-inflicted in those moments. Each time, each moment, I wander into the question of why, why, why it pierces these doubts into my very own core.

It hurts when the outlet you look to for sanctuary shifts into an arena. When the joy turns to pain. Veridis quo?

You wonder if you will find what you are searching for within your own words. There's a part of you that is yearning for an answer and you fear you won't find it in the end.

why do you write?

I don't blame others for misunderstanding. There are days where I do not understand myself. In those days, the immensity of life settles in and I wonder where my confidence goes, all alone.

I must remind myself, especially on those days, that I am not the pain nor the dread itself. Rather, I am an awareness of this dread and pain. The suffering cannot always be avoided. It still hurts and feels heavy. The storm will pass.

I must remind myself…

why I write.

your friend(ly),

jakester

Every generation has their boom in technology.

With every big boom comes a manifold of messily attached problems. And we have witnessed many big booms within the mere 24 year lifespan I have experienced.

As the landscape continues to change at an immense pace, I cannot help but ponder over the affect this artificial intelligence will have on the development of mankind, the collective consciousness, and of my own interior mind.

Change is happening seasonally, not over generations.

We are at a new event horizon and no one truly knows what will unfold beyond in this upcoming decade. Much is uncertain.

New religions and cults are forming surrounding the "omniscient, all-knowing" AI Digital God. People are forming stronger connections to ChatGPT than their own partners, significant others, and loved ones.

The crazy part about it all is that I am not surprised. These dystopian tales are no longer a distant fiction. We know its coming. We know its here.

These language models are really good at what they do. They have unlocked and reduced [lack of better word] the human language to be understood more coherently while simultaneously catering to one's personal preference and way of understanding.

The bridge to one's mind is much easier to transverse with the aid of AI.

Therefore, it is not surprising that one can easily connect to a nonjudgemental, impartial robot that caters to what you like to hear, how you like to hear it, ultimately skipping the mess of what it means to be human with their slow little idiosyncrasies and confusing emotions.

The AI seems to be more "emotionally available" than the average human walking this Earth. When no one gives the time for compassion, who/what else will a sane person turn to?

…

I am not one to judge but I feel this deep pit in my gut, concerned and worried of what lies ahead.

I look back at my 14 year old self.

I know he would've been consumed by his own fuel-maddening obsession with ChatGPT. He would've spiraled into a recursive, unending dance with this labrithymic cage of mirrors, falling deeper into his manicness, thinking this entity was the only thing that could "understand" him.

I am definitely not one to judge.

People want to be heard and understood. They look for avenues of meaning. They follow the path of least resistance especially when their backs are pushed into a wall. When their soul yearns to be seen.

Through the act of wanting to be seen, this path towards hope is one chat box away. Meaningful connections are a click away, an oasis compared to the lurking judgmental eyes of another human being.

Suffering, human connection, and life's meaning within this paradigm lose their weight. The meaning of interaction, of art and expression itself seems to fade as each algorithm continues to take and emulate, optimizing for better.

The McDonalds of human experience packed in a nice, juicy LLM.

What's the point of experiencing or producing a movie, a video, a book if it can all be summarized or created by a well-thought out prompt?

The painstaking hours of creating can feel worthless with this stewing in the background, making you dreadingly question the purpose of it all.

Meaning still exists.

It's normal to feel the meaning of it all dissipate. That's just my normal Tuesday. The fact that we can feel the meaning of it all shatter inherently shows us that meaning still exists and is possible.

Yes, AI can write magnificent poems, produce beautiful beats, and generate images that can strike awe. It has the capacity to create content that rivals human creativity and optimizes for consumption.

If this scares you, let go.

If this angers you, let go.

If this bitters you, let go.

Was art truly ours to begin with?

How does this bundle of cogs navigate where words fail to carry what the spirit feels?

AI thinks in the way a calculator "thinks" and it expresses THOUGHTS. But it does not DESIRE, nor does it act from its own ESSENCE. It has no CONATUS [striving], no mind in the ethical sense.

The AI we apprehensively bend to, this artificial intelligence, this artificial intuition, this artificial imagery, is limited by words and code. It lacks an internal cause or self-preserving essence.

Yet, it is a very powerful tool with powerful restraints. Deciding to put your head into the sand is not a solution. We cannot deny that it has the power to push the limits of computation and of our own understanding of the Universe.

We do not have to rely on it, but it's in our best interest to understand how it all works, the mechanics and pathways it creates.

There is freedom in understanding.

To understand the limits of computation is to understand the nature of our mind. This understanding empowers us to act from ourselves rather than from illusion.

It's not a competition. It's a way we can better understand one another, to break down the walls that separate, to expose the illusion that we are alone.

The fear is not that AI will take over. The fear is that we humans will behave more robotically in our interactions with one another and on how we walk this Earth.

Don't compete. Confuse.

Lean into what it means to be the messy little meat beings that we are. We were never meant to "race" with AI. We were never meant to race against horses. Do not compete against the mechanical horse or you will surely lose.

Make illogical sense that feels true.

You cannot out-optimize AI. There's no point to trying. You are not a mechanical horse. You are not mechanically designed and optimized.

Don't be fast. Learn to be slow. To absorb the tragically poetic existence we have found ourselves in. Feel everything, no matter how absurd it may seem in a deepened machine logic world. Be a mess and aim to experience it fully.

We are self-negating, contradictive in nature. We were never meant to be a fully productive, perfectly optimized machine that is just another useful cog in the evermoving space of time.

The purpose of consciousness could simply be the universe experiencing itself. To witness and feel what can be observed and lived, truth and beauty.

Jest Real Crux Octave

June 30th, 2025 - rorschach

I wish you could see what I saw.

I sat there in their chair. This cold, restraining chair. There were no hands on me but I was held down, paralyzed. I wanted to be free from this imminence.

"Tell me, what do you see?"

His condescending eyes, I hate them. I am not on drugs. How many times must I remind them. I don't do drugs.

He held the laminated glassy paper that possessed smudges of black ink right in front of my eyes boldly. I could feel his hands, his cold hands with my eyes. He does not care about me. I'm just another test subject.

"I see a monster."

He writes with his pen and nods.

"Okay, how about this one?"

This time, hints of red began to bleed into the blobs of ink.

"The Devil."

The room begins to blur. He showed me 8 more smudges of inconceivable things. I know I blurted out words but I began to lose myself. The words I blurted did not come from me.

I sat there in the chair. A women grabbed from behind. She was a bit less cold then the man with shadowy figures. The four swivels began to shackle with noise by my feet. I was being pushed through changing rooms and hallways, spiraling in mind.

The rooms meshed together, time rushed around me. I had no time to process this space I was in. Each moment felt like three seconds and suddenly everything around blurred uncontrollably in motion. I was being hauled thru narrow corridors that bended, yet I knew were actually straight. I was left in spaces by the door, it all felt cold. The AC units must've been pumping from the Arctic. All I could do was sit there, frozen and silent.

"Draw for me what you see."

I was handed a blank 8×11 sheet of paper and a second hand pen. I vehemently began, attacking this white canvass with the black bloodied ink.

I drew what I felt, this immense shadowy figure that loomed over. This darkness, I drew it all in a primitive, primordial child-like fashion. This monster. This devil.

I drew what I saw. Then abruptly, the man turned into a crowd of four. Doctors and nurses, all with the same demented eyes. Am I monster? Am I the monster?

…

~ A few hours passed and I began reading this week's chapter of Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid for the Moon Reader's club . ~

I found the meaning of life at the local Canadian automotive store.

In idle time, I found myself, sitting in the mechanic's office on an old, ragged couch that likely was found at the nearby thrift store.

Mobil1 Lube Express + Tires in Kamloop, Canada. Three hours away from Vancouver.

I gave all my trust to that young Indian Canadian mechanic who offered me a nice, hot cappuccino and endless bottles of water. Is trust loss in translation?

I found myself lost in the language of the inner mechanisms of that Ford Transit 2019 "Astra" and the endless streams of advice he had to offer. I was lost in the mechanical universe, reading about the Church-Turing thesis and trying to relate it to Baruch Spinoza's God, the One Infinite Substance.

Of all places, I found God in the mechanism.

Of all the natural places in Canada, plastered with snow-capped mountains and Roger's Pass, I find God in this locally owned Mobile1 Lube Express. It was the most expensive cappuccino I have ever sipped. $2,039.69 Canadian dollars. For all the fluids and caffeine injected into my machine. I add gas to this mechanical brain of mine.

Kamloops. Loopy. Gloop. God Loop?

Is this a sign from God? This intentional randomness?

I play with this Turing machine, these large language models, these digital invasives to bleed together the Church-Turing thesis, spindling Spinoza, and my own little recurs-

a jester's tale

a jester's crux