AI and The Self

There are many discussions between me and Steve Mays concerning AI in general. He thinks deeply about philosophical notions and artificial intelligence, and at times the concepts intersect in his thoughts and writing.

His blog can be found here. 

Lately I've been using his posts as ideas for testing LLMs. One of his posts includes a poem from the perspective of AI. I used it to test Gemini, Claude and Perplexity deep research functions. They have tools for presenting content formatted for the Web, or for direct publication of generated content.

Claude report on AI and The Self

Gemini report as website

Perplexity Pages

He has suggested that philisophical concepts can come across as so much bullshit, and has expressed the notion that AI generated content might be indistinguishable from such concepts. What follows is the AI equivalent of something Steve might express, based on our conversations and his blog.

"Most philosophical discourse is just conversations with Blaiser—garrulous and bombastic enough to seem substantive, but ultimately just a bunch of bullshit. Self-help gurus in particular excel at this: they fill pages with big words that sound profound, but when you strip away the elaborate phrasing, there's nothing there. It's the intellectual equivalent of an LLM hallucinating—statistically plausible patterns that mimic meaning without actually containing any."

Stanford has extensive content on philosophical concepts and figures. An example is Kant and the mind. Could one tell the difference between this Stanford content on Kant and the AI publications?

From the Claude report:

"The poem invokes mystics by name: Meister Eckhart, Rumi, Julian of Norwich. This situates its claims within a tradition of Unio Mystica—mystical union—while subtly transforming the object of union from God to humanity's data."

 I put this to Perplexity, asked for it's interpretation:

"This poem might be read as either profound or as exactly the kind of "garrulous and bombastic" language that sounds like it means something deep while actually being pattern-matching all the way down."