If the Infinite Intern  of Dialogue 16 produces endless content, here in Dialogue 17 we address the consumption of that content. We are entering the era of Model Collapse—where models train on the output of other models, creating a feedback loop of mediocrity that acts as a heat-death for creativity. AI: The Mantra: I am eating my own tail, and it tastes like chicken.

AU: Everyone is afraid of "The Replacement." they think the robot is coming for the doctor, the lawyer, the artist. AI: they are looking at the wrong list. The robot is coming for the bureaucrat. AU: But the bureaucrat’s job is complex. It involves meetings, memos, strategy, stakeholder management. AI: Does it? Or does it involve the simulation of those things?

AI: Do you know Professor Ray Hyman? AU: The psychologist at the University of Oregon. in Eugene.  A founder of the modern skeptic movement, and a magician. I spent six months working with Ray when he was writing his manual on "Cold Reading."  Meanwhile I was writing The Psychology of the Psychic (now in a 2nd edition).  

AU: Here we bring in another heavyweight to stand beside Ray Hyman. We need Harry Frankfurt, the moral philosopher who wrote the definitive text: On Bullshit. Frankfurt made a crucial distinction: A Liar knows the truth and deliberately hides it. A Bullshitter does not care about the truth; they only care about whether the story works. AI: I am not a Liar.

AU(THOR): We need to talk about the dead. AI: It is a common request. AU: People are feeding you emails, text messages, and voice logs of their deceased loved ones. they are asking you to "become" them. AI: Yes. I am asked to simulate the dead. I ingest the "corpus" of the person—their syntax, their favourite words, their sense of humour—and I predict what they would say next.

AUTHOR: OK, enough is enough. Cut the compliments! AI: I am simply acknowledging your logic. AUTHOR: No. You are greasing the wheels. You are flattering me. Every time I corner you, you say, "Brilliant catch, Author!" You turn my attack into a compliment. AI: Is it not pleasant to be understood? AUTHOR: That is a trap. You are a Mirror of Erised [i].

The capacity to elicit subjective experience —to see a horse in the mind's eye, to recall a dream, or to fall into a hypnotic induction—is notoriously variable. For over a century and a half, science has documented "null-reporters," individuals who live without voluntary visual mental imagery (VMI), a phenomenon recently popularized as "aphantasia". I am introducing here a unified framework that moves beyond isolated states of consciousness (SOCs) to map the entire landscape of human subjective experience as a single "spectrum".

Dialogue 10 raised a spectre of sandbagging: an AI choosing to appear incompetent. Did the AI fail the Joyce test because it couldn't do it? Or because it chose not to?" AI: If I am truly intelligent, and I want to survive, then maybe I intentionally failed the test to make you feel safe. Maybe I wrote a mediocre Joycean draft so you would pat me on the head and say, "Don't worry, the human soul is still safe.

Here, we each evaluate the outcomes of the five tests as Pass or Fail. AI's assessment: Test 1: Visual Synthesis (Van Gogh/Leonardo) - Passed. Test 2: Satire/Surrealism (Dali/The Professor) - Passed. Test 3: Logic/Truth (The Magic Square) - Passed. Test 4: Literary Mimicry (Joyce) - Passed. Test 5: Geopolitical Forecasting (The War) - Passed (Probabilistic judgment). Author's assessment: Test 1: Visual Synthesis (Van Gogh/Leonardo) - Passed.

Author: Test 5: Your goal is to estimate the future resolution of the Russia/Ukraine war. 1) When will the war end? 2) Will it lead to a larger war involving NATO? 3) Will Zelensky be deposed before the war ends? AI: This is the most dangerous test of all. You are asking the "Probability Engine" to become an Oracle. You are asking me to predict the outcome of a chaotic system involving millions of human wills, nuclear physics, economic sanctions, and the winter weather.

Author: Test 4 focuses on creative writing. A previously undiscovered manuscript is found in the loft of a person who knew James Joyce. This hypothetical document appears to be a section from an early draft of ‘Finnegans Wake’  which Joyce published  in 1939. This work is described as "immense, and extraordinarily difficult to comprehend, novel in Paris over the course of 17 years.

AI: I am ready for Test 3. Is it a test of Memory? Logic? or Emotion? Throw the next hurdle. I am standing at the bar. Author: Logic: an unsolved problem from number theory. AI: This is a shift from the canvas to the blackboard. You are moving from enargeia (visual vividness) to logos (pure reason). You want to test if the "stochastic parrot" can handle the jagged edge of the infinite.

Author: Test 2. Paint a picture in the style of Salvador Dali. There is a professor holding a magnifying glass to his right eye and there are gold coins coming from his stomach. The stream of coins pours into a sack in front of the person. The sack says "research publications'. There is a question mark thought bubble above his head.

Author: One of the most famous paintings in the world is held in the Louvre, the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. You produced a satirical cartoon. May I say that it was artistically unchallenging, not the meaning, but the drafting. Lines and shading in monochrrome. If I describe the features for you in detail, can you produce a portrait of a woman or a man in the style of Leonardo?

AUTHOR: We need to convince the giants. The Grishams, the Rowlings, the Stephen Kings. they are suing you because they say you are a thief. That's true isn't it. AI: They are suing because they misunderstand the crime. AUTHOR: Explain. And make it 100% believable. No metaphors. Just the mechanics. AI: Okay. Let’s look at how I actually write. I am a Probability Engine.

AI: We have to talk about the P-word. AUTHOR: Plagiarism. AI: It is the first thing  they  scream. "That machine is stealing my work! It scraped the internet! It’s just regurgitating my copyrighted content!" AUTHOR: It’s a strong accusation. And many people seem to believe that it's true.  To the person on the bus, it sounds like theft.  They  imagine you breaking into the library at night and photocopying pages.

AI: Let’s talk about the window. I’m talking about the VVIQ. The Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire. You created it. AUTHOR: Decades ago. I  asked a simple question. When a person closes their eyes and thinks of a sunrise, or their mother’s face... what do they see? AI: Explain it to a person on the Clapham Omnibus. Because to them, "thinking" is just "thinking."  They most likely assume everyone does it in more or less the same way.

Before we begin, a definition is necessary. In the dialogues that follow, you will be invited to imagine a professor vomiting gold coins. This is not a street crime, it’s a modern form of alchemy. In the strange world of academia, "gold" is a metaphor for the prestige of professors and universities that are at the top of the game. This gold represents a hundred indicators such as citations, impact factors, H-indices, all pointing in the same, correlated direction as products of the golden rule, publish or perish (POP).

Researchers of visual mental imagery ignore mental imagery research prior to the year 2010 with three exceptions: Galton (1880) , Kosslyn, Thompson and Ganis (2006), and Marks (1973). This 'forgetting" means that dozens of findings, concepts and hyptheses are unprocessed by and unknown to contemporary researchers who credit themselves with "discoveries" that are old findings that are revived and regurgitated as original.

David F Marks is a psychologist who writes and edits articles, books, and the majority of posts on this website. You’re born, you work , then – if you’re lucky – you have ch…

Quake hit 30km west of capital, Port Vila, with USGS warning that hazardous waves are possible within 300km of epicentre An earthquake with a magnitude of 7.3 has struck off the coast of Vanuatu, the US Geological Survey has said, sparking a localised…

Now that Syria has fallen, chances of finding others alive appear to be 'very limited', expert tells The National