“Wait, maybe I am pretty smart”, I thought to myself.

There were 5 fellow student sitting around me, all looking at me quizzically.

I had just solved a homework task they had been struggling with for over an hour.

I solved it in 5 minutes and explained it to them. It was easy.

How could they not grasp this stuff?

—

“Goddammit, why am I a complete idiot?”

I was standing in front of a room full of investors. I was stumbling over my words. Bumbling, struggling. I could feel my face becoming red. My boss, and fellow presenter, was looking at me with a mix of pity and frustration.

Turns out I’m pretty bad at remembering stuff. And very bad at coming up with words to say. Especially under pressure.

—

“I’m such a good writer”

When I write, there’s 2 modes. There’s “GOD MODE”, when the writing just appears out of nowhere. I just need to pluck it out of the ether and write it down. My task is literally to be a physical manifestation of something divine. Well, that’s what it feels like at least.

The other mode is “being dragged around a pit of shit for hours looking for gold nuggets”. It’s painful, slow, and in the end there’s no real gold nuggets to be found.

Most of the time I’m in the shit pit.

I’m not sure how to get to GOD MODE. It happens rarely, but often enough to know it’s not a fluke.

—

“I’m a total fraud”

Sometimes, when I’m talking to friends, I feel like all my responses are canned. It’s like I have a little bucket of standard responses learned over the years, and I randomly grab one from the bucket and say it.

Most of the time that’s fine. But then sometimes, with certain people, I feel like they’re expecting more from this conversation. They’re onto me. I’m not really making proper conversation! I’m just grabbing stuff from my bucket!

—

“I’m just a copycat?”

It’s 12 am. I’m scrolling Twitter. My mind is racing. Piecing together fragments. I’m trying to write a narrative. It’s all jumbled. I have a list of “genius ideas” but most of them are things I’ve seen online.

Did I really come up with these ideas? Or are they just remixes of things I saw earlier this week? Do I actually grasp the concepts?

—

At first I thought it’s crazy that LLMs can do such a good job mimicking intelligence (with mimicking intelligence = being intelligent). Can simple matrix multiplications with some nonlinear function inbetween do this? Yeah sure it’s lot of them, but still!

But recently I’ve been thinking otherwise. Maybe humans are just kind of simple creatures. It’s not that the LLM is so smart, it’s just that we are quite simple. If you really think about it, most of our behaviour seems to be based on automatic actions. If x happens then do y. If a is being said then answer b. With some statistical deviation of course. Our “temperature” parameter is cranked up. But that doesn’t mean we’re anything more than stochastic parrots. Sure we have emotions. Deep down, subconsciously, we have a rich inner life that’s not even accessible to ourselves most of the time. But how different is that from other pathways of our brain firing?

Ego and pride whisper in my ear, telling me I won’t get replaced with AI anytime soon. I’m a damn good programmer! I’m a human. Humans are smart and creative. Remember GOD MODE I told you about earlier? An LLM can’t write like that! Well OK not yet. Maybe in a year. AI slop is the worst. AI slop is everywhere. But do we see the AI non-slop. Do we know whether it’s a human or AI that created it? At first AI images were gimmicky. They were too polished. Designers told us they could easily distinguish between AI images and images drawn by a REAL HUMAN ARTIST!? That the AI wouldn’t ever be able to be truly creative. To draw something that’s not too polished and clean. Turns out that’s just a parameter to tweak. Turns out hands are not that hard after all. And maybe text in an image is doable too. Goddammit.

We have created a monster. And this monster is showing us a mirror. Do we pass the mirror test?