You are generating your own suffering

You are generating your own suffering

Generative A.I. is changing our lives. Millions use large language models(LLMs) like ChatGPT to help in a diverse category of tasks. The tasks ranged from writing our emails to our bosses and clients, to help your kids complete their homework. While embracing this technology, I discovered how my mind works in processing life events has a stark similarity with how LLMs generate outputs.

In this article, first we are going to explore what pain and suffering are to human beings. We will then switch gears to highlight an aspect of how LLMs work at a high level. Moving on, we will reveal how the outputs from LLMs are similar to the train of thoughts from my mind through some small experiments, and we will conclude with an invitation to join my journey on discovering and improving ourselves.

What are pains and sufferings?

From the age of 3, you are accumulating painful experiences. The painful experiences can come from your individual struggles. They can also come from the rejections and misaligned expectations in your relationships with others. Last but not least they can come from the loss of “norms” in your life, either a person you love, abilities you used to have or external possession.

When you experienced those losses and aversions, naturally you would remember them more profoundly. As you always become too accustomed to the “norms”.

The pains may catch you by surprise, such as losing a loved one, for instance one of your closest relatives, whom you have a fond experience with, passed on. Or you are traumatized by the pain caused by the people’s reaction, such as you got teased when you have slumped down the stairs. Or you feel remorse and anxiety caused by the pain you sustained. When you broke your legs in a bicycle accident and sat in the hospital waiting for diagnosis, you may regret being careless. You may also be anxious about the result and fear that the result would not be favorable.

All of the above will cause you much suffering. You might base your decisions based on those experiences. You build a sense of self also based on them. And you may feel trapped by those memories. Memories are stories after all.

But, what does it have to do with Generative A.I.?

To connect your pain and sufferings with generative A.I., we need to go through first some aspects of the fundamental nature of generative A.I..

Generative A.I., including LLMs have a very interesting “feature” based on its generative nature called hallucinations. Hallucination is a phenomenon that LLMs will produce non-factual results which look very convincing and very hard to discern at a glance. This phenomenon is coming from both the probabilistic nature of the algorithm, and the training data quality factors. First of all, LLMs output to you based on statistical patterns of words in their training data, and you don’t have access to the training data. Even if you have the access, the size of the training data will be too vast for you to judge if that training data is of high quality or not.

Let’s do some short experiments to showcase this feature. Here I told the LLM I am not invited to a party of my best friend and I ask why.

In other trials, the LLMs can also give an unlimited reason of how brilliant you are. Here I told LLM my success in job search and asked about the reasons for my success.

As you can see, even the best LLMs cannot stop to hallucinate new ideas on why you are not being invited to a birthday party, or why you can secure a dream job. As long as you ask them.

This experiment inspires me to reflect on my life and my feelings on events happening around me. I found an astonishing fact: most of my feelings and stories, no matter positive or negative, are of this category. When I secure a job with a higher compensation and social status, I cannot stop myself from thinking how brilliant I am. I keep on thinking how great I am in the interview, how strategic I am and how much I have done to prepare myself for that. But when I was not invited to a party when everyone else was invited, I also cannot stop myself from ruminating about how worthless I am. I keep on pondering how socially awkward I must be, how uninterested as a person I must be and how I will never be invited to other interesting parties. None of this has a clear proof and all this is my own opinion and perception.

The worst is that I am building my sense of self based on these “hallucinations“, hence I am answering the question of “who am I?” on sand. And to make matters worse, I will make decisions based on these two “hallucinations“ and I will walk further down the path without even realizing it. And even more damning is, when the reverse is happening, I will also spend time denying the truth — that I am not brilliant as I think, I am also not as worthless as I think. the perception that I am an introverted thinker has limited myself.

I called that “Generative Suffering”**. Your sufferings are based on some very flimsy recollection of events and a singular perspective. The more time you spend on ruminating your past experience, the more you cemented them without realizing those are merely your thoughts. Your new thoughts and ideas are popping out just like a LLM with a very fast speed to output and a very good memory, or in technology speak, a very short time to inference and an infinite context window. And you suffer **because of those thoughts.

Since then, I refuse to let my life be dictated by thoughts that are not based on facts and truth. I don’t want you to repeat my mistake. Examine your thoughts and you may find that reality is more complex than you think. Going back to those examples of getting a job and not getting an invitation, you are able to get a certain job . Maybe it is because the employer is in need of a talent like you, or you low ball yourself. You are not invited to the party because your best friend is planning a 1 to 1 quality time to catch up with you and he knows you are less fond of a large crowd. Reality can be multi-faceted.

I invite you to do the same.

Examine your thoughts. And I also invite you to share how you do it.

In our next article, we will talk about why thoughts are important, if not the utmost important aspect in your life. Or how we can examine our thoughts using LLM models.

Until next time!

Soli Deus Gloria

originally posted in Nous