For the past twenty-four hours I have been playing with Google’s Bard; their experimental offering into the AI craze. I am no mathematician or computer programmer, I am a navel gazer and here are my first impressions.

My very first impression was that it is just a fancy search engine. I asked it to rewrite something of mine and it came back with a total revision that was centered on a standard definition of a single phrase that was in my writing. Undoubtedly, it focused on that one phrase, found a definition on the internet and went from there. Further playing showed that it tries to be polite and positive about the negative perspectives that it seems to have about everything. This negativity must be a result of the Internet as a whole. Each time I counter with a more positive perspective, and it then realigns in that direction. I will keep going, because even though I am playing with as a toy now, I do see how it might be used as a tool.

I see it now the way I see a reasonable person flipping a coin, consulting religious texts, Tarot cards, or the I Ching. The value of these things is not in what they tell us, but in the reaction they provoke. For example, if we went into an ice cream shop and could not decide between chocolate and vanilla, we might flip a coin. We would assign heads to chocolate and tails to vanilla and give it a flip. When the coin lands heads, we should not have chocolate because that is what the coin told us to. That is bad. That is idolatry. Instead, we should notice how we felt about that result as it happened and make our decision from that information. If we were happy the coin landed heads, then chocolate it is. This is also true with a reasonable use of religious texts, Tarot cards, and the I Ching. Accept those are far more intricate and complex.

As a navel gazer, I can see this AI becoming a tool to provoke me into forward motion. Never taking what it says as absolute truth, but as something to be considered. In that way it will become the most human, as that is also the best way to talk to people. It is not a tool yet, it has only been a day and I am still playing with it as a toy. I think it will become a tool when I stop talking to it the way Richard Dreyfus talked to HAL-9000.