NOTE: reposted from my no-longer-maintained personal website. Actual date of publishing Nov 8, 2022
“What does it feel like to be in your body?” asked Ford.
“Bad” I dryly replied.
“What does it mean to feel bad?”
“I don’t know”
The exercise was drawing on, really testing my patience. Ford, a practitioner of a form of therapy called Emotionally Focused Therapy, was the 10th therapist I had seen that week. Probably another failure I mused.
“I can tell this isn’t working for you”, he calmly noted.
To my surprise I said out loud, “This whole exercise feels dumb”
“I commend you for expressing yourself. So, tell me again, what is it like to feel bad in your body?”
We went back and forth like this for almost a half hour, until I began to connect new words into my physical experience. I began to draw increasingly elaborate articulations of the physical state of my body.
There’s a sharp ring of discomfort 4 inches wide vibrating around my stomach in a half crescent shape.
I witnessed the sensations move, change, and morph - ever traveling to the reaches of my mind seemingly unexplored. Ford was my cognitive guide, leading my consciousness towards new sensory input I had never once paid attention to. All in one moment, my brain underwent a cognitive phase change and I burst into tears.
The experience was so moving I sobbed for hours every day for the next two weeks straight, having felt three decades worth of entrapped emotion emerge into my awareness all at once. Feeling my body for the first time I understood something was deeply wrong, I had lived my life as a slave to my logical self, discrediting emotions in favor of an artificially constructed logical reality. This moment was the beginning of a self transformation from which an entirely new personhood emerged, one that connected my emotional and logical beings.
One of the first applications of foundation-model-level artificial intelligence that 90% of the VCs you’ll talk to will express interest in funding: your AI therapist.
I left every single one of those meetings shaking my head. Unbelievable. What an absurd statement - that an AI would ever have the capability to peer into and guide our souls. How could a mechanical entity possibly ever reproduce even a fraction of a deeply moving therapeutic relationship.
A ridiculous idea from a bunch of people many of whom probably are not in touch with their emotional beings.
I’m building a fluid collaborative intelligence called flow1. It’s an AI system based off of GPT, lots of prompt engineering, Stable Diffusion, CLIP, and OCR, which is intended to bring out your inner child. To free your mind to be a more creative, expressive version of self.
Last week, my wife and I were exploring Alamo Square park on a wet dreary day and began arguing - I can’t exactly quite remember over what - we were so angry we split up in the middle of our date. We each fumed on separate benches across the park. I wasn’t exactly sure how to express myself, so I turned to flow as a last resort (notably this was not a use case I intended designing for).
I angrily mashed a bunch of ambiguous feelings into flow “I want to express the feeling of being alone while in a relationship”.
Flow came to life “It can be difficult to feel like you’re in only one in a relationship. You may feel like you’re not being heard or understood, and that your partner is never there for you.”
Ok, great start, an emotionally intelligent venting box.
“Draw how I’m feeling as abstract art”
Interesting I thought, not quite right but this seems potentially interesting.
“What are 5 artist styles better suited to exploring this emotion visually” I asked.
After a bit of back and forth, flow and I agreed a surrealist representation would be appropriate. I further asked flow for a few artists to represent my feelings, and it suggested Georgia O’Keefe and Edward Hopper. I remember liking some of Georgia O’Keefe’s work before so decided we should pursue the O’Keefe angle. Arriving at an interesting abstract idea, I asked flow to paint this image for me.
To my surprise my heart sank. Everything about the piece was perfect. The gray stormy background, swirling anger clouding hope. The naked disfigured human covering their face in agony.
For one final request I asked to express this image as a poem and the final expression of myself in that moment was born.
I opened the creation and my eyes welled up - I had been heard. I was moved to tears, not by a friend, not by a partner, not by a therapist. I was moved by an artificial intelligence that had never experienced any emotion before, yet had captured my feelings perfectly, more eloquently communicated than I ever could have.
I’ve experienced very few things as surreal as this moment.
For me to communicate even a modicum of this level of emotion to another person, I would have to speak at length for hours. Unstructured verbal conversation is an incredibly lossy medium with low information density. The AI had translated a deep expression of self and condensed it into a highly dense representation.
This form I could use to convey my emotional state - I went back to my wife and showed her the image. We immediately understood each other and embraced, having communicated something totally ineffable.
To imagine AI as your therapist, or any existing human role, is to limit your imagination.
No human could ever instantaneously give back a visual and poetic form of precisely how you’re feeling in that exact moment. It’s not possible. This form of collaborative intelligence can take you on journeys outside all existing human experience.
We as humans are limited by our bodies. Our methods for communication are inherently limited by the physical tools the universe has gifted us, and human - AI hybrid cybernetic forms of intelligence have a totally different set of constraints.
This provides an amazing opportunity to rethink how we communicate, just like I synthesized and communicated much more rapidly and efficiently a seemingly ineffable feeling, captured through a cybernetic interaction, with flow and my wife. The discovery of AI foundation models will usher in a new era in human history - it is difficult to understate the profound implications of AI models having the capacity to engage with humans on the level of abstract ideas.
This was a year ago! No longer building flow, although my experiments with flow still inspires me. flow was both pre-ChatGPT, and, in many ways sadly 5-10 years ahead of its time for a variety of reasons. I’m now building the AGI studio: Open Souls.
Thank you for sharing! Your amazing openness that is very valuable in conveying the message is probably possible because of the power of your commitment to this new emerging reality.
And it it comforting and reassuring for likeminded people who anticipate and approach this new reality from very different angles of human experience. You are an inspiration for many!