We're entering the human era

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While the investors, VCs, governments, and every influencer who can read news are all heralding the oncoming age of AI, I believe that the opposite is happening. We're entering the human era.<br>The complexity of human mind has always been underestimated. We have epitomized certain intellectual heroes like Albert Einstein, Leonardo Da Vinci, and Douglas Adams, and regarded the rest of the humanity as simply mediocre. We invented the IQ test to find the rare gift of intelligence in a single dimension among us apes. But, the advent of AI shows us that even the most average human can be more valuable than the best AI agent today.<br>We have been observing the unstoppable rise of AI, or LLMs to be more precise; AI sounds cooler though. AI models are certainly capable of convincing that they are intelligent. But, they are still statistical word generators, albeit very good ones. I'm obviously simplifying this. Because, I'm sure among the weights in a neural network, some rules for reasoning are also there. Because when we put our thoughts in words, some of the abstract thoughts remain in the relationship between those words in a semantic space. So "just words" may be a simplification. But it's mostly words.<br>We welcomed AI with since we saw Will Smith eating spaghetti from a bowl. We welcomed it with open arms because we thought it would solve our problems, show us a better way. That's what AI companies have been trying to sell, but does it hold water?<br>We welcomed AI because we wanted it to be real. We wanted to advance to the next level of civilization. We wanted to be able to talk to human-like superior mechanical creatures, and debate their rights. We wanted them to make our lives easier.<br>Our desire to become an advanced galactic civilization caused an immense increase in production of LLM generated works. We wrote blog posts, books, we created illustrations, logos, even entire books, we created music. But despite all that we created, there was a problem. None of those works felt authentic or desirable to be consumed by humans. The word generator didn't care if people liked it. It just generated what you told it to generate. So, people suddenly became aware of the major deficiency of AI: it didn't care. Caring was still on humans.<br>There's been a growing backlash against LLM generated works. We started disliking em-dashes, emojis, whatever AI used excessively. We got tired of boring wall of texts. We got tired of its now instantly recognizable dramatic tone. People got tired of seeing the same RGB aesthetic with saturated colors on generated illustrations. People got tired of musical compositions that held no rhyme or no proper rhythm. On everything that AI has generated, it has left its impression; in other words, it has left the lack of an impression of a human.<br>All of these complaints stem from the same problem: a missing human. How can this be? Wasn't it a human who wrote the prompt? There was a human after all. But, human wasn't really there, was it? The human only said a few words to the AI. The human failed to express their inner creativity through actually doing the creation. They didn't write the words as their brain imagined them. They only wrote the prompt. They didn't apply each brush stroke, they probably didn't even pick the colors. They had no idea which chord progression would work better for the mood of the music they created.<br>Yes, AI made people creators who otherwise couldn't, and I'm very much thankful for that. Many of us had forgotten the joy of creating something ourselves because we were involved in consuming what others created so much. AI made creating accessible. It has closed a long existing gap in that sense, fantastic. But, people who use AI to make stuff still have a distance between what they imagine and the actual outcome. In other words, what we create isn't ours. Not unless we get involved in creation to touch and shape every part of it.<br>The relation between craft and imagination is instrumental to truly create something ourselves.<br>Back in the 90's, my brother Kemal, a neurosurgeon, had created his own patient tracking software despite knowing nothing about programming. His secret was an app called Clarion Personal Developer. It provided a user interface to design databases, define relationships between them, let you design the menus of your app and the printer outputs, and it would generate a ready-to-run executable. It was a perfectly fine piece of software, and served my brother well. Almost like magic. But, it was confined in the customizability Clarion allowed. Yes, my brother had created an app, but it wasn't an app he would make, it was an app that Clarion defined what would be a good app within certain user-defined parameters. My brother had just ordered an app, not created one.<br>AI isn't much different. Despite having been trained with vast amount of knowledge humankind has generated, the confines of AI are defined by the...