OpenAI Meditates on the Nature of Time

Matthew Oldridge
2 min readOct 27, 2022

Recently I became interested in how machine learning and artificial intelligence could be propelling humanity toward a kind of “uncanny valley”, where not only does AI pass the Turing Test, it becomes imbued with some sort of intelligence of its own.

Given that humans are barely close to even starting to understand our own consciousness, who are we to say that AI won’t become “intelligent”? The singularity may or may not be near, but the fact is we now have DALL-E, images from which are already flooding search engines, mixing with “real” photographs and artwork. AI generates text for summaries of sporting events, news items, and so on.

What once belonged to science fiction, or existed only in the imaginations of science fiction writer, is now a matter of fact. Science fiction has a pretty good track record of leading to “science fact”.

What follows is what happened when I told Open AI:

Write a meditation on the nature of time.

Such a writing prompt has belonged to poets and philosophers and scientists and religious figures like Emily Dickinson and Aristotle and Carlo Rovelli and Alan Watts and Buddha.

What will Open AI do with this prompt?

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Matthew Oldridge

Writing about creativity, books, productivity, education, particularly mathematics, music, and whatever else “catches my mind”. ~Thinking about things~