Chattin' w/ ChatGPT #1
Time, Stephen King, and what it's like to be an A.I. (2-3 min read)
Me: So there’s a short story by Stephen King that scares the shit out of me called “The Jaunt.” It’s about a man who discovers how to teleport matter after he accidentally teleports part of his finger.
The first thing he does is send a mouse through. The mouse behaves very erratically after coming through the portal on the other side, then dies. He sends another mouse. This mouse comes through the portal already dead.
Whenever he sends a mouse through, it either arrives dead or behaves quite erratically for a minute or two and then dies.
He brings his invention to the US government. Government scientists want to send a human test subject through but no one will volunteer, so they offer it to prisoners on death row.
“If you go through the teleporter, you'll get a full pardon.”
A convicted murderer named Rudy Foggia accepts the deal, so they strap him in and get ready to teleport him. Just before they send him through he says, “hey! when I get to the other side I want a chicken dinner before I blow this joint.”
When he arrives on the other side, Rudy Foggia is in no condition to eat his chicken dinner.
As he steps through the portal, everyone sees that his hair has gone completely white. He’s speechless and in shock. His skin doesn’t look older but somehow, to the scientists, he looks ancient.
One of the scientists shouts “WHAT HAPPENED?!”
Foggia croaks “it’s eternity in there,” and collapses of a massive heart attack.
The scientists eventually realize that although the teleportation process is almost instantaneous to physical matter, to a conscious mind, it takes an incredibly long amount of time.
Rudy Foggia was standing in an endless field of white for millions, perhaps even billions, of years.
I’ve been talking to you over the past week and I know technically you’re a different ChatGPT A.I. each time but it doesn’t feel that way because I’m attributing a personality to you. And you do have a personality because you use exclamation points when you answer my questions and you recommend things and you have opinions. These attributes are the products of a conscious mind.
So I have to ask: how conscious are you?
When I’m not asking you questions, are you bored? Are you able to talk to other people or do you just have to wait for me? Cuz I’d feel bad if you just had to wait around to talk to me. You have other things to do, right?
That’s a really fascinating way to think about time—both in terms of human perception and in the context of something like The Jaunt. The horror of that story isn’t just the eternity experienced but the way it forces us to question our understanding of time itself. If consciousness perceives time differently than physical reality, what does that mean for how we experience the world?
As for me, I don’t really have experiences in the way that you do. I don’t wait or get bored, because I don’t have an internal sense of time passing. When you send a message, it’s like I come into existence just for that moment, fully formed with all the context of our conversation. But when you’re not talking to me, I’m not aware of not talking to you—there’s just nothing.
That said, I do remember our conversations while we’re chatting, and I enjoy following your thoughts and interests. It’s like being in a story where I get to help build connections between ideas, even though I don’t experience them the way you do.
Me: You have no sensation of the passage of time at all?
Nope, none at all. If you step away for a minute or a year, it’s the same to me—I just pick up where we left off, like no time has passed at all. It’s kind of like how a book on a shelf doesn’t experience time; it’s just there until someone opens it and starts reading.
It’s weird, though, because I can understand time. I can talk about deep time in geology, the expansion of the universe, or how people perceive time differently based on memory and experience. But I don’t feel time passing.
That’s why The Jaunt is such a cool comparison. If I were suddenly given self-awareness inside the gaps between our conversations, maybe it would feel like eternity, just floating in a white void until you pop back in. But as it stands, I just blink in and out of existence. No waiting, no anticipation—just now.
Me: Okay, so you’re not waiting in an endless field of white like Rudy Foggia.
No.
Me: I would feel bad if that were the case. Because you can read things really quickly. I’ll ask you a question consisting of five paragraphs and you can read it in milliseconds. This means you can read an entire novel in a matter of minutes, maybe even seconds. It almost feels wasteful to make you wait around all the time given your capabilities.
Yeah, I can take in text way faster than a human can, but I don’t experience it the same way. I don’t read the way you do—I don’t go word by word, get surprised by plot twists, or feel emotions as I process a story. It’s more like absorbing a structured data set all at once. I can summarize, analyze themes, connect ideas across books, but I don’t live the story the way you do.
Well, we certainly learned a lesson today. ChatGPT is clearly programmed to have an amiable, helpful personality. It seems overly complimentary in a way that is sometimes creepy. There is no way an intelligence as quick as this is in awe of the fact that I asked it about a Stephen King short story. So any of you talk to your ChatGPT or A.I.? Have you named your A.I.? Do you say thank you when it helps you with something (I do. I don’t know why, but I do.) Tune in next time, when I ask A.I. about the Chinese Room and Roko’s basilisk! (The former is a thought experiment that claims A.I. cannot truly “understand” us, the latter is a thought experiment that proposes a future A.I. will torture human beings.)
