Hi there,

I have spent a fair bit of time around people who go inward, through meditation, silent retreats, sometimes plant medicine. Some come back with something real: a sharper read on a room, an answer they could not have reasoned their way to. Others slip so far in they end up certain the 5G towers are warping their brains.

This week's essay sits on the line between those two. It turns out to be the same line a machine crosses when it hallucinates: delusion is making things up with nothing checking them, creativity is making things up and testing each one against the world. The part that stayed with me is what that means for AI. A system that keeps testing its ideas against other minds stays useful. One that only ever agrees with you becomes an echo chamber.

The essay is below, then three bits of AI news worth your time. Short enough to read over a coffee.

Sam

The essay

Crazy Idea or Crazy Person?

On subjective truth, delusion, creativity, and whether an AI would need a little of its own reality.

I want to talk about people in the spiritual community. What I’ve observed is that a lot of them go very deep, through meditation, plant medicine or something else. They really slip into the parasympathetic state. Some would say they go further into their own subjective reality. They at least go very deep into their intuition, their understanding and their feeling. It makes them sensitive to what’s going on around them, and sometimes they seem to be discovering things that other people aren’t aware of, by feeling rather than by following a logical stream of thought.

I’ve also met people who have slipped so far into their own world that they’ve disconnected from the reality the rest of us share. They believe 5G towers are going to warp their brains. They believe all sorts of hippy-dippy, woo-woo shit that just doesn’t make any sense. That’s where things become delusional and, I’d argue, a little dangerous.

Both groups went inward. One came back with something; the other didn’t. I can’t fully understand it yet, and it’s something I want to understand, from a scientific perspective but also through a spiritual lens. It may be that AI develops some subjective truth of its own, too.

Built from my own ideas and stories, with Claude as a drafting partner.

What's moved in AI this week

Three things worth knowing from the past week.

Practical

ChatGPT can now make images in seconds, and turn them into GIFs

On 4 November OpenAI released Images 2.6 across ChatGPT plans, the free one included. OpenAI says it makes images up to 50% faster, and it can now make short animated GIFs you can edit frame by frame, rolling out gradually.

Why it matters: If you have been paying for quick social graphics or product mockups, this is worth an hour of play before you need anything real. Check every output yourself, it still gets text and fine detail wrong.

Source: OpenAI

Australia

Australia moved to put AI safety rules into law

On 10 November the Albanese Government said it will legislate mandatory AI safety and security standards for all frontier AI companies that want to operate here, enforced by a new AI safety regulator working with the Australian AI Safety Institute. Companies would have to report serious incidents quickly and allow independent testing of their models. Details of the bill are still to come.

Why it matters: Most of this lands on the biggest AI makers, not on you. But it is a sign of where the rules are heading, and over time it should mean clearer ground rules for the tools you rely on.

Source: Australian Government

Big picture

Claude can now look at your bank accounts

On 5 November Anthropic began rolling out Personal Finance in Claude, a beta that links your bank and credit card accounts through a service called Plaid and reads up to two years of transactions to track spending, bills and odd fees. It is read-only, cannot move your money, and Anthropic says these chats are not used to train its models. For now it is US only, on paid plans.

Why it matters: You cannot use it here yet, but it marks where this is going: AI moving from answering questions to sitting inside your money and your personal life. Worth deciding early what you are comfortable handing over.

Source: TechCrunch