Ask Stacey! What You Need to Know About AI and Dealing With Uncertainty

Welcome to another exciting instalment of Ask Stacey!

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Question 1: How can I remain upbeat and positive knowing that at any time I can be removed from the community and placed back into prison?

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I totally understand this feeling; I struggled every day with this. Every time a police car stopped in my street, every parole day, every urine test.

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Even now that I’ve finished parole, it can still be stressful. Here are a few concepts I use to get through hard times.

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Mindfulness

Humans have a negativity bias. We focus on the bad stuff. This is a survival instinct from when we got eaten by stuff. So, try to intentionally think of the positive stuff each day. Unless you are about to be eaten…then yeah…you can be negative then. Freedom has the potential to be better than jail. Sleeping in, video games, girls/guys, whatever your vibe is.

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When something good happens now or a fun day, I put a mental pin in it and think, I have this beautiful memory now and the police can never take it from me. I’ll cherish
it forever and think of it when I’m sad.

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The Dichotomy of Control

Distinguishing between what is within our power, such as our thoughts, beliefs and actions, and what is not, such as external events and other people’s behaviours. By focusing on what is within our own control and accepting what is not, I feel more empowered.

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Impermanence

Everything changes, and this will too. Do you remember how it hurt when you hurt yourself really badly? I mean, really remember. The feeling has gone and now it’s a vague memory, isn’t it? How about when you last got super drunk and spewed and promised to any god that is listening that you will worship them more if they make you feel better? See how the moments passed and that misery passed with it. You just need to get through that moment of sadness each time.

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And another important thing that helps me hold my head up high is I know, in my heart, that I have not brought more sadness into the world intentionally since I was released.

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And I know my god can see me, and I’m happy for my god to judge me. Can the police and the judges say the same? I mean, I’m on a Loki season two redemption arc, and that is considered one of Disney Plus’s best series. It got 83 per cent on Rotten Tomatoes. And you can too.

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Question 2: I’ve been inside for two years and I’m getting out soon. What new technologies do I need to know about?

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AI, all day long, AI. It’s pretty crazy to think they are talking about building data centres in Australia. I mean, I remember watching Sarah Connor sneaking into them as a sci-fi movie plot!

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I’m reluctant to make too many jokes here – obviously I can think of heaps because I’m hilarious, but I’ve legitimately had friends hospitalised for thinking we were replaced with robots, and I wasn’t the real Stacey.

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I mean, as if a robot can be as strange as me. So, some facts instead. AI is a part of everyday life now; it just is. The younger generation is using it to write their schoolwork. It’s in the courts, hospitals, every smartphone. It’s here to stay.

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There is a term now: AI slop. AI can produce very real and very convincing pics and videos. It can quirkily come up with content as well. Many content creators will use it. So don’t get out of jail and believe stuff on social media; it’s probably not true.

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How It Works

ChatGPT, for example, is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot. It is based on the GPT-3.5 large language model (LLM).

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LLMs are advanced AI models designed to understand, generate and manipulate human language by gathering heaps of text from sources such as books, websites and social media. They then analyse the collected data to identify and learn patterns in the text, like word associations and contextual relationships.

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It creates images with a process called diffusion. It’s a similar process: it learns what a face looks like by studying millions of faces, and then gets good at creating a face, or a certain person, certain place, car – anything really.

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It is important to remember that AI can inherit biases from the data they are trained on, leading to biased or unfair outcomes. And it is not a real AI like in the movies.
It is not Skynet. It is not your friend or a doctor; it is not a replacement for a real person.

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What it is, is great at making fake images of you being arrested again to send to your parents, that never gets old.

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But seriously, it’s super helpful. I ask it questions all the time. I just asked it: What are you good for? It said, “writing, editing, coding, data gathering, research, language translation, daily planning…”

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I told it to stop and said it was being too general and to please limit the answer to an everyday person’s use. It said, “drafting emails, explaining difficult concepts, summarising large documents, brainstorming ideas such as gifts…”