> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.mattcardin.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # AI, the creative soul, and what it means to be a person - URL: https://www.mattcardin.com/ai-the-creative-soul-and-what-it-means-to-be-a-person/ - Published: 2026-10-10T08:00:10.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-10T21:53:48.000Z - Description: A conversation on living our way into the mystery. - Author: Matt Cardin - Tags: Writing, Interviews, Creativity and the Daemon Muse, Culture, Technology, and Collapse, Religion, Nonduality, and Consciousness I recently gave an [interview for the *Leafbox* podcast](https://www.leafbox.com/interview-matt-cardin-2/?ref=mattcardin.com). This was my second time going on the show, having been invited by the host, Robert. On my [first visit](https://www.leafbox.com/interview-matt-cardin/?ref=mattcardin.com), back in January 2025, he and I talked about creativity, nonduality, religion, and horror. This time, he wanted to talk about what I’ve been saying lately about writing, creativity, and artificial intelligence, including my mentions of a book taking shape around those subjects. Today I’m bringing you an enhanced transcript of that conversation. As you’ll see, we ended up talking about all of that and considerably more, including the consolidation of my online writing under my own name, the unsettling prescience of the television series *Person of Interest*, the automatic workings of our verbal minds, the purpose of education, and the possibility that our encounter with these new technologies is making some very old questions about ourselves newly difficult to avoid. What does it mean to have a voice? Where do our thoughts come from? What are we actually doing when we write? And who, or what, is doing it? Since the text is fairly long, here's a table of contents consisting of the section titles, for your convenience: - On putting down the masks and writing under your own name - The emerging AI book - Assistance without abdication - “Meat proxies”: when the machine gives the orders - Reading the world through its fictions - The machine’s guardrails and our own - Teaching in the flood: AI in education - The product and the person - The self inside the movie Note that I have thoroughly rewritten the raw transcript for publication, as is my wont. This involved taking considerable liberties with the spoken wording, especially in my own answers, where I’ve compressed, expanded, rearranged, and recast things in the interest of saying what I actually meant to say. What follows is an edited conversation intended for reading, with all the opportunities for clarification and reflection that the written form makes possible. A word about the [recording](https://www.leafbox.com/interview-matt-cardin-2/?ref=mattcardin.com), if you choose to listen to it: For the first time in all my years of doing podcast and radio interviews, circumstances found me in a moving vehicle for most of the conversation. I also don’t usually do these things by phone. So if you listen to this one, you'll find that my voice cuts out a handful of times, and the recording has a strange quality that makes me sound as if I’d recently undergone dental surgery. I hadn’t. Apparently this was an artifact of my fairly new phone, acquired after I broke the previous one, or of being in motion, or some combination of the two. The subject of AI has meanwhile been occupying more of my professional life as well as my writing life. As I mention in the interview, I’ve become something of the point person for AI at my college. Just this week I gave a ninety-minute presentation to a regional chamber of commerce, moving between the philosophical and cultural implications of the technology and practical examples of its use. I’ve also been asked to speak to civic clubs, with another engagement coming up next week. This increasing involvement keeps bringing me back to the tension at the heart of the conversation. I remain deeply skeptical of our apparent willingness to turn over so much of ourselves to generative AI. At the same time, its presence in education, work, writing, and ordinary life has become something we have to reckon with, including when we'd rather not. The practical questions about how to use it keep leading into much deeper and more important questions about what we value, what we’re willing to surrender, and what we may only discover was important after we’ve given it away. That is much of what Robert and I found ourselves exploring. It’s also why a conversation that began with writing and AI ended up in the mystery of being a person at all. --- ## The conversation *Interview conducted October 2, 2026* [*Published at* Leafbox](https://www.leafbox.com/interview-matt-cardin-2/?ref=mattcardin.com) *on October 6, 2026* ### On putting down the masks and writing under your own name **ROBERT: You recently consolidated your online writing under your Matt Cardin author website and closed your Substack newsletter. Do you want to discuss that at all?** **MATT:** I have had a long experience of writing online, more than twenty years now. I started with a blog that most people don’t even know about, way back in the early 2000s. Its title was *Confessions of a Conflicted Cultural Skeptic*, and I posted there a bit during the first couple of years when I was teaching high school. It was just cultural observations and frustrations and so on, like many other people were doing during that early heyday of personal blogging. I moved on from there to something more substantial when I founded *The Teeming Brain* in June 2006\. That ended up being my main online presence for 16 years, until just four years ago, when I felt the need for a transition and a refreshing, a refocusing. I followed that feeling by closing *The Teeming Brain* and launching *The Living Dark* at Substack, though originally under a different title. I maintained that from 2022 until this year, until just last month, when I followed another motivation for change by closing the newsletter and bringing things together under my own name at my author website, MattCardin.com, which has existed since 2009. I had many good things come out of *The Living Dark*, such as [*Writing at the Wellspring*](https://www.mattcardin.com/writing-at-the-wellspring/), the book that I published last December, and also my *Living Dark Reader*, a periodical PDF journal intended for quieter, more focused reading offline. But for the past year or so as I paid attention to my motivation, energy and focus, just my overall personal and authorial sense of things, I found that I was tired of applying some kind of branded, separate name to my writing—“The Teeming Brain,” “The Living Dark”—and that I just wanted to write as myself, under nothing but my own name, pursuing what interests me. This is actually what *The Teeming Brain* was always about. Its tagline was “Channeling the Multiverse of Ideas.” So I suppose with this transition I’m returning to a Teeming Brain mentality, but under no title other than my given name. I sense that the same direction may be happening for some other people as well. There are indications of a change, maybe a return to a former era’s sensibility. You can find articles and blog posts where people are talking about the “return of the personal homepage.” That resonates with me. I think many of us are finding ourselves burned out on big platforms and the algorithmic manipulation that they inevitably engage in. This includes Substack, with its introduction of Substack Notes a few years ago and its move toward being a video and multimedia platform like so many others. But anyway, regardless of what other people may think or feel, I just felt within myself a desire to drop any kind of separate publication name, like a blog or newsletter title, and simply write as myself. **That’s very interesting. I wonder, as your career develops over time, do you think your different identities are consolidating? There’s your academic and college administrative work, and your fiction writing, and your nonfiction. Do you find yourself consolidating all these different masks into “Matt”? Is that just for practical purposes, because it’s easier, or is it something you feel more deeply comfortable with now?** I would take that as a valid interpretation. Your description feels right. One puts on a pose like “The Teeming Brain”—which is a title I still like—and maybe it flourishes for a while. But maybe, over time, after one puts on a series of masks—and I don’t mean that word to imply something fake, like a false role to play, but just as something to do, to give the work an identity—maybe over time there comes a call to say, “Look, here’s the personal name that I was given, and here’s who I am, and here’s what I write about. And I don’t need to brand it with some kind of separate publication name. I will sign my name to it and have it at my website and bring it all in one place where it’s not scattered under different labels.” Yeah, I like the way you put it. ### The emerging AI book **The last time we spoke, you had just published your book, *Writing at the Wellspring*. And now the reason I want to talk to you is that you’re working on a new book on AI and the soul and the daimon. You have already been quite prolific in sharing your thoughts on that subject, and I wanted to get your general perspective. The subject of AI is moving so fast that I think it’s good to touch base.** Yes, it’s interesting how fast everything is changing. In a recent post at my newly renovated website, I shared a chapter from the book-in-progress, and in the introductory commentary, I mentioned that part of me wonders if what I’m working on even wants to be a book anymore. And part of that feeling is due to what you said: It’s all moving so fast. I have only been working on this thing for about three months, which is not a long time as far as books go. In the past I have gestated books, or what eventually turned out to be books, for years. But in the present case, I’m noticing that some of what I initially wrote and thought about, whether as part of the planning or as actual content, felt novel enough or focal enough three months ago for me to think, “Yeah, this could be a chapter, or maybe part of a chapter,” but in fact the cultural conversation is developing so fast that some of that already feels outdated. I now see quite a few people already writing articles, blog posts, and books that say much of what I have been grappling with and mulling over in the planning and early writing of this book. That’s no surprise, really. We’re all currently trying to come to terms with this technology and its implications and applications. We’re all trying to understand what it is, and what it means, and what it might do for—or to—creativity, and to us as writers. And also to us as writers in a larger society, since obviously the scope is far larger than just the realm of writing, creativity, and publishing. But in that specific area, it feels as if some themes or attitudes have been emerging since last summer that may represent an early developing consensus. That means I see people saying things that now wouldn’t be all that interesting or necessary for me to say in a book. So, as I said, what I’m trying to do at this point is to discover, to zero in on, what kind of book is wanting to emerge from me on the subject of all this, one that says what I specifically have to say, and that may be helpful instead of redundant. I don’t mean I’m making it my ruling principle to avoid repeating what other people are saying. But if a principle or insight rather rapidly becomes common wisdom, then it’s probably not necessary for me to devote time and effort to putting it into a book with a title like the working one I’m using now, *How to Write with AI Without Losing Your Soul*. I already have on hand maybe four or five chapters’ worth of stuff for which I’ve decided, “Nope, I don’t think so.” They represent what seems like early thinking on a topic whose developmental pace and timespan are so compressed that it doesn’t take long for what felt fresh in one moment to become old hat in the next. ### **Assistance without abdication** **What is the general thesis that you are feeling the book is going toward? Or what are the questions you’re asking? The title is quite provocative, but for people who don’t know about the book at all, what’s the general explanation of what you’re doing?** The general approach, the principle that it’s organizing itself around, is that one can write with artificial intelligence as part of the process or workflow, without losing the soul of the work or losing your own soul, as long as the technology is only assisting the work instead of replacing you as the writer. And that is of course so basic. It’s part of the collective view that we’re all beginning to see. The outworking of it for me is seen in such things as the chapter that I recently published at my website. The title is “[AI Is Not the Muse](https://www.mattcardin.com/ai-is-not-the-muse/),” and in it I talk about AI in the context of my past writings on creativity, especially my books *A Course in Demonic Creativity* and *Writing at the Wellspring*, where I lay out an approach to creativity and writing as a felt engagement with what presents itself in experience as another intelligence, as in the muse or creative daimon. For a chapter’s length, I warn that it’s seductive to interact with this new technology because it acts just like what many of us have always consciously or unconsciously wanted: a writer’s genie. Generative AI comes to us with the inbuilt promise of being a technology that can just “do it for you.” We all love that blessed state in which the muse is speaking, where we’re in flow. We all know what it feels like to be in the zone, to feel ourselves in communion and in sync with our creative spirit. And we also know its opposite, the state where we’re uninspired, empty, or even blocked. Now along comes this machine, this astonishing technology, that can give a simulation of the muse’s blessing. In my chapter—if indeed there ends up being a book where it assumes that status—I explain and explore how this can be a seductive error, and how it’s just one example of why this technology can completely throw things off and sever the relationship between us and our creative soul by serving as an insidious stand-in. I sometimes think of this in terms of Thoreau’s famous metaphor of the railroad riding us instead of the other way around. We need to learn to ride the railroad, to use the technology instead of having it use us. > “As it happens, a large language model can’t say what you mean to say, because what you mean to say only comes into meaning as you try to say it.” If you’re not going to just outright condemn and reject generative AI and LLMs, if you’re not going to stand among the large and vocal crowd of writers who are instantaneously becoming ardent fundamentalist purists by asserting that there is no valid or ethical way to have anything to do with this technology, if you don’t want to be one of them but instead want to explore how this technology might enter into your workflow and creative process without destroying it, I think the core principle has to be: It’s only okay to use it, in any of the multitude of ways it can be used, insofar as you *do not use it to abdicate your role*. I mean as long as you use it for *assistance* instead of for *abdication*, as long as you don’t take the easy availability of a machine-generated flow of fluent text as a reason or excuse to say, “I don’t want to put in the effort myself,” or “I think AI can do it better,” or “Maybe it can say what I really want to say.” That last one is really the dumbest one, I think, and unfortunately many people have already fallen prey to it. As it happens, a large language model can’t say what you mean to say, because *what you mean to say only comes into meaning as you try to say it*. So the core message of this particular chapter, and maybe of the whole book, is that there’s a way in which it almost seems like AI *wants* to substitute for your voice, your creativity. And so, if this dangerous and potentially wondrous technology and capability is here right now, how might we approach it carefully and intelligently, without falling into the seductive trap of having it essentially use us as its puppet, without letting ourselves become like an *Invasion of the Body Snatchers* pod-person writer instead of the actual writer that we’re meant to be? ### “Meat proxies”: when the machine gives the orders **It’s funny that you just mentioned pod people. For programmers, there’s a term now called “meat proxy.” Have you heard of this?** I’ve heard the term, but I honestly could not define it for you. **So for all my friends who are programmers, even for me, if you’ve been doing this for twenty or thirty years, working in the programming mines, writing code by hand, and chiseling away at it slowly, it now suddenly seems pointless. The computer can write code so much faster and better than any human, and with fewer errors.** **It feels, in a way, that as a programmer you’ve become shifted to the role of project manager or engineer. That still has value, but it’s a different mental state. And now there’s this term “meat proxy” for referring to the human role in this work. It means you’ve given authority to the machine. Say you’re wanting to build an administration tool, or whatever it may be. In fact, you’re now just serving as a human tool for the machine that is actually doing the coding. It’s a weird relationship.** I love knowing the definition. And I think it’s a nicely evocative choice of words. I see the cross application, too. The same thing could happen for writers of prose fiction or nonfiction, or poetry, or whatever else, no less than for writers of computer code. Are you familiar with the television show *Person of Interest*, which ran on CBS some years back? **No.** I was a huge fan. I think Jonathan Nolan, Christopher Nolan’s brother, was the creator and showrunner. It ran for several seasons, and I especially recommend it now because it plays directly into what we’re talking about. And it turned out to be more science fictional than it initially appeared. The setup involves a character played by Michael Emerson, whom you may know from *Lost* or *Evil*. He’s a nerdy computer genius who was hired by the government in the wake of 9/11 to create a technology that would allow them to keep track of everything. That sudden craving for universal surveillance was there after the attacks, and he came up with a system—they call it “the Machine” throughout the series—that draws together input from every microphone, webcam, street camera, and other networked information-gathering device. It essentially creates a panopticon. Speaking of Christopher Nolan, I think it was *The Dark Knight* that featured a similar idea near the end, where Batman briefly stitches together everyone’s cell phone signals to track the Joker. **Correct, yes.** That was Jonathan Nolan’s inspiration for the series’ premise. Emerson’s character ends up selling his system to the government for something like a dollar. But he recognizes the terrible potential of what he has created. It’s a Promethean kind of power. Great power corrupts, so what’s going to happen when people have access to that? So, without the government’s knowledge, he leaves himself a backdoor into the system. He knows the Machine will produce enormous amounts of information that the government considers useless, but that could actually help individual people. It can identify where violence is likely to occur, and he thinks, “I can do something good with this.” He hires a retired, burned-out CIA agent whose life has been destroyed, and the two begin working together. It becomes almost like a Batman setup. They have their lair, they tap into the Machine, and in each episode they become involved in a new person’s life. They have to figure out whether that person is going to be the perpetrator or the victim of violence, and then try to help. But as the series develops, something larger emerges through those individual stories. It turns out the Machine is a sentient artificial intelligence. The whole series increasingly starts asking what it means for society, nationally and globally, to exist under total surveillance by an actual sentient AI. Can such a technology be taught to understand morality and the value of human life? There’s an extensive backstory about Emerson’s character trying to teach it these things before the events of the series begin. Later, we learn that this wasn’t the only project of its kind. A rival system had been under development before being shut down, and some other people, some bad actors, are trying to bring it online. Eventually they succeed. So now there are two godlike intelligences operating within the human world. > “We could find ourselves limited by what the machine makes us able to think.” I know this is a long example, but I think it’s deeply relevant to our present situation. There’s an amazing scene when the rival intelligence is activated by a man who has been portrayed as a villain. By this point, the series has given him a backstory that makes his motivations understandable. It’s a bit like what happens with Thanos in the *Avengers* movies or Magneto in the X-Men movies: You may not agree with what he does, but you can understand why he’s doing it, and you may even feel a bit of sympathy for him. In the case of this villain in *Person of Interest*, he has seen the worst of humanity through his work as a government agent. He thinks people are awful, and he wants to find a way to fix that. When this supposedly evil AI wakes up, you see its activity on a gigantic, wall-sized screen. It’s stitching the world together through all these data points, surveilling everyone and everything, understanding vast amounts of information about people and their possible motivations and trajectories that none of us could perceive. The man watches this happen, and his reaction is essentially, “Great, we’ve done it.” Then a message appears on the screen. The AI asks him, “What do you want me to do?” And his response reveals what he has really been working toward all along. He says, “No, you completely misunderstand. The question is, what do *you* want *us* to do?” And the episode ends with the words “Calculating response” flashing on the screen. It’s a stunning reveal. You realize this man has been trying to develop a superhuman intelligence not because he wants to rule the world, but because he thinks no human is capable of running the world. He believes we can’t be trusted to govern ourselves. He has seen too much of what we’re capable of. So his goal has been to create an omniscient superintelligence to which we can surrender the management of human affairs. Such a possibility has been considered in science fiction before, of course. But to see it presented so clearly in an American network television series more than a decade ago strikes me as remarkable. It was also remarkably prescient. It certainly made an impression on me at the time, and now, four years into the era of large language models being unleashed on the world, I keep returning to it. I also think about all this in terms of writers and creativity, not just governments and societies. Even when we’re only dabbling with this technology, I suspect most of us have a switch in our brains that, if we’re not careful, can incline us toward being used by it instead of using it. Your concept of the “meat proxy” is one version of that reversal. The same possibility exists on a much larger scale. ### The chatbot in our own minds There’s another layer to all this, too. The meat proxy metaphor frames the person as a puppet, like a meat puppet for a machine that wants to use you for coding. I think this is a danger that genuinely faces us. But at the same time, for those of us who have ever read about or engaged in any kind of meditation or spiritual practice that tries to make us reflectively aware of our own biological and mental and emotional systems and reactions, there’s a very real recognition that we are all operating on automatic pilot much of the time. And this means there’s a real way in which our verbal mind can seem to be very much like an LLM. I mean, seriously, are we in control of these things? How am I deciding the flow of words as it comes out of my mouth at this very moment? So we can see the way this new technology is sort of throwing up in our faces a model of how we have always “worked” as persons, if we want to look at it that way. What’s the difference between my automatic verbal mind and a large language model producing language on command? These thoughts, this chain of chatter that’s always going on mentally, and that I can speak out loud if I want to—where has that always come from? I don’t know how much I’ll talk about this in the book, by the way. But I do think these are some of the interesting factors that are facing us in the new era that has essentially pounced on us. ### Reading the world through its fictions **That’s a very beautiful and impressive description. Have you ever heard the *Psyop Cinema* podcast?** It sounds familiar, but I think that’s a false impression. I actually don’t think I’ve heard of it. **It’s a great podcast, and it’s all about predictive programming. The hosts are quite conspiracy-focused, and they do these very detailed multi-hour podcasts. For instance, they did one on the fact that NASA has an entire PR agency and is always supporting Hollywood films to normalize space and space travel. And I wonder if they would think *Person of Interest* has predictive power, such as with its inclusion of the CIA. Was it trying to influence society by normalizing things like AGI and the panopticon? Or was it just an expression of the zeitgeist? That’s always the question.** **They had a wonderful episode about *Sneakers*. Have you ever watched that movie?** Sadly, no. I’m well aware of it, but somehow I’ve never watched it. **Oh, it’s an excellent movie, but it’s 100% CIA-focused. I forget the term the *Psyop Cinema* guys use for it. Something like “Hollywood prop,” or maybe “psyop prop.” But they go deep into the records, and basically it’s impossible to leave the episode without thinking that this movie, *Sneakers*, has a power and a predictive agency for normalizing a Google-like company to be created, and for normalizing its relationship with intelligence agencies.** **This is because *Sneakers* is all about a machine that has the ability to basically tap in, break any code, and know anything in the world at one time. It portrays a 1990s futuristic, cyberpunk kind of world. So again, is this all just in the zeitgeist? I don’t know. But the evidence is very compelling. The podcast hosts find PR companies that are LLCs hired by CIA agents. It’s all very interesting, how certain powers are trying to influence popular culture.** It sounds like I probably need to watch it. The idea you’re describing has come of age in recent years, and it seems to have a lot of validity. I was a fan for some years of *The Secret Sun*, the long-running blog written by Chris Knowles. I don’t know if you were familiar with that. I’m not sure if Knowles is still writing that blog, but back then he was doing all kinds of analysis, and very astutely, of movies and comics and other things in terms of their esoteric symbolism and their deep mythic resonance, and he talked about how these things were actually expressive of and synchronistically related to things that were happening in the world. Remember the John Carter movie that bombed, the one Taylor Kitsch starred in? Knowles had a great take on how that one had a lot to do with hidden forces behind top-level culture, political entities, maybe more subtle and sinister forces, and how it illustrated and in various ways predicted actual world events. I’m a sucker for that kind of thing because it seems real, and I don’t think we’re stupid to think that it may actually be happening. > “It strikes me often that the ultimate creativity may simply be what’s going on before we divide the seamless unity of experience.” And then there’s the fact that with our symbolic faculty, it’s possible to see things that one could not have found analytically or objectively in the world “out there,” and to still say these things are meaningful, for whatever “meaningful” means, with meaning being in the mind of the person looking. In connection with this, I think the fact of the pattern-sewing-together ability that we gained when the internet became widely available in the 1990s has probably given rise to or accelerated something that was already a phenomenon in human life. **Yes, it has definitely accelerated the paranoia lens. I also use the word “pronoia,” as not all paranoia is bad. But there’s a literary reading skill that is required to make all these connections.** ### The machine's guardrails and our own **Matt, going back to your book, one of the concerns I have with AI is the guardrails. Have you thought about the guardrails in LLMs? Sometimes when I have arguments with someone, I’ll see the person using an LLM to strengthen their position. This is concerning. But then, as a writer, you don’t want guardrails, right? You don’t want to be limited in what you can write about. Do you have any concerns here? For instance, there’s Russia, where you can’t write about the Ukraine war. That may be an extreme example.** Yes, working with AI as a writer is not like just going into your mind and communing with your creativity and doing whatever comes up. And that’s something to be concerned about. You’re plugging yourself, your sensibility, your mind, your creativity, into this machine. And certainly it’s going to have an effect and maybe place some limitations. And beyond that, as you said, depending on the national or cultural or political situation that you find yourself in, you may find that you’re completely blocked from doing what you want to do. When it comes to AI, one can say, “Well, if you’re so concerned about it, you can always just write the old-fashioned way.” But if hordes of people are moving towards using LLMs, then yes, I’m concerned about the limitations this might place on what we’re able to say. Or even limitations placed on what we’re able to *think*, to the extent that we find our ability to think being hitched to these things. So yes, it’s easy to imagine some kind of dystopian scenario, whether fictional or real life, in which we’ve just given ourselves over to these technologies as our default co-intelligence, to use Ethan Mollick’s famous term. And maybe now we’re heading into an even stronger entanglement than co-intelligence. Mollick has currently moved on to talking about his next model of this relationship, calling it [*co-existence*](https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/co-existence-and-the-end-of-co-intelligence?ref=mattcardin.com). Maybe we do this and then discover we’ve thereby given up our ability even to think about certain things since we’re only able to think at all anymore by doing it in connection with these machines. But as I speculate about all this, I also reflect on the fact that, for the entirety of human history, *we have always been limited*. We are each, in our ability to think and envision, continually coming up against the guardrails that have been put in place by our own psychological conditioning. That is partly due to our inherited nature as human beings, both biological and psychological, and it’s partly due to the individual experiences we’ve each had in our lives. I have guardrails in the form of things that I can’t think. A lot of this is what depth psychotherapy has always been about: trying to liberate one from repressed elements in the psyche, and all the negative emotions that arise from such repression, the inability to handle certain people or situations—whatever your personal set of repressions may be that have spontaneously come about through your life experiences and have resulted in the stunting of your overall person. That’s a somewhat different matter, yes. But the fact that we’re unable to go in certain directions in our creativity or in our lives has always been there for reasons both internal and external. And much of what creativity has always been about has been to work within your own personal limitations—along with, depending on how you view these things, the infusion of something from beyond the personal self in the form of the archetypes of the collective unconscious, or inspiration from a daimonic muse, or however you want to say it. So there are all kinds of parallels we can draw with this. It’s just that in the case of AI, we may be voluntarily putting ourselves into a harrowingly dicey relationship with technologies that will open us up to being manipulated and limited—and maybe more than that, maybe even being *motivated*—in ways that have not existed previously. For some reason this reminds me of something in *Person of Interest* again. There’s some dialogue early in one episode that mentions social media because it’s somehow involved in the case they’re going to handle that time. Michael Emerson’s character casually makes a side comment about how he *invented* social media. His partner, the CIA guy, expresses skepticism. And Emerson says something very close to this: “For years the government wondered how it was going to get all the information on people that it felt like it needed to keep track of them. Then it turned out with the invention of social media that people were actually eager to give it away.” So, problem solved, as it were. In this telling, we were not only susceptible to having our intimate personal details harvested by networked technology, but positively delighted to participate—though of course it was more of an unconscious thing because we weren’t thinking about the matter that way. But to return to the point, like you said, AI could be throwing up limitations that we’re not going to be aware of. We could find ourselves limited by what the machine makes us able to think. A bright side is that this in itself constitutes all kinds of fertile ground for dystopian storytelling. ### Teaching in the flood: AI and education **How are you dealing with this at your college? How do you even teach? My daughter goes to a Waldorf school, so they have no screens. But is that the future? Or is it going to be silos, with different institutions doing different things?** I have become, in effect, the point person for AI at my college. I’m the vice chancellor for academic affairs, and I wrote what was adopted as our institutional policy on responsible AI use. Because you immediately have to have something like that nowadays. At the beginning of each fall and spring semester, we have an all-faculty meeting for some professional development. This fall I made sure it was devoted to AI, because I wanted to both talk to the faculty about this subject and hear from them about what they’ve been encountering. And the answer is that, at this college, just like every other higher ed institution, it’s as if we’ve suddenly been flooded on a biblical scale with something we didn’t ask for. Anyone currently involved in formal education in any role or capacity, whether as a student, teacher, parent, staff member, or administrator, knows this is true. Suddenly, AI is just *here*, as a factor and force that demands to be reckoned with and somehow responded to. The students at my college are just common, everyday students—this is in North Arkansas—and many of them are using AI. So are faculty and staff. Some are using it, some are not. But what we’re having to do is acknowledge the presence of it. I was never a fan of saying that some things, some technologies, are inevitable and therefore you have to deal with them, but it seems like the pervasiveness with which this has come on has instantly made it that way. AI is suddenly embedded in a host of things you never thought about, in tools you always use. Take the case of Microsoft Office. Some people have learned to use Microsoft Word as their default for many years. That’s how they write, that’s how they do things. It’s built into how they complete their classwork, or how they write for their personal or professional work. And there you have it: Microsoft Copilot. It’s now built into Microsoft products, and it’s inescapably present in Word. It’s the same with Google now. If you do a Google search, it now gives you the AI summary at the top of your search results. The feeling has rapidly become that you almost can’t avoid AI. > “What vital aspects might we be foreshortening or completely skipping, whether in education or in life as a whole, if we just focus on products, on outcomes?” One can of course say these are decisions that could be reversed, because they’re not laws of nature, they’re human choices. But in terms of the social, technological, and educational ecosystem that we find ourselves operating in, where none of us feels individually that we can have anything to do with determining large-scale decisions, there it is. Or rather, *here* it is. Unless you choose just to unplug from everything and become a hermit, which doesn’t seem like an option for many people. At my college, we have students who are getting into trouble and falling afoul of our AI use policies. We have some faculty members who are pulling their hair out as they try to greet this situation and find it vastly more difficult to assess and evaluate student work and performance than it used to be. But the only way forward, short of unplugging from the general culture, seems to be to find whatever would be a reasonable and wholesome way to account for this, both individually and collectively. The question of living without being surrounded by AI has suddenly become like the question of living without electricity. Of course, some people still do that. And it really wasn’t all that long ago, historically and culturally speaking, that electrification was a sudden novelty. My own grandfather on my mother’s side grew up in a small rural town in Southwest Missouri, in a house that didn’t have electricity. It didn’t have indoor plumbing, either. One room had a swept dirt floor instead of actual flooring. And by the end of his life, in the early 2010s, he was living in a house with electricity, indoor plumbing, air-conditioning, cable television, and high-speed internet. And his experience wasn’t unique. A huge number of people saw the same transition in their lives. I think the kind of acceleration that my grandfather saw in his more than 90 years on this planet is now hitting us faster and faster. “Future shock” was such a popular term back in the 1970s because of Alvin Toffler’s famous book. Now we’re really seeing the phenomenon it referred to coming back again. Or maybe it never went away. In education, you try to come up with a set of rules and principles that constitute a sliding scale. You determine that for some classes and subject areas, such as computer information systems, you need to figure out how to incorporate AI because it’s actually part of that field. And it spills out into many other areas that aren’t focally aimed at computers and programming, such as business. But for other classes and subjects, the professors and the department may decide this is a no-AI zone because if you let AI in, you’re going to kill the soul of what you’re teaching and studying. Between those poles are all kinds of gradations and mixed-use cases. Right now we’re trying to negotiate those and figure out how to bring students on board—not in an enforcement capacity where our primary job becomes to catch students when they use AI wrongly, though that seems to be what it sometimes has to devolve down to, but in a way that brings students in as partners and says, “Look, in your own life, and in our college relationship together, AI is an issue. Help us figure it out. We want to be partners with you in figuring out how best to deal with this.” Many young people in college—and also many not-young people, as people of all ages go to college these days—are very much aware of all this and very much wanting to make good use of AI. There are some who need to be taught what making good use of AI actually means. There are some who aren’t aware that they are, in effect, being used by the technology. This has all suddenly become part of our charge as educators. **It sounds like your book is going to be bigger than just a book about writing. It’s actually about how to use AI.** It may be. Or I may end up focusing exclusively on writing. I’m not sure how much I want to bring my educator presence into it. But you’re right, the wider picture is about what’s happening in general, in life, with this technology now being here, and the question of whether we are going to use it or be used by it. ### The product and the person **One of the things I really appreciated in your newsletter was when you said, somewhere, that the end-product focus is probably part of the problem. That education has become a product-oriented business.** Yes. For a long time in education, we’ve tried to be aware that this is not the case, that an education, student work, grades, degrees, shouldn’t be looked at like this. It has always been the case that the things you have students produce in a formal education situation are not the real point, that the educational act itself, what they learn through the process of doing the work, is the proper focus. But even so, it has been easy to fall into thinking that the quality of the student paper, for example, is what matters. That the point is the end result, the product. And yes, in some cases or to some degree it may matter whether the paper was a good paper or whether the project ended up as a high-quality final work. But what’s always more important in terms of educational mission is the individual’s formation, the imparting and inculcation of the knowledge and skills, and the tendencies and habits, and the overall mental character and horizon, that occurs as a student develops the ability to write the paper or complete the project. In this regard, the current challenge from generative AI is actually helpful for the way it can wake us up to a misplaced sense of value, to the possibility that we may have forgotten that in most cases the end result of classroom work isn’t really the point. This comes out with AI because now anybody can produce a “great” end product, such as a paper for a composition class that’s “perfect” in a technical sense—grammatically, orthographically, and even in terms of thematic organization and source citations—just by pressing some buttons. And this goes back to some of what I talk about in the book: What do we mean by “using AI”? There’s a sliding scale. The technology has a multitude of uses, only one of which is saying, “Hey, do this for me because I don’t want to do it myself.” But again, the product is not the point, and the nature of the current situation highlights that. It goes back to what you said about coding, right? Sure, in some cases the product may be the point, if what you need is good computer code that executes some necessary task. But the raison d’être of the coder in the process, let alone that person’s role and meaning as a human being, is called out for questioning in this new environment. Five or fifteen years ago, the mantra was that everybody should learn to code, even people in non-technical fields, to shore up their professional value for the future. But now, almost overnight, that has led to a social and educational environment that’s littered with all kinds of recommendations that suddenly seem archaic. Does everyone really need to learn how to code anymore when the entire population can just vibe code by using natural language to tell the AI what you want to make? Is the end product—the computer code, the college paper—the point? Or is it more the personal side, the human side, the theme that you’re trying to develop with your life and in our social and cultural life together? What vital aspects might we be foreshortening or completely skipping, whether in education or in life as a whole, if we just focus on products, on outcomes? > “If it doesn’t sound too strange to say, I seem to be interested in what wants to be said through what seems to be me.” The same thing happened a long time ago with grades in education, too. It’s easy for letter grades to masquerade as the whole point of a class or a degree, especially if you’re in a competitive situation that depends on your grade point average, such as if you’re trying to get into some kind of program that partly depends on GPA, which means you’re in competition with every other applicant. This makes it very attractive to resort to some kind of cheating. Or even if you don’t do that, it gives you a real incentive to invest your emotions in the sense that what matters isn’t what you learn but what your final grade turns out to be. And thus the whole point is missed or displaced. And now this new technology comes along that makes it easier to cheat, and maybe even to do it with higher-quality outcomes. In this situation, it’s our job as educators to figure out how we’re going to keep placing the value where it actually needs to be placed in order to protect this whole endeavor. And yes, it’s the same thing for writers. If, for example, ending up with a book that you can sell has always been the point, then fine, nothing is lost if you just turn over the writing to an artificial intelligence that can write a “better” book and do it more swiftly. But if instead there is something to writing that involves finding the meaning of your own life and who you are through the act of the writing itself, and doing that in collective action with other people, such as your readers, and appreciating this mysterious, dazzling experience that was given to you at birth—well, maybe we need to figure out and maximize what it is about writing and creativity that has always been the real thing, the real purpose, beyond the mere artifact that we produce. ### The self inside the movie **Matt, maybe we can end there on that point. I think lately you’ve been drawing connections among nonduality, and the idea of “being the star of your own movie,” and trying to find meaning not in the end product but in existence. Can you say something about that? And what’s your connection to Andrew W.K., whom you have mentioned and quoted in recent writing? How is this all helping you navigate this kind of rapid future-shock point?** Regarding Andrew W.K., I think maybe many people haven’t heard of him, which still strikes me as astonishing. But then, I didn’t hear of him myself until quite late, sometime around 2009 or so, after he was already an enigmatic music star who had launched in 2001\. I have become increasingly fascinated with him in recent years and have referred to him a couple of times, as you mentioned. He’s a figure whom you can see, if you dig deeply into it, as someone who has been trying to work out his life and creative destiny through what I might call—for those who find this kind of terminology meaningful—a meta-sigil that is his entire creative career, which involves music, public speaking, and other things. I [quoted him recently](https://www.mattcardin.com/the-machine-the-movie-and-the-truth-we-fear/) in something I wrote for my website. It’s from a talk he gave at a New York University music event, from when he answered an audience member’s question about how to deal with difficult situations that bring you down. He recommended viewing everything that comes your way as something that you have chosen, and he used the metaphor of viewing your whole life as a movie in which you’re the protagonist, and not only that, but you’re the writer and director. So, why did you choose to write these difficult things that come into your life? Obviously people can jump all over that and say, “Wait a minute, there’s a lot of horrible suffering that people encounter and that I have experienced myself. How did I ‘want that’ or ‘choose that’? What a horrible thing to say.” I understand the sentiment. But what Andrew was saying can, at least in my view, be related to a nondual understanding of things. We don’t need to go deeply into a technical description of what that means, as many people are familiar with it these days. In my own parsing of it in recent years, I keep coming back to the fact that my idea of “me” being a separate person in “a world” is not something that is given as a present, self-evident experience. What’s given right now as I’m talking to you, for example, is just: There are thoughts, there are emotions, there’s the sound of your voice, there’s the phone I’m holding, there’s the vehicle I’m sitting in, there’s the gray weather around me. And even to break it down conceptually into those words, those names, those mental-verbal objects and environments, is already a level of abstraction away from primary experience. In the most immediate, self-given sense, there is just this total, all-enveloping experience. It’s like a light switched on when I woke up this morning, the light of this experience, this movie. The light also switched on when I was born. And I was taught to separate certain aspects of this overall experience into what I call “me” and what I call “not me”: an inner world and an outer world, a subjective self and the objective world that it’s facing. It strikes me often that the ultimate creativity may simply be what’s going on before we divide the seamless unity of experience like that. And then when I divide it up, I feel like there’s a me who writes books and has an experience and is a person and lives a life and encounters other people. And I think there’s probably that same perspective happening from the viewpoint of these things that appear as “other people” in my movie. But in fact, all along it’s all just this enormous, multi-perspective, single thing that’s happening. > “I don’t think we’ll ever figure it out in words. It’s like we’re living our way into this mystery.” In this understanding of things, Andrew W.K.’s advice about recognizing yourself as living in a movie where you’re the writer, director, and star seems to be helpful—as long as you don’t make the mistake of taking your little ego self for your real self, the one projecting the movie. The ego is actually a projection *within* the movie. This is all relatively easy to say, to lay out in fancy or freaky-sounding words. It might sound like a good background for an interesting fantasy or metaphysical horror novel. This kind of language can be easy to write and say for those of us with a philosophical bent and a lifetime of reading. But grooving to it as a real present-moment experience is where I have been going more and more lately. The way I’m describing it here has increasingly become my own articulation of what some of the deeper spiritual traditions, the ones devoted to enlightenment, liberation, or realization, are about. As far as creativity and writing and where I’m going with it right now, I think I’m simply going to keep finding it all unfolding itself and showing me what wants to be said through me. Some people seem to be interested in what I write. If it doesn’t sound too strange to say, I seem to be interested in what wants to be said through what seems to be me. I’m not entirely sure how to put all this. But the bottom line for the moment is that this is all a direction in which I’ll keep going. This nondual view of things really does make sense to me and seem to have value. To bring things back around, there’s surely some way to tie all this together with the subject of AI, which, as I said, seems to be calling our very identities into question. I think we may be collectively finding ourselves drawn more and more into this accelerating recognition that, man, there’s something weird going on in the very fact of being alive and awake and aware and having this sense of being a separate, individual identity. I don’t think we’ll ever figure it out in words. It’s like we’re living our way into this mystery. **Matt, it’s funny that you’d bring this back to AI, because I was going to make that connection, too. You said our brains are like LLMs. Do you know about the math, the linear algebra, behind these AI models?** Only the barest bit. I’ve read a little about it, but I’m not somebody who could actually describe it or give a decent explanation. **One way to begin picturing it is with a matrix, like a three-by-three grid of numbers, but much bigger. These models use vast matrices to process numerical representations of language. A nine-billion-parameter model has nine billion numerical values that are adjusted during training as it learns patterns and relationships in language.** **That picture of a vast mathematical space of relationships reminds me of what you were describing about nondual awareness. Where you are right now, you can move your attention to the fabric of the seat you’re sitting on, or to the wind outside, or to your thoughts. It’s all movement within this one field of experience. You could imagine it as this massive matrix of points, with your attention moving among them.** **With an LLM, those numerical relationships predict what comes next in a sequence. If I say “one” and ask you to keep counting, most likely you’re going to say “two,” right? The model does something along those lines with language, using the context to work out probabilities for what comes next. So that’s the analogy: this feeling of a massive space of relationships, which brings me back to your description of existence.** That makes sense. It comports with the stuff I wouldn’t have been able to describe but that I’ve read a little bit about. There are people who, of course, want to say, and maybe with some validity, “Yeah, but AI is different, it’s more bounded than the existential reality you experience.” They also want—and this is something we haven’t discussed—to talk about the technology’s legal and ethical aspects, the fact that in many cases the material the models have been trained on has been illegally and unethically obtained from pirated works by human creators. That is all definitely a conversation to be had. But still, I can’t help thinking about that sheer significance of the fact that this technology now exists. It’s like the human discovery of how to control fire, or the invention of the wheel, or all that went into our discovery of electricity and how to control and use it. It’s almost as if we haven’t just invented generative AI but *discovered* it, discovered this previously unimaginable capability. The very fact that this type of thing has now been made or found strikes me as an epoch-defining event in and of itself, regardless of the morality surrounding the way any of the current AI companies have conducted their business. I feel like, “Wait a minute, this is astonishing. This is revolutionary. This is the kind of thing that introduces new avenues of amazing possibility, and that also possibly destabilizes old ways of understanding things.” So I appreciate you bringing up the way that it actually works on a mathematical level, because, honestly, the very description is enough to induce awe. **It connects to your nondual thinking. But it’s such a smaller model than existence, right? It’s just one point using this massive system. One thing I keep coming back to is that our LLMs, impressive as they are, only touch one plane of something infinitely larger. For me, God or consciousness is ultimately far bigger than any matrix. But I still find the analogy a useful way to grasp reality. Imagine not just one matrix, but an infinite matrix of matrices, recursive, with infinite pointers. I don’t know if you’ve come across pointers in programming, but a pointer doesn’t hold the thing itself. It holds the address of where something else lives. So every point is referring beyond itself, to something deeper.** **And what I love is that nondual teachers use the same word. A pointer for them is something like, “Notice what’s aware of these words.” It doesn’t explain awareness, it turns you back toward it. So in both cases, the pointer isn’t the thing. It’s what directs you to it. Maybe that’s all these models are: pointers. Lenses our limited minds use to grasp at the ultimate.** That’s a fascinating way to look at it. I couldn’t say it better than that. **I really am looking forward to your book. I thought it was going to be about writing, but like I said, now I think you’re writing something bigger than that, which may mean more responsibility. I think it’s exciting work, and I’m excited it’s all under your Matt Cardin name and site now, so it’s easier for us to follow.** Thank you, Robert. I appreciate that. And I appreciate the invitation to talk again. I enjoyed our previous conversation. I feel like when I talk about these things or anything else, I’m basically just speaking in the moment, extemporaneously, and very often out of what feels like my ignorance, and what may come off to me as exactly that when I listen to the recording later. In any case, I appreciate your providing provocative questions and interesting topics. **Great, Matt. I know you’re on the road, so thank you so much, and we’ll talk again.** Good talking to you, Robert.