Reality Check
Reality check
The reality check is a fun enquiry. You see, one of my roles in my job is to check if the model is generating things that we can say: oh, this looks real!
To build things that are real and feel things that are equally real seems to be one of the core purposes of our human existence. We want to build things that are real, turn our desires into something real. Good health for real, happiness for real, a nice home for real. Really real!
The reality check is also a tool when anxiety knocks on the mind. When one feels overwhelmed by catastrophic thoughts, it is by checking reality that one can feel calmer: I am here in my living room, my feet touching the ground, I am here feeling each part of my body. And by confirming the only unique reality: the presence of our body at that moment, we can finally breathe better.
What is truth and what is real can give us, at times, a sense of security and comfort. Or even pain and sadness. We do react to what we feel and see as real so we can feel it for real.
Today I was reading The Republic (book X) by Plato and read that part in which Glaucon and Socrates discuss how poets and painters should not live in this ideal city. The reason was that poets and painters are imitators who do not bring the real thing. There was an example of a bed: the maker builds the original bed (the being of the bed), while the painter will paint something that appears to be a bed. The imitation is not the truth, not real. So why having the illusion of a bed?! The dialogue says that poets and painters could be dangerous because they can inflame too much desire, and at times the worst parts of people and their vulnerabilities are not in accordance with the real best version of human. āEach poet puts a bad constitution in the soul of each individual,ā it says.
It gets wild and shocking. Platoās idea is old and of course our ideas about art have changed so much (happily), but our dialogue about what is real or not has not changed much. We aim for what is real and we disagree about what is real. We see a conflict in the world, we see a painting, and we can still have different perspectives on the conflict or on the painting because we donāt even agree on what is the most real and truthful.
It gets confusing like that, and itās bad. And good. Because we are human, so things are messy, and there is no other way to come to this world and get our hands dirty with real living experience. Fun enough, one part of the dialogue made me laugh. Who could know that Glaucon and Socrates were talking about AI LLMs around 375 BC?
āAnd in the same way, I suppose weāll say that a poetic imitator uses words and phrases to paint colored pictures of each of the crafts. He himself knows nothing about them, but he imitates them in such a way that others, as ignorant as he, who judge by words, will think he speaks extremely well about cobblery or generalship or anything else whatever, providedāso great is the natural charm of these things.ā (Page 1205)
And at the end of the day, I am delighted and also puzzled by the reality-check inquiry, and I look around myself and also inside me with no answers about what is real or not. However, I am not made of imitation.
Reality check:
