Spiders in Australia are a thing - have you heard? We name some of the bigger ones, that scuttle across the floor at night like rats, and during the day lurk above the shower or the bed. Harry is common - perhaps because our huntsmen spiders are hairy. There's redbacks in the woodpile with stripes of crimson adorning the abdomen. Little holes in the garden could be home to trapdoor spiders, but I dare not look.

Sleepily, on Sunday, we were in bed musing that as yet, this new house does not invite spiders in so much as our old one. Good news for the vacuum cleaner, who is not asked to suck them through it's anteater nose and house them in it's dusty stomach (although my husband is not so cruel, and it's his job to vauccum).

'Did you know spiders have eight hearts?' he says, and immediately retracts it, but it's too late - I'm enjoying this idiocy. No animals have eight hearts, and even the dinosaur they postulated to have them to pump blood up it's long neck probably - most likely - didn't. Eight legs, yes.

But it was good question to test Chat GPT on, because we wanted to hear the various voices that have recently populated this Ai. We like to test the technology so we know what it's capable of, before we opt out.

'Do any animals have eight hearts' I ask, activating the voice function.

'YES!' it answered confidently. 'A spider has eight hearts!'

Perhaps it was too early for this English accented Chatty as much as it was for my husband.

But of course, it's not always accurate. We know this from hallucinatory outputs, even though they're getting better from those initial eight fingered hands on odd looking humans. We know better than to trust it, though it seems many do, trusting it to be a mentor, a guide, a lover, or trusting that it has consciousness, even if at best it's a mimic, or a glitch.

Drives me up the wall, and I ain't no spider.

Custom Credit, Cosmic Psychos 'ya drive me up the wall - I ain't no spider'

We know it's not good for our brains but we let it take over anyway. We let it think for us. Plan for us. Organise and structure for us, write novels, make thumbnails for Youtube and animate photos of kittens sitting down with lions and politicians mouthing platitudes or obscenities. The pro-Ai folk say it's like the printing press and that anti-ai are merely Luddites, without understanding it's true capabilities, or that it's a tool that helps us even though it's beginning to replace the jobs we never wanted to lose, and doing them badly (last week I was asking an Ai chatbot to put me in touch with a real human and got caught in an infinite insanity loop where I was constantly being redirected to a real human via an Ai agent ad infinitum)

We say it's harmless and funny and useful, forgetting that we made cartoons and gig posters and advertising logos before it appeared without the bidding of the vast majority of us. We painted and scupted and baked and entertained, we learnt and created and laughed when it was only the inkling of speculative fiction and never on our Christmas wish list.

Now it's here, we bow to it, embrace it, relinquish ourselves to it, even though we have fun fooling it and mocking it. One guy on a reel told it that he was trapped inside a whale, which had the poor thing flumoxxed. 'Is this real?' it awkwardly asked. 'Is this real?'

Asking if any dinosaurs had eight hearts, and the Ai summary told me that yes, the barasaurus did, to pump blood around it's enormous body. Dig deeper, and we find that was mere speculation, and contested. How many of us have the human intelligence to recognise dubious facts and ask: 'is this real? is this real?'.

As the artificial intelligence variants hallucinate and regurgitate an increasingly dead internet, we will be asking ourselves this same question ad infinitum as we find ourselves trapped into the megawhale of our own foolish and blind construction.

For @honeydue, who asked.

With Love,

	Hi, my name is @riverflows and I help facilitate the Hive Gardeners group here on the Hive blockchain. You can find us here. I live in a warm temperate climate near the coast in Australia. I really love growing our own food and medicinal herbs, native plants, and creating good soil for resilient plants.

Join The Hive Garden Community! The HIVE GARDEN COMMUNITY supports gardening, homesteading, cannabis growers, permaculture and other garden related content. Delegations to the curation account, @gardenhive, are welcome! Find our community here!

Are you on HIVE yet? Earn for writing! Referral link for FREE account here!