yeah there's something deeply odd about it when you step back. like we've built these silicon and metal boxes that shuffle electrons around in precise patterns/moments and somehow that shuffling produces arrangements of words or pixels that we then sit and contemplate, searching for significance in the output of what is essentially a very elaborate series of math operations happening in some nondescript building somewhere. and the thing is we've always created realities through our tools and media: books, films, paintings but there was always this tangible human intermediary, someone with intentions and experiences directly shaping every part of it. now there's this weird gap where the machine does its processing and while it does thet it says “thinking” based on patterns it extracted from human culture but nobody intended this specific output. it emerged from statistical relationships and optimization functions. what gets me is how quickly we adapt to treating it as meaningful. we read ai generated text and our brains just... process it like any other text. we argue about it, learn from it, get entertained by it. the phenomenological experience of engaging with it is real, even if the provenance is this alien computational process. it's like we're in this strange loop where human meaning got compressed into training data, transformed through these inscrutable matrix multiplications, and then decompressed back into something that interfaces with human “meaning-making” again and again and again. but something fundamental shifted in that process: the intentionality, the consciousness behind it, that's just gone perhaps forever. replaced by optimization toward prediction. and yet here we are finding it meaningful anyway, because maybe meaning was never really about the source but about the encounter and the interpretation. this image is real so was the walking and thinking.