I had this realization a couple of mornings ago when I had a dream I could remember (a rare occasion, really). My brain acts like a generative neural network, almost scarily so.

I had a dream that I was back in high school again, even though the school layout was nothing like my old high school's layout. Nonsensically tall walls and blank stucco walls and whatnot. Nothing like the concrete brick prison that it actually is. Just one tell aside from, y'know, attending classes for a teacher that I haven't seen in years. And being stressed over missing the deadlines for assignments that my brain made up.

It was in this supposed English class where we were discussing some Lázaro or something. I don't remember the context, and it was some character for a novel that my brain probably made up. Then, somehow the "fact" came up that the Lázaro that I was thinking of, the one from Lazarillo de Tormes (an early Spanish romance "novel", arguably one of the first) was less heard of in the States and more widely studied in Europe.

Now, I don't know if this is actually true (it probably is since it is a Spanish classic, and the Spanish probably studied their own written traditions more than other people), but if it is a lie, it definitely sounds convincing nonetheless. Almost like ChatGPT or other generative large language models, which have been known to do the same thing.

Maybe it's a sign that neuromorphic computing is closer to the ground truth than we give credit for. Or maybe something else is at play (like convergent evolution or something). Maybe it's a sign that we won't be able to tell AI generated from reality soon. It's hard to decipher.

Thought-provoking, isn't it?