It was March 2019. I was sitting alone in my study in Malmö, on the third floor, window facing St. Peter’s Church. I had been hearing the term GPT, so I sat down to see what it was.
I typed a prompt: Write a 300-word fairytale about a woodcutter, a princess, a toad, and an enchanted bird.
It produced a beautiful fairytale. I started a new thread and gave it the exact same prompt. It produced another beautiful fairytale — completely different from the first.
This was not a search engine returning links. This was something that seemed to think. And sitting there alone, the church outside my window, I felt afraid. I knew how fast computers evolved. If this was the same mechanism the brain uses, we would be surpassed.
It was not an abstract fear. It sat in the room with me.
I sat very still, and did not know what I was looking at.

For more essays, see my book  The Kitchen Buddha