I-Ching and ChatGPT
iching-for-all
The esteemed I-Ching colleague of mine Hilary Barrett – well-known I Ching diviner & teacher who runs www.onlineclarity.co.uk (since Year 2000)– recently had a post sharing her thoughts on ChatGPT capabilities to read and interpret I Ching castings -
It was a very pleasantly surprising and thoughtful post opening a much broader AI & ML discussion in I-Ching community. Below is my response to her post and my thoughts on this important new topic.
So, can AI & ML do I Ching readings & interpretations as good as we people do it?
As a computer scientists, web systems architect and a humble I Ching scholar behind www.IChing360.com I have the following take-aways on this topic.
1. Can machine reasoning be as good as a human reasoning?
The short answer is YES. Anything which can be analyzed, understood and described scientifically can be artificially reproduced at the right point of time (when technology is ready). As old adage advises us “Everything is possible – impossible just takes longer”.
2. How ChatGPT works anyway?
“GPT” in ChatGPT
abbreviation stands for “Generative Pre-Trained
Transformer” with
Pre-Trained being the key word, the
heart and the soul of everything there. ChatGPT’s
reasoning engine is a so-called Large
Language Model (LLM), breast-fed with data taken from the public sources for
each specific topic.
In I-Ching case it is pretty simple and easy to feed ChatGPT’s LLM with numerous I-Ching scripts - Wilhelm-Baynes, Blofeld, Alfred Huang, Wu Wei, Stephen Karcher, … you name it.
3. How Accurate is ChatGPT?
It is as accurate as accurate the data it was fed with. If we feed ChatGPT with classic I-Ching texts then ChatGPT interpretations can be as accurate as ours based on the same sources.
And please note, ChatGPT constantly evolves – I compare my questions to ChatGPT on a topic of computer programming a year ago and now. It dramatically improved from being “reasonably informational” to be “very accurate and valid”. So, it is a matter of time when ChatGPT will provide indistinguishably accurate interpretations.
4. What should we do with AI?
Should we embrace it, ignore it or fight it? We are in the same situation now where British Luddites were in 19th century when they were trying to break new machinery because it was taking their jobs. Progress is unstoppable. So, we would need to evolve to adjust to the new reality.
5. My Take-aways from AI & ML
No scriptures can describe the whole casting in its entirety - the truth is beyond the words. This is why we have so many I Ching commentaries (often time disagreeing with each other on particular interpretations) which try to explain each casted hexagram in their own way.
Getting in-depth understanding of what your I-Ching casting tries to tell you always requires a lot of inner reflection (meditation, if you wish) from yourself (diviner). This is the main reason why I am gradually drifting away from using commentaries in I-Ching, interpretations to more structural analysis of hexagrams and their inter-relationships, although there are many very solid quality commentary texts which deserve respect and attention.
6. Why humans (still) have advantages over AI?
ChatGPT doesn't create anything new on its own - it “parasites” on human-generated knowledge. Can it generate knowledge by itself and for itself?
My answer is NO. Humans produce their knowledge about the world as a result of their social and practical activity where they work together trying to achieve something important for them, going thru unknown. This is the main source and a driving-force of knowledge. Machines, until they become full-blown human-alike humanoids will always lag behind humans because they have no purpose and no reason for improvements.
Let me know your thoughts on what AI & ML can do in I-Ching.