[Lucy Fleetwood]

Hi Paul

Thank you. I wonder if you could help my understanding in another way?

I found myself thinking about AI, how it can write a wealth of people’s words in a few seconds. Yesterday evening as I walked through the park I thought some more. And I realised my thinking wasn’t just a data download of words, but a fully embodied human experience. It’s never really just about the words, they are just tools for sharing something.

I walked under a sky lit up with apricot that cast a hushed but brilliant golden light on the bushes and wet earth. The birds were singing their way to bed. Two teenagers sat on a bench having a smoke, a dog rolled in the muddy grass and a dad was running his toddler home atop his shoulders.

This was an embodied human experience no machine can ever have or understand. We are different things.

As I left the park and the Victorian metal gate clanged behind me, I crossed the rain soaked road sparkling in the early evening sunlight. The apricot sky created pools of gold in the puddles that drew me in, and I thought about sharing this, and I wondered what was different in my sharing, to the latest AI words downloaded in a few seconds. And I realised. When I write warm words something happens in my heart.

If I walked in silence with a friend through hazy sunshine on a warm summers afternoon, words would not be needed. And so, I share warm words not as data, but through this heart that is embodied human, to other people’s. Simple silent slow beginnings. Where it will take us, cannot be predicted.

How do these thoughts fit in with it all?