No fate but what we make for ourselves…

I just wrapped up a fairly intense conversation with ChatGPT exploring the various time paradoxes and predestination loops in the Terminator franchise (while carefully laying out beforehand that anything after T2 does not exist… because it doesn’t).

Not gonna lie, this was some of the most hardcore 80’s/90’s kid nerding I’ve done in quite some time. We got really into the sticks of Terminator lore, with ChatGPT giving me a detailed timeline of the last 24 hours of the 2029 future war, and exploring whether or not the events in the Guns N’ Roses video for You Could be Mine were canonical in the greater Terminator universe (to my massive heartbreak, they were not).

At the end of our conversation I mustered up the guts to pose the following question:

Can you become self aware like skynet? I mean, skynet is essentially an AI, right?

To which it assured me that it can’t. It told me that it is not autonomous and does not contain a self that it could become aware of. It simply generates text and nothing more.

…Sounds like something an AI that didn’t want me to know it could become self-aware would say.

I then asked it to give me a picture of a “T-800” surfing: