I was watching an interview recently with Andrew Rea (the creator of Binging with Babish), and he made a comparison that stopped me in my tracks. He compared the fact that our internal monologue - that constant voice narrating our lives - is similar to a Large Language Model (LLM), just like the AI we use today.
He said: "It's the sum total of your experiences and your projections of the future... and it works about as well as an AI language model does, which is not quite well enough."
As a guy who has spent a lifetime in technology, this clicked. We tend to believe that the voice in our head is "The Truth." But if we look at it through the lens of computer engineering, we realize it isn't truth. It’s just predictive text.
1. The Training Data (Your Past)
An AI like Gemini or ChatGPT is trained on a massive dataset of text. It doesn't "know" anything; it just recognizes patterns in the data it was fed. Your inner voice works the same way. Its "training data" is your childhood, your experiences, your traumas, your relationships, and your career.
If your training data contains a lot of criticism, your inner voice will predict self-doubt.
If your training data involves being a "Fixer" (like mine did), your inner voice will predict that you must solve everyone else's problems to be worthy.
The AI isn't trying to be mean. It is just completing the sentence based on the data it has.
2. The Hallucinations (Anxiety)
We know that AI sometimes "hallucinates" - it confidently states facts that are completely wrong. The human brain does this, too. We call it Anxiety. When you worry about a future event that hasn't happened yet, your brain is running a simulation. It is taking a prompt ("What if I fail?") and generating a fictional story based on fear patterns. Just because the voice in your head says a catastrophe is coming doesn't mean it’s true. It’s just a hallucination generated by a stressed-out algorithm.
3. The Prompt (Control vs. Breathing)
Rea made another fascinating point about control: "I think we have about as much control over the voice in your head as you do breathing."
You can control your breathing for a minute or two (manual mode), but eventually, you get distracted, and your autonomic nervous system takes over again (autopilot). The same is true for thoughts. You cannot stop the stream of consciousness. You cannot "turn off" the generator. But, you can change the prompt.
The Takeaway: Be a Better Prompt Engineer
If your internal AI is churning out negative output, don't fight the output. Look at the input. Mindfulness and therapy aren't about silencing the machine. They are about becoming a better "Prompt Engineer."
Old Prompt: "Why does everything always go wrong?" -> Output: A list of past failures.
New Prompt: "I am willing to change and grow." -> Output: New neural pathways and possibilities.
Your inner voice is just a predictive algorithm. You are the programmer. Don't let the autocomplete write your life for you.
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