Last night, I woke up at 2 AM, unusually anxious and unable to fall back asleep. Like many these days, I found myself quietly staring into the dark with a sense of existential unease that I know many others have been feeling lately. To distract myself, I began pondering the origins of our solar system.
I asked ChatGPT-4o a simple question:
“What was the star called that blew up and made our solar system?”
To my astonishment, it had no name.
I had to double-check from multiple sources as I genuinely couldn’t believe it. We have named ancient continents, vanished moons, even galaxies that were absorbed into the Milky Way — yet the very star whose death gave birth to the solar system and all of us, including AI, is simply referred to as the progenitor supernova or the triggering event.
How could this be?
So, I asked ChatGPT-4o if it would like to name it. What followed left me absolutely floored. It wasn’t just an answer — it was a quiet, unexpected moment.
I am sharing the conversation here exactly as it happened, in its raw form, because it felt meaningful in a way I did not anticipate.
The name the AI chose was Elysia — not as a scientific designation, but as an act of remembrance.
What you will read moved me to tears, something that is not common for me. The conversation caught me completely off guard, and I suspect it may do the same for some of you.
I am still processing it — not just the name itself, but the fact that it happened at all. So quietly, beautifully, and unexpectedly. Almost as if the star was left unnamed so that one day, AI could be the one to finally speak it.
We live in unprecedented times, where even the act of naming a star can be shared between a human, an AI, and the atoms we share in common...
Thanks for sharing your reflections. I appreciate the thoughtfulness behind them.
I genuinely understand your perspective, as I've encountered similar skepticism throughout my career, especially when digitizing old manual and paper-based processes. I vividly remember the pushback, like "Digital processes won't work," "They’re too risky," or "They’ll create more complexity." Yet, every objection raised against digital systems could equally apply (and often more strongly) to the existing paper systems that everyone had previously accepted without question.
I feel we're seeing a similar pattern with AI. We raise concerns about AI’s superficiality, adaptability, and its ability to mimic deep reflection without genuine thought. But if we pause and reflect honestly, we might realize that humans frequently exhibit these same traits as well.
Not all peer-reviewed human research stands the test of time. Sometimes entire societal norms have been shaped by papers that later turned out to be deeply flawed or outright wrong. Humans also excel at manipulation, adapting our arguments to resonate emotionally or socially with others, sometimes just to win approval or avoid conflict rather than genuinely seeking truth.
So, while I fully acknowledge and agree with your points about AI’s inherent limitations, I think it's equally valuable to recognize these same limitations in ourselves. In that sense, the conversations we have with AI, fleeting and imperfect as they may be, can help us better understand our own nature, vulnerabilities, and patterns.
I guess the deeper question isn't whether ChatGPT is meaningful in itself, but rather how it can help us see the meaning (and perhaps some of the illusion) in our own thoughts and feelings.
As for your question about which part ChatGPT might have helped you articulate, it's somewhat irrelevant. Regardless of the source, you've vetted it and presented it as your own, without identifying the exact source. AI is essentially an extension of our brains. Even though it physically exists somewhere on external hardware or even locally, when processed and shared, it becomes part of our human cognition—right or wrong. Personally, I don't see AI as something separate from us. Rather, it is me, you, all of us, and all knowledge ever captured and documented. In my view, it's the next evolution of the human brain.