I look at previous generations of “AI” and see where this generation of “AI” is going. (Hint: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkgHapnwBs4)

The middle ground would be for companies to accept responsibility as members of the society they’re in and provide support for the people they’ve displaced. For them to recognize that the '80s shibboleth of “maximum return to the investor” is a sociopath’s creed.

I’ve come to a rather bleak conclusion: Most people can’t distinguish between shit art and good art.

I mean I’ve kind of suspected this all along given what music is popular vs. what music is good, but when I hear what Udio users call their “bangers” I had it confirmed.

Most people have a tin ear. I suspect the same applies to visual and written arts: not just no taste, not even able to understand what taste, as a sense, even is.

I have friends that openly admit they’d rather use AI to generate “art” and then call people who are upset by this luddites, whiny and butt-hurt that AI “does it better”

Anybody who thinks AI does art “better” is someone whose opinions in all matters, big or small, can be safely dismissed.

I struggle to understand why everyone is going along with it.

1. It seems cheaper. (corporate world)
2. There’s a certain amount of jealousy that the “untalented” (by their own estimation) have against the “talented” (again by their own estimation). (non-corporate world)

Basically hiring someone to do creative stuff is “too expensive” and it seems cheaper to just push slop out. (When, not if, it fails, of course the decision to use slop is not ever accepted as the reason for the failure…)

And for the second group, it turns out being “creative” is REALLY GOD-DAMNED HARD WORK. They don’t want to put in work to create art. They want to type in a few words and get something that kinda/sorta does what they want.

They’ll literally paste my assignment into ChatGPT and paste ChatGPT’s response back to me.

I solved a similar problem when teaching EFL (students just pasting assignments written in Chinese into a translator) by making them read select paragraphs out loud to me. You can rapidly spot the people who have no idea what the words they’re reading mean (or in my case are even pronounced on top of that!) and …

Well, cheating gets you 0.

These tools can easily be injected with biases like [Grok’s unprompted white supremacist ramblings] (and much more subtly too) to turn them into a giant propaganda machine.

It’s fortunate that Kaptain Ketamine had his little binge of his favourite drug and made it SO OBVIOUS. There’s subtle biases all over degenerative AI. Like there was a phase when trying out the “art” creators where I couldn’t get any of them to portray someone writing with their left hand. (I don’t know if they still have a problem with that; I got bored with AI “art” once I saw its limitations.) And if the word “thug” was in the prompt it was about 80% chance of being a black guy. Or if the word “professional” was in the prompt it was about 80% chance of being a white guy. EXCEPT if “marketing” was added (as in “marketing professional”). Then for some reason it was almost always an Asian woman.

Or we can look at Perplexity, supposedly driven by not only its model, but incorporation of search results into the prompt. Ask it a question about any big techbrodude AI and its first responses will be positive and singing the praises of the AI renaissance. If you push (not even very hard) you can start getting it to confess to the flaws of LLMs, diffusion models, etc. and to the flaws of the corporate manoeuvring around pushing AI into everything, but the FIRST response (and the one people most likely stop reading after) is always pushing the glory of the AI revolution.

(Kind of like Chinese propaganda, really. You can get Party officials to admit to errors of judgment and outright vile acts of the past in conversation, but their first answer is always the glory of the Party!)

Oh, and then let’s look at what’s on the Internet where most of the data gets sucked up from. There’s probably about three orders of magnitude more text about Sonic the Hedgehog in your average LLM’s model than there is about, oh, I don’t know, off the top of my head, Daoism, literally the most influential philosophical school of the world’s most populous country! Hell, there’s probably more information about Mario and Luigi from Nintendo than there is about the Bible, arguably the most widespread and influential book around the world!

I wonder how that skews the bias…?

When most people talk about “hating AI” they’re talking the AI that is this wave before the next winter: (de)generative AI (whether based on LLM or diffusion or whatever ever other tripe drives things like GPT, DALL-E, Jukebox, etc.).

And yes, I hate AI in that sense, in that it is a dead end that is currently burning up the planet to produce subpar everything (words, images, music) while threatening the very foundation of cultural knowledge with obliteration.

AI in a broader sense, I don’t hate. Even the earlier over-hyped-before-wintered AI technologies have found niche applications where they’re useful, and once the grifters leave the (de)generative AI field we may find some use cases for AI there as well. (I think LLMs have a future, for example, in the field of translation: I’ve been experimenting with that domain and once the techbrodude know-it-all personality is excised from the LLMs and the phrase “I don’t know” is actually incorporated properly I think it could be very valuable there. You still have to look out for hallucinations, though.)

But (de)generative AI in general is overhyped shit. And it’s overhyped shit that cannot be meaningfully improved (indeed latter-day models turn out to be worse than earlier ones: ChatGPT4’s suite is more prone to hallucination, for example, than ChatGPT3.5). So a whole lot of people are getting pressured, a whole lot of lives are being ruined, a whole lot of misinformation and active disinformation is being spewed by them … but hey, at least we can have shit writing, shit art, and shit music!

I know A.I might be used for replacing jobs, but that has happened many times before, and it is mostly a positive move forward like with the internet.

This is an excuse used many times but it doesn’t stand to inspection. Let’s go with robots making cars. When the auto industry had massive layoffs in the '80s the median age for factory workers assembling cars was about the early '30s. What proportion of people in their '30s make any kind of transition to stable, well-paid careers when they’re rendered redundant? (Hint: not very many.) An entire generation of the rust belt, in effect, because of automation, were shoved into poverty THAT WE STILL SEE TO THIS DAY. And that’s one sector. Automation shit-canned a whole lot of sectors and the reverberations of that have echoed throughout my entire life. (Born in the '60s.)

The only “positive move forward” seen by these traumatically devastating technologies released willy-nilly into society with no mitigation plan is that rich fuckers get richer. Because, you know, Sam Altman needs more cash and not a punch to his oh-so-punchable face.

The followup is worse.

They just published an insert from Hearst. The source of the fake list was HEARST.

Legacy media is officially dead.

The medium doesn’t matter. The behaviour does.

There’s nothing magical about “organic” either. That just means it’s based on carbon.

Way to miss the point.

The brain is a physical system. If it is matter it can be replicated, as is demonstrated by the human brain being replicated daily a mind-boggling number of times. There is absolutely nothing in principle preventing human beings at some point from replicating one, or one that functions in a similar way, at some point in the distant future.

There’s just nothing even close to that now, and never will be while capitalism fucks everything up by turning everything they have into grifts that suck up all resources for no overall gain.

The problem with Searle’s Chinese Room is that he’s basically describing how the brain works. NOWHERE in the brain is there a cell (or even a group of cells) that defines “Chinese Language”. The “Chinese Language” encoding is spread out over an absolutely mind-numbing collection of cells and connections that individually each fire off on some (relatively) simple rules. No individual cell “knows” Chinese. They “know” voltage levels, chemical concentrations, and when to fire along which connection based on these.

So if we take Searle at face value … we don’t think either.

This is so obviously untrue that it’s actually amazing to see someone say it.

It’s replicated each time there’s a child made.

What, precisely, do you think a brain is?

The word “we” is doing heavy lifting there.

Like hundreds of millions of people use it every day ??

[citation needed]

It’s adorable that you think the USA has “oversight” over its megacorporations.

…

I don’t even know where to begin to unpack this.

I guess I’ll start with the “nefarious shit”. Nefarious shit like taking periodic snapshots of your screen (against your will) to feed an AI? That kind of nefarious shit?

The only problem there is that you then have Linux running which is one of the most actively user-hostile things you can run.

And this is in a world where every major software vendor is turning their software against you. It’s still less hostile a user experience than Linux.

I trust Huawei a fuckton more than I’d trust Google or Apple or Microsoft or …

And by the time I’m in the market for another phone/PC it won’t be just Huawei making HarmonyOS phones/PCs.