I can see tante’s point. Besides AI datacenters being used for surveillance tech, I can also see LLM tech itself used nefariously post-bubble. Maybe maintaining an up-to-date LLM as a product is not viable, but a custom-trained model to snipe public online discourse around a crucial election could remain affordable for a wealthy fascist.
On the bright side, I am hoping for a brief period of powerful yet affordable gaming PCs thanks to retrofitted, slightly singed Blackwells.
Didn’t come up with that simile, but it might fit:
It’s like a fleshed out version of a 12 year old thinking “everything would be great if I was in charge, because I’m smart and people are dumb”
Something about people who are too impressed with their own smarts and swap pet theories that make them feel smart.
Honestly the most surprising part was when she went “of course we know fanfiction can be used for cult indoctrination, ever since that other cult did it”
I skipped that episode because it seemed boring, but now I might come back to it.
be me, super genius autodidact
be deeply moved by the prospect of defeating death with technology, write some sick prose about it because am eloquent as fuck
proceed to punt this goal decades or centuries by helping to justify a tech bubble which consumes tons of R&D resources for no apparent benefit and will bind further resources in the future to adapt to an aggravated climate crisis, and also inspiring a slew of technofascists too dumb to tell the difference between tech that benefits mankind and tech that exploits and oppresses
mein face when
First I thought “Oh jeez, what a wall of text” but now you gave me my own thoughts that I want to share.
I don’t think callling genAI output “not art” is a very defendable statement. I believe art is ultimately a type of activity, and one that is very hard to draw a strict line around. If I find a cool piece of driftwood and frame it, did I do art? That’s kind of what that artist did when he picked his album cover.
But I also share your sentiment about “AI artists” pretending to work in a medium of which they understand 0% of the nuance. I think it makes more sense to call those people hacks instead of “not artists”, because that’s what you call people who use shallow, formulaic methods to dabble in a medium of which they are wholly incompetent.
And finally, AI as toolset does of course uniquely pander to hacks.
I always thought you could do interesting stuff with genAI, especiall when it goes into mangled, uncanny-valley territory. Though I can only think of examples for visual generators, like this album cover or the AI Pizza commercial.
The only text-based example that comes to mind is I forced a Bot to write this Book and that’s just a guy imitating LLM writing style. (Hillarious though!)
…pirating them at all instead of learning Inkscape & Krita.
Yes, deceitful corporations are truly a troubling new phenomenon, which brings them closer to the baseline for evil: democratic governments
High IQ politics hour over here.
archive: https://archive.is/4RT80