Of course its magic. You know, the forbidden black magic that burns part if your soul to cast and is a monkey's paw that turns everything it touches worse by design.
It's built from a body of every conversation anyone has ever had online! It's able to produce convincingly conversational sentences because that's what it's built out of! There is no magic! It has not learned how to talk! It is a black box of conversational sentences and that's what falls out of it!
“I’ve got a great idea, guys: let’s make Gattica combined with Starship Troopers a reality, but with the stupidest, most craven people of all time managing the most powerful government to ever exist.”
You can embrace randomness and stochastic processes without biting on other people's work. John Cage used to compose using the I Ching or incorporating random elements into his work; music dice are a thing.
My 2 cents:
GenAI is fine but not the way it's currently used. By stealing data from people without consent and compensation
People still think it's random but with the same prompt and seed you obtain the same result, something that won't happen with people
It's a glorified chat bot
I had very similar reactions to a patron the told me libraries would be museums and I’d be out of a job in three years because of AI. But I told him that it was pure, straight up sh*t. In those exact words.
A plagiarism algorithm designed by* and for* incels to destroy Earth's ecosystem for the low low payout of a sloppy image of an anime girl with three and a half tits and 37 fingers.
👏👏👏
Stochastic methods don't require draining lakes, consuming vast amounts of power, or stealing all the artistic work in the history of humanity. Just roll some dice you lazy fucks.
I'm wondering if some people are amazed by it because they never saw just random generation. They don't know we can just use a noise texture or a Musgrave texture or a Voronoi texture to create amazing looking things without using the plagiarism machine.
And I think cause they don't understand that we program in "randomness". Random number generators aren't perfectly random, for example, but the average person will never know this.
Someone told me that they'd rather ask ChatGPT than 'some random person on the internet'. They said this right after lamenting that 'traditional knowledge is being lost'.
The debate was whether talking to people online who care about the subject your interested in or just asking ChatGPT will yield better results. I think their 'results' meant 'answers' and my 'results' meant 'a dialogue between multiple people that arrives on answers'.
Fine I'll be the dissenting voice so everyone doesnt circlejerk themselves to death on anti intellectualism. Neural networks are just a tool. They can be used for evil, but so can all tools. Math and language as unbelievably good metaphors for the world are the true magic behind generative AI.
The Tarot you use was stolen from India by a British imperialist and rewritten to hide it's history, thus depriving it of meaningful metaphors and any real magic or connection to the world. The Ryder tarot is just an evil toy based on deep principles of true magic, same as generative AI.
Math and language are the closest things to real magic humans have ever created. The fact that language can encode so much information, not just in words but in it's very structure, and that a billion vector transforms can recreate that information emergently is fascinating and beautiful
Math and language are deeply tied to both our physical world and our experience as humans. Stories have always been known to posess magic. What LLMs tell us is that these tools ancient humans discovered hold magic powers we still don't understand.
AI chatbots are a joke, but it's foolish not to consider what they mean for all studies of emergent understanding and complex systems, including divination. I think one of the lessons is that we're not thinking big enough. One card cant tell the future, but enough small vector shifts can change it.
We need to look at the relationships between things to understand the system. Things are not always as they seem, and context is everything. The matrices that make a sentence when cast in the framework of an LLM are meaningless in another context.
this isn't a strict definition but as far as i use the term when i say "random" i mean "a computer has a relatively equal chance of picking anything from this array" but with "arbitrary" it's more a human or system *estimating* what they *expect* to be random, so the results cluster differently
i say a computer because i make bots that are mediated through computers but a dice or shuffled deck are also both random enough for my purposes. arbitrariness is, to me, about not being able to predict a result, but that's sort of because the result isn't something that matters, i think?
i spent YEARS on the beauty of random juxtaposition as a method for laughing at my own jokes while severely undertreated for my mental illnesses and this shit is GARBAGE and people thinking they are the same is OFFENSIVE
I want to add that I really love the person who said this to me! They are very smart and ethically grounded! The vast majority of normies just really don't understand the horrors or inner workings of GenAI!!!!
Every person has a corpus of text in their names, and now you don't even need an estranged brother to point out "eat your cake and have it too" if you publish something anonymously.
A friend of mine works in the stroke ward at a big hospital and she was telling me that their note-taking software has a ChatGPT module which summarizes the diagnosis and care instructions in easy-to-understand language for the patient and the way I physically *recoiled*.
The way consumer-facing AI is being advertised makes it look so stupid, silly, and frivolous that I don't think a lot of people are capable of seeing it as destructive and evil.
I have long thought that delivering the content of gaming tables in a narrative form to riff on is maybe one of the only creative uses for a LLM that makes sense to me, but I still haven't seen an application that feels different from just rolling dice.
A prompt window that could provide you with the output of multiple related rolls into something ready for gameplay would be an interesting use of a database, but it's also not generative AI, lol
It would take actual effort and thoughtful play testing and the people behind it having some ethics to make something that feels different let alone better than just referencing the tables, I agree.
Human beings are randomness collated into something tangible and we've been here much MUCH longer, did it with meat & fire, and are actually self-aware. Give US the resources and support being thrown at Venture Capitalism's Leech-o-tron 5000!
I wrote an article on my blog explaining why AI is a terrible idea for anyone trying to become a writer. Basically, it doesn't actually teach you anything and degrades any skills you have. https://wp.me/pgcidV-14x
Comments
Lol, stealing this for the next time someone praises the plagiarism machine.
GenAI is fine but not the way it's currently used. By stealing data from people without consent and compensation
People still think it's random but with the same prompt and seed you obtain the same result, something that won't happen with people
It's a glorified chat bot
A proper job whose surplus value creates both insight and sausages, and doesn't boil the seas dry.
Don't try to make it seem special or fun.
“Capitalism leads to innovation” is only true in entertainment.
Stochastic methods don't require draining lakes, consuming vast amounts of power, or stealing all the artistic work in the history of humanity. Just roll some dice you lazy fucks.
Or if I should be doing physical therapy,
Or when i'm lonely or need to speak on something I can't talk to another person about
We want generative AI in engineering, medicine, and even therapy
Also related:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUrOxh_0leE&t=3346s
It's pattern recognition and profiling of texts.
Every person has a corpus of text in their names, and now you don't even need an estranged brother to point out "eat your cake and have it too" if you publish something anonymously.
AI is never more interesting than that. It's lazy ugly and uninspiring.
Every technology in existence relies upon, and is the product of, a vast web of credited and uncredited labor and innovation.
And it all uses fossil fuels.
People have said this about multiple technologies and history has never validated that perspective. 😮💨
Good article btw 👍❤️