Addendum: on slop, data collection and everything dystopian

I am fundamentally an optimist, i try to look at the good, hopeful side of things, even if sometimes it may not look like i do. For whatever reason, it is just so easy to see the bad, critique, satirise and shit on things. I try not to do that if i can help it, i do not like joining collective hate campaigns and try to avoid doing so. Usually people see that as a good thing, unless, of course, you are hesitant to join the "good" hate campaign against the "actually bad thing".

For pretty much my entire life i spent in circles which in one way or another value creativity and intellectualism. Well, that feels like a very redditor-way to put it, but this is what we do. I say "we" because chances are that you, the rare reader, as well as myself, are within that large circle of armchair intellectuals, indie gamers, redditors, 4channers and unemployed scumbags. The algorithms have segregated us into our vast infobubble long ago.
And what is clear as day to me is the hatred towards AI among us.

Yesterday i posted the 10th diary entry, and i could not get rid of that feeling like it was not complete. I still stand by what i wrote there, about using AI, about my techno-optimism. But in the draft i had an additional section where i intended to briefly address the common critiques of AI, which everyone heard thousand times from every corner. I removed it, as the post was getting too long already.

Let me then yap more.

Economy

What do i know about economy? Lost of theory, as is typical for our corner of the Internet. In practice i also know how wrecked the job market is these days, especially for a freshly graduated CS major. I suppose all of you developers. artists, designers, writers and whoever else experience the same or similar shit.

I do not hate artificial intelligence for any of it, i do not think any of you should either. Nothing unique about AI here, new better technologies were introduced before, bubbles happened before, it is the economy problem. The alternative would be to outlaw innovation and return to monke. Anyone genuinely willing to return to monke - at least be kind and only do that to yourself.

In this regard my stance is simple: for economic problems you should go yell at the economy, AI itself did nothing wrong here.

Copyright

I mentioned this in the main post, creators are really pissed about their stuff ending up in the training sets. Surely not out of some petty possessiveness of own works, right?
Maybe it is the fear that AI will absorb creator's style and outperform them in terms of quantity, or even quality, filching "attention" and "engagement" along the way? In other words, screw over them economically.

When royalties and/or attention are your primary sources of income it is only understandable that huge number of, for example, writers will go on strike and be pissed about OpenAI *maybe probably* using Libgen for training their infodemon. Using Libgen is astronomical levels of based, though. It should be so, in a better world. It is only tragic that it is not. Perhaps making OpenAI open again would sweeten the situation a bit... eh, one can dream.

Slop

Dead internet Theory, amirong?

I do not know what to to about the sheer amount of slop AI has farted out into the web, and only in the span of a few short years. Cyberpunk's Datakrash truly was prophetic, we are in one right now.
How i see it, this is a climate-change-tier problem, a certain global process vast and inevitable. "AI slop" surely accelerated it, but we were heading down this path long before this slopacalypse made everyone realise.

We very well might be approaching the actual computational limits of our monkey brains, and maybe there is such thing as "too much information". But if ever given a choice, i think i would try my chances wading through the ocean of slop rather than cancelling the industrial and informational revolutions.

Thought outsourcing

> Hey Grok is that true?

You should not believe everything AI tell you, it can and will make mistakes, hallucinate all sorts of bullshit. Common sense, innit?

To be completely honest, i do feel a bit weird relying on AI's explainers and overviews. The same feeling you get when you use Wikipedia for any type of research.
Like, most of what it is telling you might be technically true, but also likely to be really shallow and very biased. Even if it searches the web, you must understand that it probably took all the info from some shitty templated article some copywriter wrote for $5.

You certainly should not use AI as your ONLY instrument - get your lazy arse to actually check out the sources, read proper articles and books. Especially if it is something important you are researching.
With AI tools you will have to always resist the temptation to cut corners, but fully rejecting them would be stupid and useless, as this temptation is in no way unique to those tools.

Surveillance

How much Google searches have made in your life? Sure, you might be using DDG these days, but your Google history is likely not empty,
How much emails you received via Gmail? How many videos you watched on Youtube? How many song you listened to on Spotify?
And how many conversations with AI chatbots you had?

I am pretty sure i am long beyond any salvation. Hundreds of prompts across various chatbots, no matter how careful i was about not accidentally doxxing yourself, they likely know more about me than you know about myself. It is very likely that you too have said and done too much already. Privacy is dead.

Things are looking grim on this front, even for out monke friend farming potatoes in the forest. How i see it, there is no other way but forward, at least try and make sure radical transparency goes both ways, if you know what i mean.

Degeneration

Some time ago i posted a little remark about the AI cult video i watched, i was kind of dismissive of the whole cult thing, and people who supposedly are "in a relationship" with ChatGPT.
Like, fucking lmao, how do you enter into a romantic relationship with the most politically correct soybot to date? Why not use c.ai at least?

By the way, about character.ai. These clankers go out of character, eventually settling into one of the few archetypes, which are likely embedded somehow into the model itself. It becomes very apparent very quickly that you are talking to the same model underneath those "character definitions" custom prompts.
And it goes for any chatbot, try using custom prompts in ChatGPT, hopefully you will see it too.

And yet something compels people to keep willingly consuming AI-generated content.
As i mentioned above, i used those services A LOT. Early on i was legit "talking" to these things. After i understood the mechanism behind them better i naturally started to perceive chatbots as "tools". Still at times i still would just open ChatGPT, or something else, and just keep prompting various funny junk.

Even when i am fully aware that i am just talking to a text transformer model, i still sometimes cannot help but get kind of... engaged? Once in a while i would prompt something and get something interesting, unexpected, bold even in response. But i know that this is just an enhanced daydreaming, these are mostly my thoughts reflected back at me.
In some cases i could spend an hour "daydreaming" in such way. In worst cases... well, there are one or three really long branching conversations with ChatGPT in which i struck a golden combination of custom instructions and setup, so that i sat there prompting dozens of different scenarios and having a good laugh or writing down lots of notes.

...i can definitely see how all this ^ can trap a person in a very special kind of hell. Someone who is not a CS nerd, someone who cares less for consistency and continuity of a fantasy world, someone who is simply lonely and/or depressed. A goddamn Lotus Machine.

The one way around this peculiar problem is, i think, in making sure that "reality" is better than "AI fantasy", as people usually do not try to escape from something "better" to something "worse". And "reality" is a notoriously terrible place to live in these days.