General Discussion

Whatever else it is.

A lot of it has no utility either. It’s just promoted bullishly.

And a lot of it is downright distasteful. Like those AI mockups of people who have passed.

I thought this morning of how elleng is not with us anymore. Nothing would be creepier than a horrible AI company making mockups of In Memoriam DUers beloved by the community ..
Ewww…that would be so gross.

I would be impressed by an AI that was not built using stolen human output and ..well I’d have to think more about it. But it would be very different from the stuff we see. It’s not so much replacing real human labor (that’s the canard) as getting rid of jobs and services that are essential or useful for ones of no value whatsoever.

I too have no objection when I hear about AI that finds new protein structures or things humans cannot possibly do and which legitimately supplement human effort rather than shilling disgraceful things like the dead peopel thing (rereading this I realized I paraphrased Chuck Palahniuk’s Marla ..I bet that would be a legal argument those creeps would try. Humans themselves use art etc without attribution. No we really don’t. Try again. Lately I want to attribute any piece of writing to its sources when I can remember.
I am not wildly original but nor am I mindless.
I think about creeps way too much :eyes .

And yet that is totally the type of creepy “non-service” they shill and the type of legal argument they will use if a real pushback starts. A lot of what those industries shill makes no sense except in WallE world. I think it’s worse for artists and I totally back serious pushback rather than Google or Facebook approved pushback which would be neutered and tamed.

If they actually ever offered useful stuff I’d be shocked. I think we should distinguish between good AI and bad AI. And even good AI that steals human or animal learning by encroaching into spaces it had or has no business being in is outrageous when so much of earth is endangered and most humans are suffering.

AI should have built in politics to not suck and it can’t be outdated Asimov’s laws. If AI could parse genuine consent and target info in sane ways rather than in oligarch friendly ways, then you have closer to AI that represents the populace or wild spaces than an atrocious disgrace.

Anytime I have second thoughts it’s when I see how it’s all oligarch driven and think of how different it would be if the kinds of scientists I respect worked on it and it had a place in society in the best way not the obscenities we see. After all human intelligence is different when it is yours or mine versus Trump, Zuckerberg etc etc.

Yan LeCun is one AI scientist who made me less reflexively hate filled for the field and he would be a “radical leftist” in America whereas he is merely sane. His focus on common sense should be extended beyond stuff like not bumping into obstacles physically. They should have some comprehension of how humans think.
In this ott world how is finding sleazy and lame ways to repackage the status quo novel. If anything novelty lies in the parts of society Musk etc want to delete.

Present ai fawns because it seems trained on hostages (ie the modern employee who has no rights whatsoever often) because apparently anything else is unstable and violent etc.

At a time of stark and increasing inequality when people resent having to feel grateful for the smallest bits of relief, outlawing anger etc except when it sells viral videos and becomes “safe and profitable” yet again..that’s underestimating human intelligence when it doesn’t fit what’s convenient .

Recently I have started feeling how pointless anger is as much as agreeability when everything somehow gets tamed and goes back into the same safe for them (oligarchs and CEOs) but not for us model.

I myself have pretty scorched earth views about tech companies by now. I wish I could organize with people like some of you guys here or people like Yasha Levine to be part of some broader pushback without attacking scientists and doctors inadvertently, but definitely stopping this fraudulent scourge.

I think I was in the early wave of “life destroyed by AI”. But I am very wary of self-commodification or astroturf like that traffic snarling “artist” Google loves. An artist like Levine’s wife Evgenia I would trust, Simon Weckert not so much.

It’s also pretty much the “optimization problem” to use gross CS speak that DU discusses all the time in a way-electability balancing other stuff. That’s not how DU or grassroots movements work whatever internal squabbling is a hallmark of human groups. But a neoliberal or worse effective altruist prediction scheme would see it that way rather than as a collection of complicated humans each making assessments in ways that you can’t reduce to something as shallow as IBM’s Ocean score. That’s so unscientific and fluffy.