It’s nice to just sink into Shakespeare awhile. He wrote complicated and nuanced things about the human condition. He invented bits of language, he thought about things and then put them into words. He reworked existing works but with a strong eye to putting his own stamp on it. He was a great eye, quite rightly thought of as one of the all time greatest. And what he did is really getting into sharp relief now.
We all know by now how incredibly dumb the vast majority of people on his planet are. We no longer have to struggle to survive, we have no natural predators, we don’t need to be in any way clever to even get basic sustenance, to survive in general. And the majority of people are puddings. If all the infrastructure was pulled for a week, most of us would be dead. No water for starters, so people would try and drink the sea or tidal rivers after they’d killed each other grabbing bottles from supermarkets. But more of them wouldn’t even think of it until too late and would die wearing their stolen trainers.
Now these Large Language Models are helping us do the thinking and it will make even the clever people a bit dumber. There’ll be an interim generation of recent students who didn’t learn anything cos they could pass off LLM essays as their own. By now the professors are all going to be savvy about it so people will be reluctantly learning again, but it does feel as if, generally, if people could push a button that meant they never had to think or care about anything again, lots of people would just push it.
I don’t think LLMs are going to do what the people selling them say they will do. But I have started to see so much content on social media that is made by them. I’m looking out for them but they’re in busy l video form now too. Rabbits on a trampoline. I sniffed that out just as I know rabbits aren’t like crows – they looked too conscious of the play aspect. But… people ask LLMs to make these things and with a pretty basic prompt you can start to generate stuff that will pass as real at a cursory glance. It pushes all of our critical thinking muscles into overdrive, particularly if the thing we are watching plays to our bias. “Yay I like animals having fun, this must be real.” The possibilities for manipulation are off the scale, not just because people can make convincing fake videos but because people in compromising real videos can just say they’re AI and take no responsibility.
The idea that we live in a “post truth” world really rings now. Now we can have convincing fakes appeal to our biases, it is very nearly at the stage where we can’t pick the fakes from the real ones at all. It’s too late to regulate, so we are gonna have to just stop relying on anything we see that doesn’t come from a creditable source, but then the sources! All the papers in this country carry heavy bias. They can’t be trusted to bring us the truth. Reuters etc are supposed to be immune to bias, but they still have a perspective, they still have an editor. Pages like this are entirely biased. We are close to just honestly not knowing what the fuck is actually happening anywhere unless we can see it with our own eyes. It’s not a happy place to be…
The bullshit generators often have short memories. A few weeks ago I got served a load of stuff about an alien spaceship on a collision course with earth that is gonna arrive in November. November will come and go, no alien spaceship, but there’ll be stuff predicted for March. The amount of times I’ve been given dates for things that are going to happen… They never do. Cos you can’t predict the future, kids, and I tell you that as a tarot enthusiast.
I don’t even know why I bother going on social media anymore. Twitter was fun for a while, now it’s a Gutter. And more and more of these AI slop videos and stories, I don’t mind the ones that announce themselves – they’re like shit cartoons. But I detest the ones trying to pass themselves off as true. Keanu Reeves and Elon Musk arguing. Celebrities doing nice things. Celebrities doing nasty things. Articles that would be irrelevant noise anyway but made all the worse by being inventions. But practice I guess for “this is the democrat candidate punching a baby on CCTV” “here’s Jeremy Corbyn kissing a picture of Hitler with tongues”. Elections are gonna be an absolute shit show with this tech. You don’t need the truth to damage a reputation. You just need an idea.
AlBarclay 