The way we value information has changed so much in my lifetime that it is very hard to parse it out. The internet seemed like it was gonna be a helpful tool for sharing things. It might become that in time but there are generations who grew up believing that if they’ve read something, it has weight. Back then people had to go to a lot of work and do a lot of thinking to come up with a book, and then it had to be decent to get it placed in such a way that you could find it. So we got conditioned to put value in the things we could find that were written down.
Now you’ve got people who have … read some articles online and they are honestly thinking they can go toe to toe with people who have been actual qualified scientists for decades. Delusions like flat earth and the Icke stuff have fed themselves and grown fat. Right now the fundamentalist Christians are going hard on the moon landing stuff because it looks like there’s gonna be another landing and they need to line up their bullshit early because they’ve decided that science disproves religion. I personally disagree with that anyway, but these people are way too obedient to start thinking cosmically. They just want to cling onto something.
And then this latest scourge of rational thinking is bubbling up all over the place and oh lord I detest it.
It is a misnomer to call it AI. Because it oversells what it can do. It is merely a vast aggregation tool, it can only regurgitate what it has eaten. But it can eat a lot, it has eaten a lot, and idiots like me are putting stuff up every day that it can eat as well.
It’s a restaurant where they serve leftovers and call them the Daily Specials.
There can be nothing new. No new thought. No creativity. It has a hard cap on innovation that can never be broken. It will atrophy us and make us smaller and smaller and smaller.
It is in the interests of the people who sell it for the capacity of this tool to be misrepresented up. To sell the idea it will break ground.
You can use it to labour save. Like a computer. Thoughtless donkey work might be speeded up, but forever beware of inaccuracy or hallucination.
The narrative being pushed is that if you don’t get behind it you will be left behind. And jobs are going because of that trust. But every human you cut and replace is going to make your output more and more bland.
On balance, is social media a good thing, or a bad thing? I’m asking those of you who were here before it was here. I think I know what I think about it. We were better without it. This will be the same. We aren’t evolving quickly enough to evolve with these fast communication things we have made. But they aren’t good enough for us to rely on like we do, like we learnt to do with books. Social media is totally manipulated now, it’s just a swamp. AI is just blowing smoke up your arse while regurgitating stuff that was crap when it was eaten.
This Walking Dead Game I’m playing has a spin-off series that revolves around a well known character in the TV series. It is written by humans but clearly the B team. The main series is brilliant and I care about all my decisions. That’s good writing. The spin-off I don’t give a fuck. It is generic, doing all the things that are supposed to make me care, but I don’t give two hoots about it and as a result my decisions have been pretty arbitrary and likely many more made up people are dead than need to be. And that’s just bad writing by humans. If an LLM had done it – and that is all these things are, all they can be – I would likely have not worked my way through it at all.
I can’t be bothered with all those slop articles every day everywhere that people are fobbing off as theirs. “It understands my voice!” No it doesn’t. You’re just lazy. And why so much of this ordinary stuff? “Here’s a rude sign someone put on my car,” “We put a gopro on a rabbit,” and it’s AI. It’s ridiculous.
Someone I respect sent me a load of dross to learn one time. I didn’t learn it cos it was basically just atrocious and lots of it. I went into the shoot saying: “Did you get hammered and write that script over the course of a long night?”. In my imagination they had been caning it, probably on substances. That was how much sense it made.
“No. It was chat GPT.”
“I’m glad I didn’t learn it. Let’s improv on the themes.”
AlBarclay 