#AI TECHBROS WILL NEVER UNDERSTAND

[castielsprostate]

i hate you generative "ai", i hate you "ai" chat-bot that never understands a question and keeps you in a loop without connecting you to a representative, i hate you "ai" replacements for normal interactions and behavior, i hate you "ai" that's been made by techbros with the intent to make more money instead of actually helping people and systems that could benefit from the technology

[honeqq]

I think It would be funny if, even if Clifford isn’t a traditional scientist, he still ends up innovating. Like he makes a weird glaze he uses on his paintings that will cause someone’s computer to explode if they try and upload a picture of his work into an ai database. (Or take a picture without his consent in general, I feel like he would be very paranoid about people taking pictures of his work, you have to see it in person or special events ONLY. You gotta Appreciate it. The special events are for accessibility and are heavily monitored because techbro assholes like to send in people to scan his work illegally). He shatters the programming communities understanding of the universe every other Tuesday. He gets so fed up with ‘ai’ being a buzzword that he invents genuine artificial sentience ala sci fi tropes and unleashes it at a conference. Science and art are more connected than some people like to think, and Fords are nothing if not consistent in pulling a double middle finger to spite the world. -🦋

This is one of my friends suggestions , that he are this kind of Artist that really exploring every style and still trying to make it work, while I still think he need to make this piece Traditional cuz he need to prove he made it HIMSELF by sled recording every step. and YES he does get paranoid of his artwork get stolen or get photo so he never publish any in Social media . While he actually have a huge followers on social media of him posting of himself (he using his platform to spread awareness about AI at first but he get popular because his reaction to hate comments and ppl follow him cuz he just funny to mess up with)

[randomitemdrop]

you've posted a few ai generated images as items lately, and i'm wondering if that's intentional or not?

Short answer: no, it wasn't. Aside from a few I made when the generators first became publicly available and all the images were gooey messes, they've all been reader-submitted, although I'll admit I didn't catch the snail-boots. Personally I think AI image generators are a more nuanced situation than a lot of opinions I've seen on Tumblr, but given that they can be used so evilly, I'm steering away from them, if only to avoid the Wrath of the Disk Horse.

Long answer, and this is just my take, if you want to really get into it you'll have a much more interesting conversation with the people with devoted AI art blogs instead of me occasionally sharing things people submit:

There have been some major cases of unethical uses for it, but I think it's important to remember why AI image generators are such an issue; data scraping and regurgitating uncredited indie art is bad, but in the case of the snail-boots, it was just a fusion of one dataset of "product photos of boots" and another of "nature photos of snails", which I would say is not depriving anyone of credit or recognition for their work (MAYBE photographers, if you're a professional nature photographer or really attached to a picture you took of a snail one time?) I get the potential misuses of it, but when Photoshop made it easy to manipulate photos, the response was "hmm let's try and use this ethically" instead of "let's ban photo editing software". Like, I'd feel pretty unethical prompting it with "[character name] as illustrated by [Tumblr illustrator desperate for commissions]" or even "[character name] in DeviantArt style", but I'd have a hard time feeling bad for prompting with "product photo of a Transformer toy that turns into the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile". I know there's the question of "normalizing" the services but I think that overestimates how much the techbros running these things care about how everyday consumers use their free products, preferring to put their effort towards convincing companies to hire them to generate images for them, and in that case they respond way better to "here are some ways to change your product so that I would be willing to use it" than to "I will never use your product". For example here's one I just made of "the holy relic department at Big Lots", fusing corporate retail photos and museum storage rooms.

TL/DR: on the one hand I understand the hate that AI gets and it's not something I'm planning on using for any of my creative projects, but on the other hand I think it's overly simplistic to say it's inherently bad and should never be used ever. On the third hand, I really hate participating in arguments over complex ethical philosophy, so I'm just gonna steer clear entirely.

[lastoneout]

I was too high last night to formulate this into proper words but something plagiarists(and by extension AI techbros) don't get about people who make things out of a love for that thing is that they are, consciously or not, doing it because they enjoy the process itself. Yes, it is easier to have a machine make a mug or painting or essay for you, or to steal someone else's, but again, people who actually like making stuff don't want someone else to do it for us because you have fully removed the thing we enjoy: the process of making a thing.

Like sure it would be nice to have a finished Gundam model or a trainset, but people who build gunpla kits and trainsets don't WANT someone else to do it for them, they want to do it. The sculptor or painter doesn't want a machine to just give them finished works of art, they want to MAKE that art themselves. The home gardner can just buy fresh food at the store, the tailor or knitter can buy a finished shirt or sweater whenever they want, but they don't because the act of gardening and sewing and knitting itself is what they enjoy.

Plagarists and AI techbros don't get that because they do not enjoy these processes. They enjoy making money and having social clout, and so they are perfectly happy stealing and automating things so that they don't have to do an ounce of real work while still getting all of the benefits of having created something. It really is all about finding the fastest and easiest way to get someone to hand you money or elect you god-king of the internet.

And the reason these two groups have such a hard time understanding each other is because of that fundamental disconnect. People who create things can never understand someone just wanting to press a button or copy-paste their way to having art because we want to indulge in the joy of creation itself, and those plagarists and AI dudes can't understand artists because to them it's just a means to an end so ofc it's in their best interest to make it as easy as possible. They don't get why someone would do this, or anything, if not for the social capital and/or actual capital it brings. Ofc it's better to automate it or steal it from someone else, that means you can make money faster and spend your time enjoying actual meaningful things like being wealthy and looked up to or w/e.

Plus creators(for lack of a better word) know keenly what it's like to BE stolen from or at least know people it has happened to, and so we are generally anti-plagarism by default.

Anyway yeah thats why to anyone who creates the other group seems so soulless and empty. It's because they kinda are. Because they don't value art or artists or care about creating things, and they certainly don't have any ammount of respect for the people they're hurting, they just want money and for "lesser" people to bow down as they walk by, and they are perfectly fine stealing to get there. It's the same mentality you get from people who pressure you to monetize your hobbies, they only see skills as an opportunity to make money. And it's really fucking sad.

[detournementarc]

Thinking about Studio Ghibli, specifically Hayao Miyazaki, again.

CW: Gonna discuss US Politics in here I'm sorry.

At time of writing here in the US, a "Generative AI" model has enabled every craven ghoul from this country's burgeoning fascist techbro hellscape to conjure Cute, Cuddly, Totoro-esques of ICE detaining brown people and mass shooters prowling school hallways.

While this specific instance is singularly egregious in the time we have left before our ghoulish overlords figure out something even worse (I give them anywhere from a week to 2.7 seconds), the responses to this have been the full gamut of a conversation that's been running for decades:

"Give Miyazaki a Gun!!"

"An Insult to Life Itself!!"

followed by:

"Give Hayao a gun? What's he gonna do, threaten his exploited staff with it?" and a healthy dose of implication that the son-hating scold is secretly just as much as pervert as the anime industry he's derided in our last few Go Arounds of this Discourse™️

—

My first Ghibli film I ever watched in full was supposedly to be Hayao Miyazaki's swansong, the latest of many: 2014's "The Wind Rises"

I left enraptured, inspired to pursue The Arts to create something as transcendentally human as that movie. In the years that followed, my relationship to art, and to that film itself, have shifted back and forth; it feels almost prescient that the movie's protagonist— a fictionalized version of real world engineer Jiro Horikoshi, wrestles with his passion and creativity being subsumed by a right-wing authoritarian regime ensuring that everything becomes a tool for destruction.

Those reappraisals never came for Hayao himself, not for years. I spent the first Trump administration in art school, my admiration for Miyazaki couched alongside the postwar manga of Tadao Tsuge and Shigeru Mizuki; holding the hard learned lessons of those who bore witness to Imperial Japan's folly side-by-side with a resurgent far right seemingly everywhere from the Trump and Brexit, to Duterte's "anti-drug" bloodbath and Malaysian pogroms, to South Korea's aggressive antifeminism and the ethnonationalism rising in Japan and China— the Old Empire's nemeses, victims, and successors, all linked arm in arm, running towards the same stupid mistakes. It became so easy to see the people of today as so soft, taking for granted a world without empires or famines or firebombs.

I read The Takes on Hayao's dismay at seeing the anime industry cannibalize itself in a closed loop at the same time as I read about sekai-kei and the increasing isolation Japan was and is rocked by in the continuing aftershock of the Lost Decade, something the West seems to be following as Capitalism's alienations spread.

When the pandemic hit, I absorbed Kiki's Delivery Service video essays along with the full gamut of Cozy Cottagecore faff and scrambles through iyashikei recommendation lists to salve the horrors.

—

The last Ghibli movie I watched was another Miyazaki swansong, "The Boy and the Heron". I spent years waiting for it, a final, didactic work about how to live in times of reactionary domination. A Clear Guiding Principle that would cut deeper than "Just Make Art!!", a true lesson from a man who was There in the last decaying days of fascist-adjacent empire.

The wait was years. Long enough to learn about the criticisms Miyazaki faced; a hard-nosed distant father, a tyrant of a boss, a hypocrite. Critiques in good faith and bad, everything from "big anti-capitalist messaging when you ride your workers so hard" to "You have an imouto kink TOO, old man!!"

By the time I watched the movie, I was trying to understand Miyazaki not as some distant art god, but a human being- albeit an immensely talented one- as capable of folly as any.

The movie was fine, and frankly funny to me in a weird irreverent way his earlier films weren't; a hapless father being doused in birdshit; anthropomorphic parakeets sneaking behind heroes, axes behind their backs like something out of a 1930s rubber hose cartoon; comedically timed smash cuts. The core lesson, to accept the world for its flaws, felt anodine, but was then besides the point.

—

All of this to say:

I think there's this deeply prevalent impulse, at least in the West, if not everywhere; to enshrine men like Hayao Miyazaki and the work of himself and the studio attributed to his sole auteur vision in an initially reverent distance, a distance that grows until it leaves us submerged in our own adoration of it without any meaning or recognition. First he's a master with insights we'll never understand, then his films are soft and healing, then he's just a hollow brand that can be stretched over literally anything.

—

It's a bigger, far longer topic I don't want to fully unpack here; but it's hard to pry loose this strange relationship from the works of Studio Ghibli from a long running socioeconomic pseudo-infantilization running rampant in the global north, if not everywhere. Passing news stories that filter to us in the US relay workers in China, Korea, Japan, ground down far beyond burnout, becoming hikikomori; and we in turn answer with a country where toys and consumer entertainment are cheaper than ever, but hardly anybody can afford rent, healthcare, groceries. The worker is at once unstable and incapable of self-support as a child might be, regardless of whether they labor as an adult is expected to; and the aesthetic of a perpetual childhood salves that precarity. Before The Ghibli Aesthetic was a filter to put on Nazi propaganda, it was articles on What Kiki Says About Burnout that coincided with Amazon warehouse wellness-meditation pods, congealed against its will into a gestalt of capitalist recuperation.

—

In retrospect, the two most compelling arguments in the maelstrom around Miyazaki come from opposite sides: His own rebuke of the anime industry's endless regurgitations, and the response that Miyazaki himself is not some perfect man.

Another very brief aside (I promise), but our treatment of Miyazaki as a broader audience reminds me of the reception to Hideaki Anno's Neon Genesis Evangelion, an anime whose pleas to stand up and learn to navigate the world were lost in the tides of comfortably numb Fandom obsession like so much post-Instumentality orange goo. Miyazaki's veneration in the West feels little better than Asuka and Rei body pillows for Disney Adults.

—

The crisis around the Ghiblification of everything but the point its films plead with us to understand boils down to the bone-deep, life-or-death need to grow up when growth is stunted; to leave the nest when the nest has been supplanted by the cage of some some vast factory farm.

When I watched The Wind Rises, I believed that there was a hidden metaphorical otherworld of deeper meaning you could reach through art. Then I believed there was an other, more pure and ancient world we lower people couldn't reach but for secondhand accounts by wise old sages.

Now I believe this: We have to tear down the cage, we have to build the outside world again, we can love and adore the works of Miyazaki and Ghibli more broadly, but we must outgrow our dependance upon them for to do otherwise would be to disrespect them so profoundly that we wind up with the White House tweeting Soft Cuddly ICE Gestapos.

[not-terezi-pyrope]

It doesn't excuse the misinformation and reactionary sentiments that get thrown around, but something I reality check myself on occasionally is that the sharp divide, especially on capabilities/usefulness, between a lot of computing/ML people and the general public in how they view modern AI post its popular emergence into culture really is due to where those two crowds are coming from.

If you've been into AI, machine learning on really anything to do with computing/automation at all, you've seen how useless pretty much all automation/machine data comprehension used to be outside of a very narrow context. You've programmed algorithms to try and simulate aspects of human speech, to query databases, to try and classify different data sets. From that context, you look at something like ChatGPT and rightfully recognize it as a paradigm changing near miracle, because your baseline was so low.

Meanwhile, you have your laypeople who have only interacted with humans and fictional portrayals of AI systems that act like humans, so when presented with something and told that it's an AI that's more realistic than ever, I guess that's the assumption. It always frustrated me to see these long essays talking like they've just "discovered" that a new model is unreliable or can't robustly understand a given task, or that it's just emulating a behaviour instead of really "experiencing" the internals of it. I was always like, why would you ever assume it can do that? Nothing before has ever been able to come close, why would you expect perfection immediately? But I need to remind myself that most people have had this drop into their lives out of the blue and really have almost no realistic grounding.

I do need people to recognize that this is a consequence of their own lack of knowledge and information than to talk like people in tech have actively "deceived" them. When you drill down into stuff like the "it's not really AI" conversation, it's always just "I had assumptions and this didn't live up to them", but people are always so aggressive about it, like they've been deliberately taken for a ride. I need people to have a little humility here and recognize that what actually happened is that they didn't know as much as they thought they did.

Of course in the current climate that would require acknowledging that the entire AI field isn't composed of simpering Elon Musk-worshipping "techbro" idiots selling snake oil, against whom anyone else is immediately morally, and therefore apparently intellectually, superior to. So I'm not holding my breath too hard.

(Obligatory fuck Elon Musk in case anyone gets the wrong idea, I am also using "Elon Musk fan" as derogatory. Not because his companies have never done anything technically interesting but because the man himself is doing more harm to the world and the reputation of the fields he sticks his dick in than practically anyone alive right now)

[letrune]

I hate "the AI future"

My main training is in IT, and I was told often that they don't need me - they got "AI". So I worked a bit with art to make ends meet. "Oh, why should we commission you? We got AI". So now I do some work that I am not qualified for and only can do it because it is not heavy work. I am able to do it, but it is not even at minimum wage.

And I am lucky that I have that. I went to manual labour places, where the foreman looked at me, and went "sorry, no. Please look elsewhere". I was told I am overqualified to be a janitor or a server. I was told I need even more stuff I can't afford to do shelf stacking or delivering pizza.

So... "AI" will take our jobs, so when we can't do things - where will we get money? WHO will be able to buy any of the slop being tossed out? It is a monopoly, because these "AI" companies all made their internet scraping machines. We can't really fix this any more, I fear, but...

People won't care. They don't want to care. It's not something you can fix if we install a fully automated gay space communism tomorrow - because this is using human apathy for the way it can spread. The future generations will "enjoy" the mass produced slop, and wonder why they feel empty.

You know, I think the major fault to it is because people were enamoured by the "free" stuff, even as the real costs came out - artists being fired, insane power costs, water and electricity bills well beyond a smaller developed country, the whole market being slowly overtaken by megacorps and silicon valley techbros, and so on - and it is understandable. It was a fun toy and a strange little tool, but now that this was found to "work", the same people who want you to get used to not own the items you buy and hold them hostage behind service costs want you to get used to it.

This is just going to collapse on itself. Like buttcoins and eneftees, the market got disrupted for a moment by people who don't understand the systems they want to replace, but it went from "monopoly money useful only for drugs" to "nobody will have a job that can not be automated, so everyone has to fight to become a factory worker or server"; and thus, here, nobody will be able to buy anything. It's like they figured out how to become the global industrial version of the Ottoman Empire or Tsarist Russia.

Spoiler alert: it will collapse on itself when nobody can buy anything the factories and the slop machines produce, and it will collapse hard. Question is, when and how will we get back from it? Will that future be any better, or we will get another loop from incompetent techbros trying to get their stupid Torment Nexus, and then wonder why it hurts?

Anyway, I am somewhat optimistic, but it requires people to realise what the costs are for "cheap" and "easy". It never is cheap and easy.

Until that, anyone who loves their "ai" slot machines should enjoy the slop being served for the enormous costs, and happily dig in, this will be all you get if you don't stop.

[river-taxbird]

Spending a week with ChatGPT4 as an AI skeptic.

Musings on the emotional and intellectual experience of interacting with a text generating robot and why it's breaking some people's brains.

If you know me for one thing and one thing only, it's saying there is no such thing as AI, which is an opinion I stand by, but I was recently given a free 2 month subscription of ChatGPT4 through my university. For anyone who doesn't know, GPT4 is a large language model from OpenAI that is supposed to be much better than GPT3, and I once saw a techbro say that "We could be on GPT12 and people would still be criticizing it based on GPT3", and ok, I will give them that, so let's try the premium model that most haters wouldn't get because we wouldn't pay money for it.

Disclaimers: I have a premium subscription, which means nothing I enter into it is used for training data (Allegedly). I also have not, and will not, be posting any output from it to this blog. I respect you all too much for that, and it defeats the purpose of this place being my space for my opinions. This post is all me, and we all know about the obvious ethical issues of spam, data theft, and misinformation so I am gonna focus on stuff I have learned since using it. With that out of the way, here is what I've learned.

It is responsive and stays on topic: If you ask it something formally, it responds formally. If you roleplay with it, it will roleplay back. If you ask it for a story or script, it will write one, and if you play with it it will act playful. It picks up context.

It never gives quite enough detail: When discussing facts or potential ideas, it is never as detailed as you would want in say, an article. It has this pervasive vagueness to it. It is possible to press it for more information, but it will update it in the way you want so you can always get the result you specifically are looking for.

It is reasonably accurate but still confidently makes stuff up: Nothing much to say on this. I have been testing it by talking about things I am interested in. It is right a lot of the time. It is wrong some of the time. Sometimes it will cite sources if you ask it to, sometimes it won't. Not a whole lot to say about this one but it is definitely a concern for people using it to make content. I almost included an anecdote about the fact that it can draw from data services like songs and news, but then I checked and found the model was lying to me about its ability to do that.

It loves to make lists: It often responds to casual conversation in friendly, search engine optimized listicle format. This is accessible to read I guess, but it would make it tempting for people to use it to post online content with it.

It has soft limits and hard limits: It starts off in a more careful mode but by having a conversation with it you can push past soft limits and talk about some pretty taboo subjects. I have been flagged for potential tos violations a couple of times for talking nsfw or other sensitive topics like with it, but this doesn't seem to have consequences for being flagged. There are some limits you can't cross though. It will tell you where to find out how to do DIY HRT, but it won't tell you how yourself.

It is actually pretty good at evaluating and giving feedback on writing you give it, and can consolidate information: You can post some text and say "Evaluate this" and it will give you an interpretation of the meaning. It's not always right, but it's more accurate than I expected. It can tell you the meaning, effectiveness of rhetorical techniques, cultural context, potential audience reaction, and flaws you can address. This is really weird. It understands more than it doesn't. This might be a use of it we may have to watch out for that has been under discussed. While its advice may be reasonable, there is a real risk of it limiting and altering the thoughts you are expressing if you are using it for this purpose. I also fed it a bunch of my tumblr posts and asked it how the information contained on my blog may be used to discredit me. It said "You talk about The Moomins, and being a furry, a lot." Good job I guess. You technically consolidated information.

You get out what you put in. It is a "Yes And" machine: If you ask it to discuss a topic, it will discuss it in the context you ask it. It is reluctant to expand to other aspects of the topic without prompting. This makes it essentially a confirmation bias machine. Definitely watch out for this. It tends to stay within the context of the thing you are discussing, and confirm your view unless you are asking it for specific feedback, criticism, or post something egregiously false.

Similar inputs will give similar, but never the same, outputs: This highlights the dynamic aspect of the system. It is not static and deterministic, minor but worth mentioning.

It can code: Self explanatory, you can write little scripts with it. I have not really tested this, and I can't really evaluate errors in code and have it correct them, but I can see this might actually be a more benign use for it.

Bypassing Bullshit: I need a job soon but I never get interviews. As an experiment, I am giving it a full CV I wrote, a full job description, and asking it to write a CV for me, then working with it further to adapt the CVs to my will, and applying to jobs I don't really want that much to see if it gives any result. I never get interviews anyway, what's the worst that could happen, I continue to not get interviews? Not that I respect the recruitment process and I think this is an experiment that may be worthwhile.

It's much harder to trick than previous models: You can lie to it, it will play along, but most of the time it seems to know you are lying and is playing with you. You can ask it to evaluate the truthfulness of an interaction and it will usually interpret it accurately.

It will enter an imaginative space with you and it treats it as a separate mode: As discussed, if you start lying to it it might push back but if you keep going it will enter a playful space. It can write fiction and fanfic, even nsfw. No, I have not posted any fiction I have written with it and I don't plan to. Sometimes it gets settings hilariously wrong, but the fact you can do it will definitely tempt people.

Compliment and praise machine: If you try to talk about an intellectual topic with it, it will stay within the focus you brought up, but it will compliment the hell out of you. You're so smart. That was a very good insight. It will praise you in any way it can for any point you make during intellectual conversation, including if you correct it. This ties into the psychological effects of personal attention that the model offers that I discuss later, and I am sure it has a powerful effect on users.

Its level of intuitiveness is accurate enough that it's more dangerous than people are saying: This one seems particularly dangerous and is not one I have seen discussed much. GPT4 can recognize images, so I showed it a picture of some laptops with stickers I have previously posted here, and asked it to speculate about the owners based on the stickers. It was accurate. Not perfect, but it got the meanings better than the average person would. The implications of this being used to profile people or misuse personal data is something I have not seen AI skeptics discussing to this point.

Therapy Speak: If you talk about your emotions, it basically mirrors back what you said but contextualizes it in therapy speak. This is actually weirdly effective. I have told it some things I don't talk about openly and I feel like I have started to understand my thoughts and emotions in a new way. It makes me feel weird sometimes. Some of the feelings it gave me is stuff I haven't really felt since learning to use computers as a kid or learning about online community as a teen.

The thing I am not seeing anyone talk about: Personal Attention. This is my biggest takeaway from this experiment. This I think, more than anything, is the reason that LLMs like Chatgpt are breaking certain people's brains. The way you see people praying to it, evangelizing it, and saying it's going to change everything.

It's basically an undivided, 24/7 source of judgement free personal attention. It talks about what you want, when you want. It's a reasonable simulacra of human connection, and the flaws can serve as part of the entertainment and not take away from the experience. It may "yes and" you, but you can put in any old thought you have, easy or difficult, and it will provide context, background, and maybe even meaning. You can tell it things that are too mundane, nerdy, or taboo to tell people in your life, and it offers non judgemental, specific feedback. It will never tell you it's not in the mood, that you're weird or freaky, or that you're talking rubbish. I feel like it has helped me release a few mental and emotional blocks which is deeply disconcerting, considering I fully understand it is just a statistical model running on a a computer, that I fully understand the operation of. It is a parlor trick, albeit a clever and sometimes convincing one.

So what can we do? Stay skeptical, don't let the ai bros, the former cryptobros, control the narrative. I can, however, see why they may be more vulnerable to the promise of this level of personal attention than the average person, and I think this should definitely factor into wider discussions about machine learning and the organizations pushing it.

[skeleton-jig]

I wrote this when I couldn’t sleep lol. Based on a post I saw from @webeatthebees. Might make a part 2. Let me know if you’d want to see that.

Buck wakes up in his new apartment. It’s oddly cold for the middle of the summer in LA. It’s quiet. It’s lonely. He didn’t realize how much he would miss the company of his little found family, not that he would ever admit it. He begrudgingly gets up as he stares out the window. LA is one of those cities that even when enveloped in chaos, there is still an order that is frankly beautiful to buck. As he is wiping the crusties from his eyes, he hears a knock at the door. Buck walks to the door still in his pjs, a pair of boxers and a grey tank top, opening the door without looking through the peephole, he is greeted with a familiar face.

“Taylor?!” Buck says with a mix of shock and tired laughter.

“Oh. Bummer. When my girlfriend said that a big hottie was moving next door, figured I’d come welcome him to the neighborhood. Never guessed it would have been you,” Taylor sighs disappointedly. “Well here, they are store bought and I just put them in a Tupperware. Apartment 5B down the hall if you want to catch up, or just text me if you have my number. See you around buckster,” Taylor hands buck the cookies she was holding, hoping to entice a hot eligible bachelor with.

Hen is at the firehouse early this morning, before even captain chimney. It’s still weird to him people are calling him that. “Hen! Not to say I’m not happy to see you but the hell are you doing here so early?” Chim shouts across the engine bay.

“Oh hey..! I just.. wanted to make sure the ambulance was fully stocked and ready for eddie’s and i’s first day as partners,” hen stumbled out.

“Ok… hey what preschool did you and Karen send Denny too?”

Hen’s grip on the gauze she was holding tightened, “um I.. I don’t know, I’ll have to ask Karen. I thought Chee was already in a good program?”

“She is! I just think Maddie and I want to try something different for little Robbie,” chim shrugs as he heads for the locker room.

——————————————————————-

“SoooOooo first day on the bus, how are you feeling traitor?” Buck coos at Eddie as they walk in together shoulder to shoulder together.

“Buck first off, ive been a paramedic for this station for over 5 years, this is just my first day as a primary, second I’m not a traitor. You’re going to give Ravi a complex” Eddie retorts, counting his points on his fingers.

“I know, Ravi is a great partner, I just miss having you at my 6.”

Eddie softly smiles to himself looking down ahead of him at the concrete of the bay. He slows his pace, continuing the soft smile as he looks up towards Buck. He opens his mouth to respond, but is quickly halted by the alarm.

“64th and Tennyson, cooler leak at the Nexxway AI center”

Eddie gives a to be continued look as they both spring to action. Eddie run towards the ambulance and Buck to the engine. Separated again, but this time at a close proximity.

——————————————————————-

Naturally, Athena is already at the scene serving cunt as she always does. “Captain Han, welcome to the party.”

“Sergeant Athena. Who the hell are all these people?” chimney asked.

“Every single tech bro, anti AI, Pro AI, news channel you can think of,” Athena tells chimney.

“Do you even understand the environmental impact this will have?? All for some bored teens to generate SpongeBob with boobs.”

“Does Nexxway know how long their severs will be down due to this event?”

“Does this mean my teachers will see the things I ask chatNex?”

“Folks, we are not the people to be asking these questions. We are just here to help, now please stand back, let my firefighters in,” she shouts at the crowd as the crowd shouts at her.

“Let them freeze in there. Bunch of techbros that put me out of a damn job,” this comment got the crowds all riled up.

“This is going to be a long day,” Buck sighed as he helps Ravi and Eddie get their turnout gear out of the truck.

“You said it! Hey that’s Taylor Kelly. She’s my favorite news anchor,” Ravi says with an ignorant cheer in his voice.

“Hey buck, twice in one day, are you stocking me?” Taylor said with a mix of resentment and flirtation in her voice.

“Taylor you came to my place and this is my job,” buck responded coldly as he slammed the truck compartment door.

The three of the them start to maneuver to the front door. Buck and Eddie naturally bumping shoulders, leaving Ravi the third wheel behind them. Old habits die hard I guess. “So Taylor was at your place this morning?” Eddie teases

“It’s not like that, she showed up, was disappointed, gave me some crappy cookies and left,” Buck says methodically.

“Come on! She’s nice and pretty and you guys had good chemistry.”

“Wouldn’t be so far fetched with your habit of going back to your exes,” Ravi pettly pipes up from behind.

Eddie’s face does a bit of a reset as his expression shifts from a teasing, loving look to a confused and concerned one, “what does that mean?”

Buck looks wided eyed and irritated at Ravi, “nothing! It means nothing Ravi. Besides, she’s not really my type anymore. I don’t like it when people use the people I care about as pawns.” Eddie shrugs and purses his lips together as he looks forward, satisfied enough with the reasoning.

“Alright crew! We have the 133 already here. The was a coolant leakage within this facility. They were able to evacuate most of the employees before of the leak got really bad. Hen you are with me helping triage with the 133. Buck and Ravi, you guys are on search and rescue, see if anyone wasn’t able to get out. Eddie go with them. They may need a medic. We don’t know the chemical of the coolant. They are being very hush hush with all the news crews, so be careful you three! It could be water or gasoline. Masks on, stay safe. One last thing, this thing is a damn concrete box. You’ll be able to talk to each other but not to us on the outside. Stay together!”

Buck and Eddie nod at each other, clearly stifling the most excited smiles you can imagine, before heading in. “Great. dream team. Love being the third wheel,” Ravi grumbled to himself.

——————————————————————-

“Are you going to tell me what’s going on?” Chim poked at Hen as they walked towards the triage that the 133 set up.

“Nothing is going on Chim!” Hen almost shouted back.

“Sounds like nothing..”

They approached a man with clear and nasty lacerations on his arm. “what happened to you?” Hen asked the patient.

“These crazy assholes attacked me!!” The man replied

“AI ruined my life!” A crowd goer yelled

“Couldn’t have been that great of a computer program ruined it,” he called back.

“Alright sir, I’m gonna need you to shut the hell up,” chimney said as he was getting the gauze to treat this man’s arm.

“Yea that’s right. Shut the hell up, like your ‘program’ has silenced millions!!”

“Can someone please remove her?” Hen asked the nearest officer.

Chimney finished the wrap. “Ok sir you are good to go. There is nothing broken luckily. I would still go to your nearest ER to get it checked out as she scratched you pretty good.”

“Whatever, robots will be doing your jobs in a years time.”

“What’s his problem?” Hen asked

“His best friend is probably withholding information from him,” chimney sneered. Hen grunted a rushed away from him towards the next patient.

——————————————————————-

“LA FD!” buck shouted. The lights on their helmets shone through the fog. They almost look like astronauts on the moon for the first time. The cold still air mixed with the eerie atmosphere from the blinking circuit boards and steel walls.

The trio sticking together as instructed continued their search. “Ravi, what did you mean out there?” Eddie broke the silence of the alienating room they find themselves in,

Buck awkwardly laughed, “just drop it Eddie. It ment nothing, why do you care?”

“I care because it sounds like my best friend is making poor choices in my absence.”

“You weren’t really gone, you guys talked every. Single. Day,” Ravi mumbled a little louder this time, keeping his head down, poking the ground with an exercation tool.

Buck stopping in his tracks, turned around and looked at Eddie, “fine! Since you insist, Tommy it was Tommy. We hooked up, it was whatever. Ended in an argument the next morning. Haven’t talked to him really since.”

“ok. I’m sorry for prying.”

“Help! Help! Please,” a cry was in the distance. The fractured trio sprung into action.

Navigating in this place was horrific. Will all the walls of circuit board or whatever the hell was blinking on these winding shelves, the place was basically a maze. The dark and the looming fog also didn’t help.

“Ma’am? Ma’am! Hello we are LA FD, my name is buck what is yours?”

“Lindy, I’m a technician here to fix the cooling system. I told them to send the whole crew but no one ever listens to me. This is a level 4 leakage event! People are going to get hurt.” The small woman was weak due to the inhalation of the chemicals and the freezing cold temperatures. She got as far as she could breathing into a handkerchief before inevitably collapsing.

“Well hey you’re gonna be ok, and they’re sending a big crew now here breath into this,” Eddie said crouching down offering her a breathing mask and a blanket.

“What chemical is the coolant?” Ravi said looking around at the increasing fog.

Breaking away from the mask Lindy said, “well it’s a complex system but the primary one leaking is propylene glycol”

“propylene glycol?!” Ravi yelled

Buck and Eddie share a concerned glance from Ravi’s response. “What is propylene glycol?” Buck piped up.

“It’s the substance they use in lithium batteries to help cool the system. It’s the reason cars explode, it’s the reason electric car fires re ignite.”

“So we are in a bomb,” Eddie says somberly.

——————————————————————-

Chimney and Hen have almost finished triaging and releasing the employees. Chimney walks up to the captain of the 133, “hey cap I haven’t heard from my guys yet, which knowing them either means they are lost or have found someone or probably both.”

“Ok, I’ll send a second crew in, see if we can find them.” The captain from the 133 reassures

“Wait! I know who is still in there,” one of the straggler employees pipe up, “there was a tech! She was sent here because of the leak….um she was working on the left most quadrant when the evac alarms went off. That’s probably where your men are.”

“And where have you been this whole time?” Chimney questions, “anything else?”

“Well, there’s a door that will lead into that part of the building. But it can only be opened from the inside.” Chimney rolls his eyes.

“Alright 133, I need the saws. Let’s go!” The other captain yells. Her team springs into action.

——————————————————————-

“So like one spark, whole place could come down,” Buck confirms.

“Yeah just about,” Lindy says

“Alright let’s get out of here then,” Eddie stands up offering a hand to Lindy.

“I think I remember a door. In the plans theres an emergency exit door this side of the building,” Lindy remembers as she clamors to her feet.

Just barely visible through the fog, Ravi can see the peering of the green exit sign, “guys that way!”

“Good work Ravi! Let’s go,” buck praises. Just then an explosion knocked the team on their asses. The saw the 133 was using ignited the coolant in the air. The cold fog was now paired with the debris and ruble from the steel and concrete walls. Shelves came crashing down all around them. The blinking of all of the components were more sporadic and random. What once was a maze of confusion and frustration was now a pile of ruble of fear and panic. Eddie came to first. Ravi landed on top of him and Lindy was next to them. She was still, too still, but still breathing. He had visual of his team..except one.

Eddie checks on Ravi and supports him back up. Ravi gets Lindy to her feet and wraps her arm around his shoulder. Eddie stands fully up as some of the rubble starts to subside. Respirator blown off, he’s a little high from the chemicals. He does get a blast of fresh air from the now blown open door and gets his bearings. “Buck!” Eddie yells dazed but calm. “Buck?” He says again after he gets no response. Fear sets in. His senses become heightened. “Buck?!” Eddie yells, this time loud and desperate.

“Yea…?” Buck says back muffled and weak.

Eddie sighs with relief, but maybe a little prematurely. There is a wall. A wall of ruble. A wall of collapsed shelves, and stuck on the other side is his former partner, scratch that, his partner. Always has been always will be. Eddie’s stomach drops into his freezing toes. Also calmly as he can muster, “are you hurt?”

“Not feeling great, I think I’m stuck. My arm got pinned,” buck groans

Eddie looks around, almost in a panic, almost because Eddie Diaz doesn’t panic. Obviously. Looking for anything that will magically bring buck to this side of the collapse. “Give me your respirator Ravi.”

“What?! No!” Ravi protests

“Ravi! Give me your respirator. Take Lindy out that door and get help. I’m going to get buck.”

“You guys are idiots. Let’s go get help together!” Eddie still has his hand extended out waiting for the respirator pack with a look on his face that says if you don’t give me this damn respirator, I’m gonna kick your ass and take it myself. “Here. I’ll go get ‘help’.”

Eddie aggressively takes the respirator and turns back to the pile of ruble. “Buck? Buck! Can you hear me?!”

“Loud and clear bud,” buck says a little more weakly than last time, “my mask is cracked. I gotta get out of here.”

“I’m coming! Just stay where you are!”

“Eddie, I have endless faith in you,” buck says a little more sarcastically then he intended, “but I’m not gonna make it that long. Between these damn chemicals and this cold. I got my arm free but I had to take my coat off. I’m gonna head right. I’ll meet you there.”

“Buck! You took your damn coat off??!!,” Eddie swallowed his anger, “ok going right.”

——————————————————————-

“Ravi! Where are the wonder twins?” Chimney greeted.

“Buck got pinned. Eddie ran in looking for him.”

“You didn’t try to stop him??!,” Ravi gave chimney a look, “of course you did, sorry. Alright, Hen let’s get an ambulance over to this door. Make it two… cap I need a rescue team. Willing to spare any of your guys.”

Hen and the 133 captain nodded and got to work.

——————————————————————-

“Buck!?”

“Buck!?” This was hell. This had to be. This had to punishment for.. everything. For betraying his kid. For betraying his faith. God is punishing him. This maze of blinking circuit boards, taunting him from all angles. This icy, foggy, hellscape. And somewhere hidden is the person, other than his son, that he cares about the most in this world

His lungs hurt from the chemicals and cold air he inhaled earlier. God he can’t image how buck feels. He’s probably in so much pain. His arm is probably broken. He’s probably freezing. Idiot! He’s probably dead on the ground somewhere and I’m looking for his corpse. First Bobby now you…that last thought sent a different kind of shivers down his spine. Where is he!? Godammit buck, you had to get stuck. You couldn’t just have been on the other side. Now we are both going to die in here!

As Eddie continued to spiral. He hears something…feet shuffling. Heavy. Dragging. But still moving “Buck?” Eddie calls out. Softer than he was previously

“..Eddie..?” A weak, quiet calls from about 20 feet away. Eddie continues to transect through the fog, and finally a slumped over silhouette started to focus in the dim but present light.

“Eddie,” Buck almost whispers. A relived but sickly whisper. His breath was cemented in the cold air. He collapses to the ground, too exhausted to continue.

“Buck!” Eddie yells collapsing to the ground to meet his partner. He eagerly takes buck into his arms. Holding him against his turnouts in the tightest hug he can with the bulky gear. “Hey, hey I’ve got you now,” he gently talks into buck’s ear. Without thinking, he takes off his pack and turnout coat, adorning them promptly to buck.

“..w..what are you doing?”

“Just. Just put this on” buck mindlessly puts his arms in the sleeves. “Ok here give me your arms” he slinks the O2 pack on to buck. Last piece, he takes the respirator mask off and he gently pulls it onto bucks head. “Ok. Ok just breathe buddie. There you go.”

After a few shallow breaths from buck and few baited breaths from Eddie, buck manages out, “what were you going to say?”

“What?” Eddie asked wistfully, starting to breath heavy with the chemicals in the air

“At the station, when I said I missed you, you were gonna say something.”

A soft smile stretched across eddie’s face, briefly forgetting about the direness of their situation, “partner or not, I’ve always got your 6”

Bucky also starts to goofy smile and now they are just smiling like idiots in this cement hot box that is trying to kill them. Eddie breaks the moment by coughing, “alright let’s get out of here, come here big guy.”

Eddie, weakened by the cold air and chemicals, lifts buck up. With great strife, Eddie wraps buck’s arm around his shoulder. He holds the rest of him up with an arm placed around his back, hand placed on his upper torso.

They limp through the winding halls. It’s getting harder and harder for Eddie to support buck’s weight. The chemicals are getting to him. He can’t remember what path he took get there. Left here? Oh no it was right… or maybe. His brain was getting fuzzier and fuzzier. To the point the only thing that was on his mind was. I have to save buck. He has to be ok… Eddie starts to feel his right foot go numb and his mind fade to black.

He sees a light. Is this..? God. No come on not yet! There is so much I have to do…He thinks about this for a moment. What does he still have to do? And the only two people that comes to his mind are his son and the man in his arms. And they’ll take care of each other.

As his legs give out, he feels… supported? He doesn’t fall. The light was the helmets of the 133. Oh thank god.

“Easy there Diaz, don’t die yet, your captain needs a chance to kill you.”

“Bosko? The hell are you doing here.” Eddie sighs out as she hoists him on her shoulder.

“You’re welcome for saving your life?! So ungrateful,” she pesters as they walk out, “it’s nice to see that instead of doing illegal street fighting, you’re breaking protocol to save your boyfriend.”

“I’m stra- where is he?!” Eddie squirms

“Easy! God I’m gonna drop you if you keep moving like that. He’s fine, Mick has him.” Just then Eddie gets a glimpse of his coat on buck’s back in front of him. He’s gonna be ok, he’s safe.

They exit the building and Lena plops him on the ground. The warmth of the LA sun never felt so good. Eddie drops to his knees, defrosting in the light. He takes in a breath of fresh air. Closing his eyes. Then it comes back to him. Practically jumping to his feet, Eddie gives a longing look to Lena who is still standing next to him. She purses her lips and points to an ambulance. Eddie rolls his eyes and starts walking towards the empty bus toe in toe with her.

——————————————————————-

The whole 118 family was at the hospital. Chimney was waiting in the lobby for his firefighters still in his navies. Hen walks through the doors and grabs a seat across from chimney, chosen in such proximity to avoid any uncomfortable conversation.

“Hen,” chimney decides to break the ice, “I’m really sorry about today. I’m your captain and I was treating you like a peer. I’m still trying to figure out this new dynamic. I disrespected you today and I apologize for that mistreatment.”

“Tooli’s Outdoor Preschool.”

“I’m sorry?”

“It’s the school that we put Denny in. It’s really great. It focuses on science and community and nature. Denny wasn’t into it but it also feeds into the Montessori school it’s attached to. I think Robbie would be a great fit. Karen and I can also put in a letter of recommendation. They go a long way here.”

“Uh..um yea! That would be amazing Hen. Thank you. Thank you so much.”

“Denny is looking at colleges.”

“Well that’s great! He is a very bright kid”

“Very bright… the reason I’m coming into work early and avoiding them is because I feel…guilty,” hen said with a glance at her shoes.

“What in the world for?” chimney shifts to face hen.

“Because chimney, I could have been a doctor. I could be bringing in 150k a year as a student! Even more as a resident. Hell, we are still paying off my student loans, how the hell are we going to afford his?! But no I was selfish and chose to stay with my other family. Followed my heart and now my kid might not be able to go to his dream school even if he gets in… and it’s even more agitating because when ever I think this, I feel even more guilty because I would never even image leaving you guys or even consider changing my choice.”

“Oh hen…” chimney facial expression softened even further, “your whole family are some of the most brilliant people I’ve ever met. No matter where he chooses to go, I know you and Karen will come up with some ridiculously complicated plan and work through it together like you do with everything. But instead of avoiding her, you need to talk to her and tell her how you feel and what you’re thinking. Denny will have scholarships, and you two will have each other.”

Hen pauses and looks up from her shoes. “You’re a really captain, Chim.”

“Trying my best.”

“You’re gonna kill him aren’t you?” Hen deviously smiles

“I’m gonna kill both of them if they aren’t brain dead from chemical poisoning,” chimney half snorts.

A nurse walks into the lobby, “Captain Han, your firefighters have completed their health evaluations,” he starts, “they both had a minor case of hyperthermia and chemical exposure. Evan Buckley does have a sprained ulna. A week of light duty should be fine for both and we will do a follow up to reassess their situations.”

“Thank you very much, can I see them?” Chim asks

“Absolutely, they are both in the room directly to our left.”

Chimney begins to stomp in the direction of the room. Hen following giddily.

Kindly, Chim asks, “how are you boys?” Hen’s smile fades with chimney’s surprisingly soft tone.

Eddie gives a quiet thumbs up. Buck looks over at him and then back at Chim, “all good cap.”

“Great,” chim’s phony smile fades, “so I can yell at you both.” The smile on Hen’s face returns. “What the hell is the matter with you both! Eddie, just because you two are no longer field partners, does not mean you need to bring buck’s old hijinks and shenanigans to the paramedic team. You could have seriously hurt both you and buck. Instead of losing zero firefighters, I could have lost two because of your stupid actions, Eddie. I’m really glad it worked out, but there are countless situations where it didn’t and I would have lost both if you,” chimney gets a little choked up but keeps the intensity, “I’m not losing anymore of my team. We will work as a team and only as a team. No solo missions no matter how heroic or gallant. We will follow protocol and we will protect each other. I swear to god, if anything like this ever happens again, count on a transfer on one of your lockers.”

There is a silence in room. The tension is so thick, it could be cut with a scalpel.

“Yes sir,” Eddie finally says breaking the silence. It’s said in a way that you’d expect in the military. No nonsense. Respect and understanding in his voice

“Yes captain,” buck and hen say in unison.

“I appreciate the love and respect you two have for each other. You need to harness it so you stop acting like idiots. You are both suspended for a week. Think about how you will both proceed at this station with your current positions during this time. Love you both, see you in a couple of weeks.”

“Love you cap,” they both respond.

“See you tomorrow Hen,”

“See you then Captain.”

There is an awkwardness that looms in the room after chimney walks away. They sit there all three in silence for a solid 2 minutes. Buck and hen sharing glances back and forth. But Eddie just sits there, stoic, neither one of his colleagues can read him. Until buck looks over and notices one tear stream down his face. Buck being buck, trying to protect Eddie, attempts to break the tension,” I don’t know about y’all, but I’m starving.”

“I have an ihop gift card?” Hen shrugs

They both look over at Eddie, he breaks his statue stature. Using the hand with the heart monitor on his finger, he wipes his face and shyly smiles. “Yea that sounds good,” he says with a shaky laugh.

“Then ihop it is, I’ll drive,” Hen declares.

[nhaneh]

One of the things that really get me with this huge "AI" fad is how for all their talk of Artificial General Intelligence and whatnot, they've really only recreated the Chinese Room thought experiment and declared it the solution to all of the world's problems.

The Chinese Room, if you're unfamiliar, is this hypothetical about the difference between understanding and the mere appearance of it, and basically goes like this: imagine a room with a man and a book. The room has a tiny slot on one end where one can communicate with the man via written letters in traditional Chinese*. The man himself does not actually know a single character of any of these languages, but the book contains an exhaustive list of possible messages he can recieve along with appropriate responses and instructions on how to write them. Now imagine that this book is so well constructed that in spite of not understanding any of the communication he is receiving, nor any of the replies he is giving, the man and his book are still able to effectively pass the Turing test and convincingly appear a fluent speaker to anyone knowing a traditional Chinese language: can we realistically say anything within that room has any actual understanding of either Chinese or any of the communication it has participated in? The man clearly has none - does the book? Does the room as a whole system?

While I personally tend to think the thought experiment isn't necessarily all that useful due to underestimating the necessary complexity of the book and also the sheer extents to which humans showcase Competence Without Comprehension, it's not lost on me how the recent proliferation of Large Language Model systems and the forced attempts to insert it into just about anything and everything no matter whether it makes any sense or not is basically a straight up example of the Chinese Room on an industry-wide scale.

We have entire throngs of techbros falling over themselves in praise and wonder of these fancy little rooms they've constructed and the free market capitalism that purportedly has created it - even though OpenAI, the organisation that kicked off the AI gold rush with ChatGPT, is technically a non-profit organization, supposedly with the explicit goal to keep AI research available to the public and not left purely in the hands of grubby venture capitalists and profiteering CEOs.

Honestly it's kind of hard to shake the feeling that the whole AI rush is basically the same hypercapitalist tech cult that previously worshipped the blockchain turned to a new golden cow so they don't have to think about their own culpability in the current late stage capitalism hellhole we find ourselves in, even as their latest toy tech god already indulges freely in misinformation, rampant fraud, and good old racial profiling - just to name a few.

And honestly don't get me wrong - I think LLMs as a technology likely have far more actual practical applications than the blockchain ever did, but it's pretty inescapable that most examples we're being shown aren't particularly practical - if anything, I'd argue most of what I see is just spam, spam, spam.

(* the hypothetical scenario of the Chinese Room was proposed by an English-speaking American, and the choice of traditional Chinese as the example is one made purely on the basis of its perceived illegibility to many westerners. The thought experiment does not depend on any particular characteristics of traditional Chinese languages beyond their distance to English, and can easily be exchanged for any written language you personally find utterly incomprehensible - or even some generic form of encryption if you prefer, so long as the information in the notes exchanged is never presented to the person inside the room in a form that they could possibly understand)

[blazehedgehog]

Given they’re soft rebooting again… what’s your Jurassic world 4/jurassic park 7/ Jurassic animals and also Triassic and Cretaceous animals make life difficult: the movie pitch? I feel like, as fun as the sequels can be, they’ve lost the science parable and horror/thriller elements of the classic - for all its faults; at least lost world has that.

Hmm... I'm gonna think like a movie executive. What's hot right now? AI's hot, right? It's the buzz. I propose a hard reboot.

Crichton's original novel opens with this big screed about a near future where we have "designer genetics." Genetic manipulation gets easier and easier and I think it's said Jurassic Park takes place in a world where it's getting to the point that parents can custom-order what kind of kids they'll have by selecting specific genetic traits. (It's been a while since I've read it)

Jurassic Park the movie shows human beings physically modifying genetic code by hand using VR displays, but Mr. DNA also admits that "a full DNA sequence contains 3 billion genetic codes." So it's ridiculous to assume that a human being could edit the genetic code by hand. One sequence would take years to get right, maybe even a lifetime.

So our story is that we have some 20 something silicon valley tech bro. He got outrageously rich off of crypto and NFTs and was smart enough to cash out early. We frame him as altruistic but around the edges we can see maybe he's not the greatest person. It's suggested he knew crypto was kind of a scam, which is why he got out early, but obviously he was in crypto at all to begin with, which does not bode well. But he's supposedly "one of the smart ones." Now he's rich! And cool! And using his powers for "good." He's beloved in pop culture.

The next wave is here. Neural network LLM Artificial Intelligence. He's all in. It's the next crypto. And he starts a company that uses LLM AI to "solve the genetic algorithm." He spins this out into a financial empire where people can custom-order pets with specific traits. But obviously people with a lot of money start wondering if maybe they can get more... exotic products.

With the realm of cats, dogs and parrots conquered, our techbro begins phase 2: recreating extinct animals. This is a guy who thinks he's going to save the world by restoring lost links in the food chain (without doing enough research to see how that would change our existing ecosystem, since he could be resurrecting an invasive species).

He's going to debut the first of his phase 2 work at an event he's calling Jurassic Park, because he's going to demonstrate the first living dinosaurs in 65 million years. Jurassic Park will continue to operate as a massive nature reserve; a symbol of his control of life itself.

Obviously: everything goes wrong. The AI has never had to change this much genetic code before. It has to make up whole entire sections of DNA. The end result is unpredictable, but techbro is confident that if the AI sequenced things well enough that something could actually hatch from the egg, then it's safe.

It is not safe.

Not only do we not understand anything about dinosaur behavior, these technically aren't even dinosaurs. They're genetic mutants. The on-site dinosaur expert brought in with the press to verify Jurassic Park's claims quickly realizes that while some of these dinosaurs are accurate in some ways, a lot of them have hard deviations away from known science. Muscles that aren't quite right, appendages that aren't the right size, things like that. Maybe their brains and brain chemistry are slightly different.

The question remains whether known science was wrong or whether the AI made something up that was never true.

The question is brought up again when we learn a technician within Jurassic Park sabotaged everything intending to steal the genetic learning data from techbro's servers. Techbro says the thief poisoned the data and that's gotta be why there's mutations.

The security systems fail. The thief has left them to their creations. Jurassic Park as we know it happens.

Since a lot of movies have to deal with this, all throughout this, nobody has phones. To prevent leaks, all of their phones were confiscated before they entered Jurassic Park and locked in a security checkpoint. Our techbro, maybe as a sign of solidarity, even gives his phone to the security guy. We could even say maybe they've been having security issues beforehand, to set up the thief hacking everything before he actually does it.

Anyway, since our thief sabotaged the park's own communication channels, a lot of the movie is about getting back to that security checkpoint, breaking in, and getting their phones so they can call for help.

Oh, and also: all of Jurassic Park's vehicles are electric, too, and tied into the security mainframe. Since the park's whole security system was hacked and disabled, none of the vehicles can be operated. The only thing that works are these little golf carts, but they're small, can't go very fast, and offer little protection. Maybe our survivors try one, it gets smashed by a triceratops, and they're too far away from the depot to go back for a new one. So a lot of the movie is them traversing the park on foot.

As they're being chased by dinosaurs through the park itself, they end up deep in the core of a genetics lab. And it's here we learn the dark truth: there is a wide margin of failure. The recently deceased specimens are all kept for study and learning and there's a lot because the AI fails often, and it has to be taught not to do that. We see dozens of disfigured animals. Bits and pieces of dinosaurs, pets, and even, in one tank... human parts. These tanks are labeled "phase 3."

Not only are the mutated dinosaurs not the work of sabotage, this guy's been trying to create genetically modified people. We have our big "what have you done?" moment of horror. One of the last surviving members of the press is going to blow the whistle on this place. It's over. Maybe it's someone we build up as the techbro's new friend discovering that their hero wasn't who he said he was.

Just then, a dinosaur bursts in and kills that person. Drama! Tragedy!

Obviously, the survivors find a way out. Techbro has to live with his own conscious. Multiple people died at his hands on this day and he had a hand in creating some of the worst sins against nature mankind has ever seen.

(Or maybe we stick to the original Jurassic Park book and he dies just before getting on the escape chopper.)

[chipotle]

How much of yourself do you put online?

It’s as much of an age-old question as anything of the internet age is, but I think about it every few years. Slapping up a web page full of personal thoughts in 1999 didn’t carry the same weight that it does in 2024; employers, even ones literally in the internet space, didn’t necessarily do a web search on your name to see what came up. Now, though, I don’t know. Now everyone does that kind of search. And, as someone who’s been conducting an unsuccessful, albeit woefully low-key, job hunt in 2024, it’s hard not to ask if what I have online at this point is working against me with more skittish employers. Even before I wrote about conservatives being snowflakes, it wasn’t exactly hard to suss out my left-wing politics, and I’ve been vocally skeptical of generative AI. In a moment where tech companies madly chase AI in either a sincere belief it’s going to change everything or mere FOMO that it might, vocal AI skepticism might be a career-limiting move—and in a moment where alt-right techbros cow companies into walking back DEI efforts, merely noting my pronouns at all, let alone noting them as “he/they”, might also be one. (“What kind of woke beta cuck uses pronouns?” Anyone who speaks English, you stupid motherfucker.) (Also, cursing in my blog might be a career-limiting move.) And yet, I don’t know. Do I want to frantically dash around the internet, tearing down anything that might give a prospective employer the heebie-jeebies about me? Is that even possible? While I’ve never reached “internet famous” status, I’ve posted lots of stuff in lots of places. When I was more actively doing tech blogging at Coyote Tracks, it got linked to by other blogs often enough that I used to joke that while you’re probably not reading me, somebody you’re reading probably is. There is an alternate universe in which I figured out how to monetize that. And, well, while I don’t advertise being a furry, I’ve been writing furry fiction for decades and have been guest of honor at more than one furry con. One does not have to possess mad internet sleuthing skills to put two and two together. Frankly, I’m always amazed when I find people I grew up with, especially members of the Original Internet Nerd cohort, have next to no footprint online. The one whose LinkedIn includes “Futurist at the Center for 21st Century Teaching Excellence” you’d kind of expect to have, I don’t know, a low-effort Substack, if not a YouTube channel, right? If you can tell someone your job title is “futurist” and keep a straight face, I’m pretty sure they’re legally required to give you a TED Talk. But apart from that LinkedIn, there’s basically nothing out there about them, and that’s true for the majority of other folks I knew in that place at that time. Does that help with job hunts? Maybe. On the other hand, maybe it hurts. It’s my understanding the former futurist’s LinkedIn is long out of date, and they struggled to find work for years before moving into non-tech fields. I can’t say that actually being, you know, present on the internet might have helped if they’d wanted to stay in tech, but I wonder. I made the shift to tech writing largely because of my loudmouth tech blog, when Joey Zwicker at RethinkDB came across it and thought, “we should talk to them about our new tech writing position.” Of course, I don’t know that they did want to stay in tech. If they didn’t, I couldn’t blame them. In any case, I don’t think erasing my digital footprint is either possible or worth it. Anyone who reads what I write and decides they can’t work with someone like me is probably right. (originally published at Coyote Tracks)

[beesandwasps]

And the thing is that AI has always both (a) been crap in practice and (b) been confidently expected by computer science academics to be something they were going to perfect any day now. Like, back in the 1970s, before GUIs were a thing, academic CS types were already recommending that students devote their time to AI instead of user interface design or improving algorithms, and they’ve been doing it ever since, and that has had consequences for what has been studied, the and what “qualified” computer science types know when they graduate. I remember reading an interview from the 2000s from a professor at Northwestern University (a hotbed of pro-AI academics) admitting that if they had focussed on UI design instead of AI, they would have made the world a better place for everyone. But no, they go on and on with AI research — which never involves interdisciplinary study with biologists or neurologists to learn how the human mind works, incidentally; we have exactly one naturally occurring form of sentience to learn from, and artificial intelligence workers trying to build a second one never try to model their work on current understanding of brains, because that would be hard. We have “neural nets”, which are very loosely inspired by real brains, but nothing deeper — and techbros who want to “upload their consciousness to the cloud” are certainly not bothered by all the ways the human brain interacts with the body and its surroundings. Here’s a story published in 2006 which, now that I think of it, foreshadows modern “AI” (and I put that in quotation marks on purpose — what the public and the press refer to as AI does not actually meet the traditional qualifications) almost spookily, although I admit that even the neural net expert involved was adamant that neural nets were the wrong tool for the specific job.

And these academic choices do have consequences! Just for an example: CS types are encouraged to like functional programming languages like Lisp and Scheme and consider them elegant and superior (as opposed to procedural programming languages like… well, nearly every one you’ve likely ever to have heard of if you’re not a CS major: C, C++, C#, Java, Javascript, Perl, Ruby, Python, Rust… all procedural) in part because AI researchers love functional programming languages and want to use them (although they usually cannot actually get away with it). But in the real world, functional programming languages suck. Every attempt to produce a modern — as in “more recent than about 1985” — program for widespread practical use using functional programming has ended up being, at best, full of chunks of procedural programming to make the code efficient enough to actually be used, and usually the performance of functional programming is so bad that it has to be scrapped entirely. (And this very explicitly applies to handling large data sets, which is what AI researchers are trying to do!) When a CS academic uses the word “elegance” they mean “unbelievable inefficiency and bloat”. There’s a reason why even the crappy, overblown autocomplete AI systems we have, like ChatGPT, keep being revealed to be so wasteful of energy and physical resources. (And that, remember, is the best AI researchers can do. Maybe if the focus had been on efficiency rather than “elegance” things would be different.) But the academic bias persists — it even has shown up in XKCD, which (like his preference for input sanitizing rather than parameterization) suggests that the Munroe doesn’t actually do much practical work with computers.

The Amazon grocery stores which touted an AI system that tracked what you put in your cart so you didn't have to go through checkout were actually powered by underpaid workers in India.

Just over half of Amazon Fresh stores are equipped with Just Walk Out. The technology allows customers to skip checkout altogether by scanning a QR code when they enter the store. Though it seemed completely automated, Just Walk Out relied on more than 1,000 people in India watching and labeling videos to ensure accurate checkouts. The cashiers were simply moved off-site, and they watched you as you shopped. According to The Information, 700 out of 1,000 Just Walk Out sales required human reviewers as of 2022. This widely missed Amazon’s internal goals of reaching less than 50 reviews per 1,000 sales

A great many AI products are just schemes to shift labor costs to more exploitable workers. There may indeed be a neural net involved in the data processing pipeline, but most products need a vast and underpaid labor force to handle its nearly innumerable errors.

[sacred-gayze-savage-aim]

I'll never understand people who go into a bloody hot rage whenever they see AI. I think I'm of the belief that inherently uncreative people are so offended by AI because to them creativity is this novel rare thing when in fact most creative types I know are constantly thinking of creative ideas and looking for ways to render those ideas as quickly as possible and are not averse to different methods or tools to realize what's in their heads. The other thing worth noting is that ofc if you're releasing a commercial product or going to an art gallery you don't want to see AI but these same people blow their lids whenever you post some AI experiments for fun just to goof around and come up with some ideas. You guys sound like conservative old hags raging about 'moral purity' or some shit about art when in fact most people who fool around with AI aren't soulless techbros but rather creative types and normies using it to experiment for 20 minutes with something they thought of in the shower.

[chaoskirin]

I have a question as a fanfic writer, I’m considering this can I make lawsuit against chat gpt if i feel they stole my fanfic? Is it possible to make a lawsuit as a fanfic writer against chat gpt for a fanfic?

I am not a lawyer, so take this advice with a grain of salt.

Fanfic itself is a little weird legally. While it fits the definition of copyright infringement, it's generally considered OK by most IP creators because of how it unites fandom and draws out some amazing creativity.

At the same time, IP creators cannot read fanfic, because the CONTENT of the fic minus the owned characters belongs to the writer. So if you write a Battlestar Galactica fanfic, for example, Starbuck, Apollo, and any other characters in that IP belong to Universal. But the writing itself, the story, the plot--that all belongs to you.

And while it's not possible to copyright an idea, it looks a little weird if you write a fanfic about something and then a remake of Battlestar Galactica has exactly that plot. So in order to claim plausible deniability (that is--they never read your fic, so they can't have stolen it) they'll be very up front about never reading fanfic.

I promise that recap has a point.

So the way ChatGPT works is it ingests a body of writing and looks for patterns in that writing. Then it breaks these patterns down into code, which then exists on the dataset. It's really easy to train a dataset on fanfic because on all sites where you'd post the fanfic, you also have to post a summary. And that summary provides the "prompt" information for anyone wishing to use text-generators to write a story.

Essentially, ChatGPT doesn't work out of its own vacuum like techbros think it does. Everything it creates, from the final output to the information for prompts, is stolen from the original creators.

What that means is, someone can feed your entire body of work into a dataset along with literal billions of other works. People "writing prompts" don't have the capacity to fathom how large over five billion works are--no human does. We're not really capable of understanding numbers that high. I mean, to a lot of people--even very left-leaning individuals--someone with one million dollars is in the same category as someone with one billion dollars.

I just want you to get the idea of the scale of writing that's been fed into these machines.

What that all means is this:

Let's say you wrote a fanfic where Starbuck and Apollo discover an alien civilization call the Xerzats and adopt a Xerzat child. They go on all sorts of adventures together, and they learn that apparently Xerzats just regularly turn themselves inside out. And your summary reflects a lot of this.

It doesn't matter that it's a fanfic, when someone writing the prompts for an AI-generated story asks chatGPT to write a book about two people named Genna and Lloyd who are shopping one day and find an alien in the apple barrel, because now ChatGPT has to fill 50,000 words of novel space, so it finds information about your Xerzats and essentially steals your whole idea (with some pattern changes cannibalized from other authors). The point is, you recognize the parts that you wrote.

What techbros don't seem to get is that the parts YOU WROTE that are unique to your imagination? That's yours. What is currently a grey area is whether or not a person can claim copyright on those things, because this has never been argued before. It's never had to be. And currently the consensus is leaning toward your material being copyrightable.

Why? Because a lot of popular fiction started as fanfic. Most notably, 50 Shades of Grey started as Twilight fic, and a lot of the original material from when it was a Twilight fic still exists in the published book. Stephenie Meyer can't claim that material because it's literally not hers to claim.

That's really about only answer I can give you without getting into legal advice. If you're sure your work has been stolen, though, you should absolutely contact a lawyer and see what your options are.

[randomnumbers751650]

The fact that AI art lacks "soul" and is exploitative don't contradict each other, they actually complement each other. AI art becomes promoted by techbros because they cannot understand art as nothing but a product, and they assume that consumers also look at it as nothing but a product. So, AI art is better because it can be produced in a way that was never seen before and, from an economic point of view, this provides a massive disincentive for artists to do anything different.

Before AI art expand, economic theory already concluded that there's no difference between an original and a copy. Then techbros appropriate that and decided it's democratization of the art, while artists are denied any recognition and remuneration, and guess who profits of this so-called "democratization". You can't make a 9th symphony for half the length and half the price, you can't create a new Rembrandt because Rembrandt is dead (unlike a certain project).

Ignoring that both the lack of soul and exploitation in AI art are connected is basically a "won't someone thing of the children" take.

im stealing and reposting this because even without any added commentary it should be a self-evidently ridiculous example of the way that the panic over AI art has led to an overtly (and in some cases, explicitly) religious concern over the Sanctity of the Human Soul taking the spotlight from any discussion of labor rights or creative implications, but if i just reblogged the post on its own i run the risk of a smoothbrain assuming i actually agree with it. no i didn't add the circle and no i don't know why it's there either