RedRegard
1d ago
Aliens in these sorts of space opera stories are commonly representative of the 'other' or cultural diversity or what have you. Exploring the vast galaxy was about exploring our own formerly interesting planet. When Luke goes to the cantina with Obi Wan, much emphasis is placed on the bizarre habits of the locals. I'd say it's fair to assume the directors knew what metaphors they were playing with, although maybe not pointedly.
Furthermore, back in the timeframe the sequels were made, colonialism was still alive, minorities were sometimes mistreated by the police (uniformed white men primarily), and immigrants were, and still are, exceptionally precarious population groups, in many cases. So I'd say it was fair of them to employ this dichotomy.
I'd say it's less of a worldbuilding decision than an expressive one, perhaps gotten secondhand from stewing around with all the other genre works and their tropes.
That Monet painting might be operating along extremely fine and subtle principles, and so be highly opaque to the large majority of people who view it in terms of any brilliance it may hold.
My favorite painter is Max Ernst. The genius of his paintings is quite a bit louder and more flamboyant. Even to relative laypersons like myself, it's easy to distinguish his paintings against AI, as AI cannot match him for creativity, intricacy, etc.
This is to say, there might be situations where AI art cannot be separated from masterful human work because the human work operates on principles potentially no one besides the master who created it understands, but for masterful works which are more scrutable, which do exist, it is easy to see that no AI can compare against them.
And the distinction should be made between the creative effort required to conceive a painting and configure it, versus the technical effort required to reproduce one. AI is fully theoretically capable even now of producing identical or near identical copies of works it has seen. The only reason it doesn't, during the course of casual prompting, is that its designers for copyright reasons sought to inhibit that behavior. What AI can't do is create wholly original works, or even to composite existing works at a high level. Anyone saying AI cannot reproduce existing works is wrong. Anyone saying AI can produce good original works is also wrong.
RedRegard
10d ago
To some extent art and entertainment are something you’re taught to interpret. For instance, having a moustache and a cape isn’t inherently nefarious, but common tropes in our culture teach us to associate the qualities together. Essentially artists use the symbolically coded languages of their mediums to impart ideas and stir emotions. Highly refined sensibilities come in part from understanding these languages at a high level.
Sure! If you're up for some heavy reading and don't mind receiving Harrison's thoughts poetically, check out his Viriconium series and his Empty Space trilogy. (Warning: Spoilers ahead.) The first, his most popular set of works, he began early in his career, grew disillusioned with, and eventually set aside. It tracks the arc of his thinking with regards to commercial fantasy, and you can see its development through the effects of his shifting aesthetic philosophy. Where it opens with a pretty prosaic first novel, the Pastel City, it becomes increasingly epistemologically degraded as it goes on, until the world of Viriconium itself has become nothing more than a reflection in a dirty restroom mirror in A Young Man's Journey to Viriconium, a captstone short story of sorts.
Empty Space opens with the novel Light, a tour-de-force revival of the Space Opera genre updated to include a bunch of quantum theory notions. Light opens with the concept of the Kefahuchi Tract, a symbol of endless potential wrapped up in the genre's core interests. As the trilogy goes on, it plays with this metaphor in increasingly critical and bleak ways.
For more direct deliberations on the relationship between fantasy and modern life, check out his literary magical realist story The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again. It dramatizes the negative influence that omnipresent fantasy can have on modern persons.
If you want some nonfictional, direct commentary on these matters, you can check out his blog and try to root out those essays I mentioned, which would have been from quite some time ago (I couldn't find the one I was looking for, but here are two somewhat related responses). As you will note, much of the blog posts' response to the topic of fantasy is snide and dismissive, however he does actually provide substantial criticisms in places if you dig for it.
You might be interested in M John Harrison. A fantasy writer in his early career, he turned on the genre vehemently and spent much of his middle career attacking it, trying to cope with it, or pretending it wasn’t there. He wrote a famous internet essay on genre fantasy and its negative influences, but later wrote a second, less famous response to it, a decade or so later, saying that he was wrong. Fantasy was to blame, he still agreed, but it went far beyond just the genre. Everything in the modern world had become a fantasy, essentially, from cellphone commercials to presidential elections to the way that ordinary people lived. Fantasy and its deleterious influences had become all encompassing. He continues to grapple with the matter in books he writes today, in what is some of the most pertinent writing I have ever come across. I more or less agree with his present, complicated verdict, to the extent that I can understand him. Fantasy is bad, but in the modern world, everything is fantasy.
RedRegard
14d ago
It goes towards proving the basis for what we observe: that LLMs are very good at recalling large and disparate amounts of knowledge but are poor for functionally utilizing said knowledge, especially in matters complex, unusual, or otherwise not 1:1 with stuff from their training material. Whether this proves or disproves they are sentient or intelligent or whatever is a matter of semantics, but what it does do is give us a clue as to why we observe certain disparities in their capabilities, and can help inform our expectations about what further capabilities might emerge.
Humans lean on theory, trained pattern spotting, and various heuristics or memorized devices (i.e. king opposition) when playing chess. Memory plays a role to, but outside of maybe Magnus Carlson it is dwarfed by the capacities of LLMs. This is a level of intelligence that can also be employed for creating architecture or symphonies. LLMs lean a lot harder on brute memory recall (although I won't discount entirely their capacity for higher-tier reasoning) through hyper-intensive statistical calculations, and these make it very good for things like discoursing on a broad variety of facts or semantically juggling abstractions, but they do not, apparently, allow LLMs to create complex architecture, symphonies, or do anything else involving the complex interlocking of smaller elements.
The small elements are found in its memory and can be expurgated intact individually, but the LLMs do not possess the intelligence to complexly fit them together. The LLMs do not operate at a level of intelligence that would allow that. They are hyper-intensive exploiters of lower order processes but not high tier ones. That's what's suggested by the fact they can recall 96% of a novel. That they lean on highly scaled relatively brutish methods to repeat stuff verbatim, or close enough.
RedRegard
14d ago
LLMs can reproduce 96% of the text of Harry Potter verbatim. Even if they do not store all their training data with perfect fidelity, their underlying operations are such that it doesn't matter. It's data compression with variable loss depending on what they were trained on. When 1:1 outputs from their memories of training data can't exist, they reach for similar patterns and smooth over the disjunctions using sophistry. They must be commended for semantic fluency.
RedRegard
15d ago
Craft would be about strategically wielding the narrative elements in order to achieve affect or to convey meaning. In the second video in the post to which we are replying, when the girlfriend character gets stabbed by the demon, does it register as anything other than bathetic? Or does it even register at all?
Those artists you mention, they achieve affect through the careful arrangement of skillfully created elements. With the AI, there is no cumulative impact, and it doesn’t use skill to recreate things. All we have is a clunky copy-paste machine.
RedRegard
15d ago
Disagreed on the 90% figure. The AI can spit forth from its datasets superficially accurate renditions of tropes and imagery from other works that it has seen. What it cannot do is perfectly mold every detail towards the purpose of a given scene. The act of expression is missing, and thus 100% of the relevant criteria for an aesthetic-artistic work is missing. All you have in the end are a variety of statistically likely tropes and images strung together in some pattern of Baudrillardian remove, lacking any signification or meaning.
RedRegard
22d ago
I've given up on planning my stories beyond the starting circumstances. My best ideas come to me while I'm in the midst of writing. Potentialities that I can spot, take notes on, sometimes even act on before they flutter away from my brain each night while I sleep. The key is to just dedicate unbroken blocks of time, I've found, and to think about projects frequently. As far as hardcoded outlines go, those have never worked for me. My mind goes blank when I try to enact them.
For the brutal economy thing, I think that's a result of increasing technological sophistication requiring increasingly demanding skill levels from human workers. The economy bifurcates in two directions as the middle is eaten up through automation: roles where not much beyond warm bodies is required, say as in retail, and then roles where highly advanced technical abilities are required for filling in gaps left by automation.
This is a simplification, but the general trend is for automation to eat up moderately skill-dependent occupations. Computers ate into traditional office work but created more sophisticated tasks involving coding, but now the entry-to-mid level coding is being threatened by AI.
If an area is less technically demanding, it is more amenable to automation, generally.
Areas where this pattern doesn't follow are misleading: while ambulating around as a plumber, say, doesn't seem highly skill-dependent, ambulation is nevertheless a skillset very difficult for machines. There are incongruencies between human capabilities and those of machines which don't map cleanly to the pattern I have outlined.
I think one reason you're having trouble finding work is that there's been a major oversupply of white collar degreed workers for what the economy actually requires. Those sorts of jobs are very cushy and high status, but too many people have been going to college trying to get them, and now we're seeing an overshooting of the demand. Probably more tradespeople are required instead, but owing to the bifurcation effect I outlined, those don't pay as well as the absolute top-level knowledge occupations and are a lot more taxing, so everyone's trying to force their way through a narrow funnel to the top instead.
RedRegard
28d ago
I must differ here as I do not see evidence (in domains I'm able to judge) of AI employing techniques and theory in its tasks. Ask it to mimic Stephen King and then compare the output to actual Stephen King. You'll understand what I mean.
I cannot speak to math here as I lack competency in that. But from what I hear from coders, its similar in that domain as well: AI can expurgate volumes of legible code, but it cannot utilize structure.
Humans have techniques and theories which inform their decisions high and low as they layer things together using judgement, intuition, etc., while AIs appear to generate text using probabilistic hacks. AI appears to be able to recreate low-complexity patterns from its dataset. I disagree that these processes are related except at a very basic level.
RedRegard
28d ago
We formulated our understandings of the world and our interactions with it into techniques and theories, and when we build stuff we do so by employing those techniques and theories from a standpoint of engineering and design. LLMs are merely next word generators. They can recall many of the things in their databases and expurgate them to us, but their outputs aren't the products of strategically employed techniques and theories. This is inherently limiting for the complexity of the outputs they can give us.
RedRegard
1mo ago
To be fair his numbers declined with each successive election and he never managed to win a majority government after the first. He also lost the popular vote both times after the first. I think he stayed around for so long because of Canadian ambivalence. It's apples to oranges when comparing Canadian politics to American.
RedRegard
1mo ago
Military investment can also be a boon to the mass populace. My understanding of WW2 spending is that it helped to bid up wages, by creating an enormous demand for labor, while simultaneously denying growth potential to the capitalist class by forcing them to forego commercial developments in favor of facilitating the war effort. The result was the most egalitarian period in American history following the war, where the gulf between the mass populace and the capitalist class had been reduced to almost nothing. Ensuing this was an explosion in the creative arts, high taxes on the rich (a symbol of their reduced power), and a period of social calm, arguably broken in part once inequality began creeping upwards again.
Although, Trump's budgeting probably will not accomplish this, and the conditions necessary for the post-war boon were probably unique to that time in history. His war in Iran is expected to cost trillions of dollars in the long-run, though, so perhaps we can infer that is the true reason for the spending and the one objective it will accomplish, counterbalancing an enforced burden.
RedRegard
1mo ago
A method I've seen is for someone to copy the transcript of an existing video, feed it into an AI and ask it to make arbitrary changes, feed the outputted script into an AI voice generator, then use AI + third worlders on Fiverr to stitch together visuals to go with it, and voila, a complete video with minimal effort.
There's also a trend of using AI actors or clones. Essentially, since so many videos are just people talking into cameras with minimal movement, an AI generated actor is totally serviceable. It's AI script + AI voice, exposited by an AI person.
Now the question is, is AI mimicking people or were people already mimicking AI?
RedRegard
1mo ago
It’s all downstream of the choices YouTube makes. YouTube wants to show you videos lengthy enough for ads, so they create incentives both monetary and exposure based for creators to make them, and then adjust their algorithm in order to show them to you. YouTube controls it all and the content creators are merely their puppets. YouTube has a monopoly over this sort of thing and that is how they get away with it. The monopoly is more or less inherent to how these digital platforms operate, with market forces encouraging centralization of user bases. So really it’s digitized markets to blame for all of this, YouTube’s just the beast it operates through.
RedRegard
1mo ago
You're making the mistake of thinking it operates as a human does. Humans are constantly forming models of the world and using those models to inform their judgements and actions. While LLMs potentially develop models during their training, their prompt outputs are based on probabilistic likelihood calculations. 'The code being bad' is one likelihood which might emerge for it to disjointedly expand on, but there are many others. It's more like it's exploring probability space while hugging the median than actually contemplating your question; the calculations it runs through are instantaneous.
*A note on its calculations: the probabilities themselves pertain to the text being outputted and not necessarily the underlying concepts, so if it says something about 'the code being bad', that might only indicate calculations pertaining to the very words these ideas are expressed in rather than the underlying ideas themselves. LLM might not have, through its training or anything else, an approximate understanding of what code or 'bad' even are, but instead merely highly elaborate algorithms linking them and other words and word assemblages together.
So since its operating primarily or wholly on a linguistic level, it is impossible to get it to divorce its output from your starting prompt, which sets off the whole probabilistic determinacy cycle.
RedRegard
2mo ago
To the extent that America's foreign policy was subject to democratic influence, I think it did lean towards a rules-based order to a greater extent than any other empires or hegemons have historically done. Vietnam as the crowning example - taking a geopolitical loss in order to stand by popular principles and appease the masses. The problem is that the people only take an active interest in foreign affairs from time to time, and quite a lot can be done clandestinely through the CIA or whatever. This gives the state department a lot of room in pursuing an agenda that's might-makes-right under the hood while preserving an outward appearance of civility.
But the very need to disguise their actions imposes some limitations, so even that can be considered a win for creating a more idealistic world.
RedRegard
2mo ago
I'm guessing you have an entirely different view of novels than me, but as aesthetic works I can't see how extreme care in the details isn't essential to the form. Like, if you're just skimming through The Drowned World by Ballard and not subvocalizing the prose or catching all the nuances and fine, structural meanings, then I don't see how you're getting anything like a full appreciation of the story, or even really a partial appreciation. But you think AI can write to that caliber?
And even more confusing is that you think AI can do fine at art but fails at business communique, which, though still demanding, is nevertheless much cruder and more template-driven?
RedRegard
2mo ago
I switch back and forth depending on context. If I'm wanting to extract info and nothing else, I'll skim with minimal subvocalization. Generally I'll partly subvocalize but at a fast, syncopated clip. When I encounter good writing, I give myself the time to taste if fully. When I read over my own writing, I'm very attentive to rhythm.
Even if we're discounting rhythm in AI prose, though, there are many other reasons it's bad. There's a lack of structure at any level, other than randomly inserted lists and stuff, and it's fraught with all sorts of repetitions and other inefficiencies. It blurs meanings, inserts arbitrary detail, hallucinates, forgets stuff, etc. Much of this is difficult to be seen at a paragraph level. It's the kind of thing that builds on itself, until you're left with a tottering spire of slop.
I think one of the main things that makes AI output unreadable for some but not others is how attentive to detail they are. If they don't really care about the overall quality of prose, or say an artwork or anything else, and they don't want to examine it minutely for how the form feeds into substance, for its minute intricacies, then they won't see what AI output is missing.
RedRegard
2mo ago
You can add that they are literal slavers who fund ethnic cleansing terrorists in Sudan and betray fellow Muslims by allying with imperial outsiders and extract much of the region's natural endowment of wealth through resource and geography rents while spending it on sybaritic pleasures, and yeah, they basically exist to cater to the globalist rich who don't think they're cool or suave enough for any other tax haven with greater personality and style to it and would prefer to construct their personal images around chintzy opulence and unreproductive sex with Russia prostitutes, or at least that's the view of the place I receive.
RedRegard
2mo ago
Typically those sorts of praetorian-style elite forces select on the basis of loyalty or ideological commitment or some such rather than ability, and are more intended to reinforce the regime than excel at special military missions. However, since they do get the lion's share of available resources as you say, their training is usually above the standard that their countries are able to offer. So I'd expect them to perform better than the shitty conscripts that make up large parts of these 3rd world armies but poorly compared to special forces that are organized strongly for competence like the Navy SEALS.
That's not saying they are nothing: probably we can expect them to at least maintain cohesion in the face of American-Israeli bombings, and thus resist internal uprisings while also keeping up harassment of shipping along the straight. So I'd say it's fair to consider them a factor in this whole affair.
RedRegard
2mo ago
The phrase is often taken out of context by neocon Americans to show that Iran is hellbent on America's destruction, and thus to justify their highly violent efforts to destroy Iran in turn. Given the context of not just the phrase but these politics surrounding it, I think it actually is meaningful to point out the translation issue, since 'death to America' isn't necessarily proof of what they claim or justification for their own destructive desires/rationale.
Basically it comes across as disingenuous to use the phrase as a basis for wanting to destroy Iran, when idiomatically it's supposedly weaker than it's presented as being. But then again this whole affair is hopelessly mired in bad faith.
Art requires a huge degree of specificity to create its effects, so trusting AI prompts to get what you want is like trying to wield a giant mallet to repair a delicate wristwatch. To give an example of the specificity often required, in this image, the artist chose to highly stylize the bars in the way he did to create an effect of solidity and imperviousness, in order to convey the extent to which the character on the other side was locked there, and that's just one detail among many for just one comic frame among many in a very long manga book. Zeroing in on the bars in particular while also controlling all the other details and framing with AI would be incredibly difficult and arduous. It would probably be faster for a skilled artist just to draw them himself, not even counting the superior quality (especially in terms of exactness) he would undoubtedly achieve. Furthermore, while there are many non-artists who claim they have 'ideas in their head' just as good as the man who drew this scene, the truth is that in order to conceive this scene in its full panoply of detail, you need to have a highly developed artistic skillset in the first place. That is to say, to even know that you ought to stylize the bars in a given way to achieve a particular effect, you need to already be fairly well trained in this kind of art, what its potentials are and how they are craft-wise achieved, because the art is more in its buildup of details and controlled effects than any central, floating idea. So the notion that AI would allow non-artists to get those ideas out of their heads and onto the page through bypassing the actual need to learn the foundations of a craft ends up being inert.
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