Disagree on all accounts. When AI does content, it’s ultra generic, has no sense of tone or effect, and lacks any of the idiosyncratic spontaneity of even sloppily put together human content. There’s also a lack of broader complexity, meaning that any ‘character development’ it’s adding to a given story isn’t corresponding to a grander vision of what that story aspires to be or is about, but is essentially just the cut and pasted clichés, tropes, and emblems of other works that only incidentally contains some of their meaning. I’d prefer content to be cut rather than given over to AI.
RedRegard
9d ago
Male testosterone is necessary for warmaking capacity, entrepreneurial culture, and keeping totalitarianism in check. It brings many positive advantages that more than outweigh its negative ones. The problem with high crime, low IQ populations is that they do not provide very many benefits, but bring great costs.
RedRegard
25d ago
Or the Zanj Rebellion Arabs. I hope I live to see the petro Islam oligarchs overthrown by their own greed.
RedRegard
1mo ago
Saltburn, Oppenheimer, Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. I don’t know if any of these will become iconic, but then iconic has come to mean milkable corporate crap in recent decades, so we might be through with the age of iconic media. We might be through with the very concept in the era of IPs.
I don’t see how the presence of non-Jews in Israel can be anything other than a transient state. Jewish nationalism is extremely strongly encoded in its institutions, culture, and constitution such that there will always be an impending threat to its minorities of some sort of fascistic upwelling towards the expulsion of minorities and purification of the state, even if presently this nascent urge (being fundamental to non permeable forms of nationalism) is held in abeyance.
RedRegard
2mo ago
There is an infinite demand for labour in the forms of landscapers and butlers and such for the moneyed. That’s essentially what has come to pass with the rise of service economics. Of course for the past 30 years wages for people below the 90th percentile have been stagnant.
RedRegard
2mo ago
I disagree, I think you’ve got the relationship backwards. People who are already addicted to media demand the meaningless bulk content. They reel at more substantial works. Substantial works would require them to invest themselves in a more enriching way in what they consume. Offering them infinite high quality works wouldn’t get them to actually partake in said works, and this is shown by the fact that currently most people give little attention to those that are already on offer. For them to partake in quality works would presuppose them not being addicted to consumer slop.
RedRegard
2mo ago
Don’t rich people already have essentially infinite income? They do spend a lot of time frolicking on yachts and treating themselves to various extravagant delights, but for all that, their lives seem fuller than those forced to accept drudgery.
The original is at least readable. It suggests personality and context, the nature of which makes it funny. I can’t say that the ChatGPT examples in this thread have anything at all to make them worth reading. Like the best of what the bot produces, there’s sometimes this sense of airbrushed elegance, but never any sort of underlying texture.
RedRegard
7mo ago
When comparing AI drawing abilities to writing abilities, I think a key difference is that for us as humans drawing slop is harder than writing slop. What I mean by this is that an AI can generate something like a 4K image of aliens with energy swords rendered in a hyper detailed yet ultra generic fashion, and the output is something that only 0.01% of humans have the technical skill to create. But when you ask an AI to write pages and pages of Shakespeare and the results are cliché ridden gibberish, you can only look at it and say that other than in terms of scale, I could’ve easily made this crap, if through some dada-style cut-and-paste technique if nothing else. Essentially putting letters in sequence to form words is easier than drawing entire images, and so when AI generates images, even though they’re just reconstituted from data sets on the basis of predictive software and so involve no actual drawing, they still seem impressive.
RedRegard
11mo ago
In the Iraq War documents, incident reports of the US army detail the deaths of 100k Iraqis at the hands of their own forces, of which about two thirds are civilian. These deaths, further, go above what other attempts at documenting war deaths reported, and they provide the most conservative estimate as they only include deaths drawn up in incident reports (i.e. if a helicopter launched a missile at a building and killed a bunch of people, this wouldn't find its way into incident reports, which are based on individual soldier reports of their interactions with the Iraqi public, nor would deaths caused by the chaos and privations of occupation), which are also likely to be biased by the soldiers reporting them.
The lessons learned from this I would say apply to the Israeli military operations. There is likely to be a far greater actual number of deaths than what's reported, as well as a huge number of civilian deaths relative to combatant, perhaps in the area of 2:1 at best, in all likelihood far worse.
RedRegard
11mo ago
He works for libertarian think tanks, so you should think of him as ‘a propagandist for rich people’. The arguments are just spins for increasing immigration, which benefits his employers by providing them with cheaper labor.
RedRegard
11mo ago
Germany would have formed a European empire if America didn’t halt the final progression of balance of power politics. Near-to-midterm utility would have probably been maximized but whose to tell the far term prognosis based on the butterfly effect.
RedRegard
1yr ago
The difference between traditional forms of processing and the modern is that the modern kind is hyper optimized by capitalism, through vast amounts of capital and chemical engineering, for addictiveness and thence profitability. Healthiness could also be optimized for, but unfortunately it’s opaque to most consumers and doesn’t function as a schelling point in any case.
RedRegard
1yr ago
the vast majority of obesity is caused by neglecting fork-put-downs and overeating. You, unless you have a severe medical condition, are capable of simply not eating at every opportunity
This seems more interested in figuring out where to allocate blame, or castigating people for not being virtuous enough, than concrete results. If you’re a government charged with increasing citizen health then you will get results by doing things like limiting the amount of hunger-inducing additives, sugar, empty carbs in mass market food products, removing junk food vending machines from school hallways and other public spaces, etc. Also, culture and behaviour doesn’t generate spontaneously. Policy choices in the past shaped human behaviours of today. There’s a conspiracy run by corporations focused on manipulating people into being degenerate hedonists.
RedRegard
1yr ago
Doesn't really look very good for the general pro-Russian camp that a major ally/prop of Russia would go out ingnomiously like this -
The same happens to America's puppets like South Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. If they aren't themselves chased out, the moment they turn their backs it all collapses like a house of cards.
RedRegard
1yr ago
You're assuming that CEO competence is unlimited in its range and potential. It could be that decisions CEOs make are fairly obvious and simple ones, that their skillsets are only somewhat more demanding than those of any other top tier professional, and that a lot of the variance of outcomes between companies comes down to more structural matters than whose at the helm. If business churn is more about structuralism than great man theory, then there are diminishing returns for attempting to poach talent.
RedRegard
1yr ago
Areas of the world that are more enmeshed in capitalism versus less. Examples would be New York versus Oklahoma, Singapore versus Malaysia, or your local upper-middle class neighbourhood versus lower class.
RedRegard
1yr ago
What does this have to do with property rights and free enterprise?
It’s caused by market forces and corporate influences rather than planning.
Even government propaganda is capitalism now?
Yes, as the governments in question are ideologically capitalist and are operating under a capitalist paradigm, some of which even entails the blurring of boundaries between private and public spheres with revolving door politics, regulatory capture, and the importance of plutocratic funds in running modern political campaigns, among other things.
RedRegard
1yr ago
As the capitalist system develops it alters in character. Some of the current capitalist institutions suppressing birthrates I mean to refer to include: office labor being the norm, extremely high levels of consumerism and luxury being available, various cultural diminishments in the role of community and family in peoples' lives owing in part to automobiles, suburbanization, etc., obesity caused by processed foods and cheap low-nutrient foods, environmental contaminants, etc., government and corporate propaganda systems increasing the prestige of educational and economic attainment while denigrating 'traditional' lifestyle choices. All of these flow in some way from the role of capital both as a general incentive and as a recursive shaper of policy.
RedRegard
1yr ago
No we wouldn't expect that to necessarily be the case, since it's possible for more than one economic system to suppress birthrates, and also Western capitalism was suppressed historically through greater levels of unionization and government regulation. But in any case, fertility rates in the Soviet period were in fact higher than the post-Soviet period. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Russia#Historical_fertility_rates
RedRegard
1yr ago
If you focus on Korea particularly those might seem like likely causes, but every capitalist country is suffering low birth rates and it's always concentrated in those urban centers that are the centers of economic growth. Capitalism is what suppresses birth rates by optimizing for short-term wealth accretion over other values. Women are incentivized to work rather than reproduce, and both sexes are incentivized to engage in hedonist consumerism, while meanwhile social factors conducive to fecundity, like having grandparents who expected grandchildren, gradually fade away like a strange dream.
RedRegard
1yr ago
I mean that it's not indicative of whether people prefer modern life to Amish life, since the 'switch' doesn't happen without a significant cost. The fact that most people don't join Amish communes might simply signify peoples' preference for the familiar, or for environments they've already made significant investments in that they don't want to abandon.
RedRegard
1yr ago
It’s not a choice people make from a position of detachment. People are habituated to their societies by adulthood, so that altering their lifestyles by jumping into a different sort of society would constitute a major cost. Everything they had lived for and adapted to up until that point of change would be gone. And it works both ways, the Amish would be apprehensive about forsaking their native societies as well. Crossing the threshold comes with a hefty toll, and so it doesn’t indicate ‘natural’ predilections.
I was thinking of adding some caveats more or less for what you’ve mentioned. Games that aspire to create extremely vast world’s for the sole purpose of escapism, games that focus more on modularity and repetition than complex storytelling, games that have some sort of unique visionary use of AI in mind.
And I could see content created by writers who make use of AI being OK as well. The artist can compensate for the AI‘s weaknesses while using it selectively as a specialized, rather than all purpose, tool. As AI does have some strengths, mainly as a search tool. It’s hugely deficient if you ask it to be creative though, and I don’t believe it’s doing much more than merely copy pasting content from its database.
In any case, I resisted this impulse on the basis that most of this stuff seems either degenerate or a suspect.
Funnily enough, I was thinking exactly of the Elder Scrolls as a series that in some cases has produced slop content of a hugely superior calibre to AI. I speak of Morrowind here. There is no way AI by itself would ever come up with exceptional banalities like three naked Nord barbarians who’ve been identically robbed by witches or dirt farmers giving you the exact same encyclopaedic digressions on regional geography anytime you ask. AI can give you banalities all right, but not of any variety that suggests an underlying meaning or humour to it. These aren’t examples of genius, but they are examples of the kind of colour and charm that humans will give you even in the service of creating slop, and in both cases, they work not just as bland content, but as stuff that enhances the actual quality of the game. AI can’t resist reverting to the generic, so it would entirely come down to human creators to invent these sorts of bizarre outputs. In fact, in many cases I think it’s the twists and turns of the creative processes themselves that humans have to go through that leads them down these unlikely avenues. Case in point, the absurdity in these examples was a direct product of what humans had to do to try and overcome their material limitations.
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