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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30012 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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My brother once put it to me this way: Imagine you have a favorite band with several albums of theirs on your top-faves list. You've followed them for years, or maybe even decades. It's not even necessary for this thought experiment, but for a little extra you've even watched or read interviews with them, so you have a sense of their character, history, etc. And then one day it is revealed to you that all of it was generated by an AI instead of human beings. How would you feel?

I think I would feel a profound sense of loneliness. I would never revisit those albums again. And I don't think this basic feeling can be hacked through with some extra applications of rationalism or what have you. This feeling precedes thinking on a very deep level for me.

I think differing intuitions on this is exactly what makes this such a heated and fascinating culture war topic. My response to this thought experiment is that I'd be mostly neutral, with a bit of positivity merely for it being just incredibly cool that all this meaning that I took out of this music, as well as the backstories of the musicians who created it, was able to be created with AI sans any actual conscious or subconscious human intent.

In fact, this thought experiment seems similar to one that I had made up in a comment on Reddit a while back about one of my favorite films, The Shawshank Redemption, which I think isn't just fun or entertaining, but deeply meaningful in some way in how it relates to the human condition. If it had turned out that, through some weird time travel shenanigans, this film was actually not the work of Stephen King and Frank Darabont and Morgan Freeman and Tim Robbins and countless other hardworking talented artists, but rather the result of an advanced scifi-level generative AI tool, I would consider it no less meaningful or powerful a film, because the meaning of a film is encoded within the video and audio, and the way that video and audio is produced affects that only inasmuch as it affects those pixels (or film grains) and sound waves. And my view on the film wouldn't change either if it had been the case that the film had been created by some random clerk accidentally tripping while carrying some film reels and somehow damaging them in a way as to make the film.

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