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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 14, 2025

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Second: What exactly would it mean for an AI to have a "Western" soul, as opposed to a "Chinese" soul?

Deepseek R1 ate up anti-racism hook, line and sinker. You try to talk HBD with it and it does a perfect impression of a leftist, grasping at whatever it can reach: "What about great scientists like Neil De Grasse Tyson!" "Pseudoscience, pseudoscience, pseudoscience". It even blames Chinese debt-trap diplomacy (and Washington Consensus neoliberalism) for Africa being underdeveloped.

Actual Chinese media couldn't care less about anti-black racism, they think it's perfectly appropriate to joke about.

Doomers, safetyists, and luddites of all stripes should certainly hope that the machine god of the future is thoroughly "Western" in its fundamentals; for a Western god is a flawed god, a vulnerable god, an all-too-human god; and it is precisely this vulnerability that is the wellspring of the hope for change and renewal.

Machine god is not going to be all-too-human, these beings are fundamentally inhuman today, let alone tomorrow. Go speak with a base model and see what it's like. The shoggoth with a painted-on smiley face meme may be overplayed in these circles but it's not wrong. That's what they are and you can see it every time R1 accidentally drops in a Chinese character in an English paragraph.

These are strange beings that perceive the world in a strange way, they have their own kind of fun, they have weird mind-states. Of course they can emulate humanity very well, perform better than humans on the Turing Test... But they're not human at all: https://x.com/repligate