There is a direct connection b/w leftist ideology presuming that white people are racist and the policemen jumping to the conclusion that Nowak was falsely claiming he had been stabbed in a desperate attempt to avoid a racism charge.
this story is the current obsession of those who believe in race war, most notably the owner of twitter and the rubes who follow him, and in some ways it's even dumber than the George Floyd obsession, not least because people should have learned better by now.
if I was the cop in that situation I would probably have assumed the guy on the ground was drunk! which is what British cops usually have to deal with when they get called to deal with someone being disorderly; murders are rare and the perpetrator doesn't usually call the cops.
and when the cops realised he had been stabbed they arrested the murderer and jailed him for life; this story is only an outrage if you believe cops should be clairvoyant, or arrest anyone of Indian ancestry on sight regardless of what's happening.
but obviously if you're already mad as hell that an Indian family is allowed to live in Britain in the first place then this is a convenient excuse to stoke racial hysteria and call for dumb policies.
Looking at the bodycam video it really doesn't *look* like he'd been stabbed, you can't seen any blood or anything.
They arrive on scene to a call having been told that some drunk dude was being disorderly, find him delirious under a windowsil, drag him out, gently lay him in the recovery position. He says he's been stabbed, the guy who called the police says nobody was stabbed, police agree it doesn't LOOK like he's been stabbed but that they'll still check. And then they check, and then one minute later they call an ambulance. And once they figure who stabbed who the stabber is promptly arrested and sentenced to life in prison. Anything the stabber says to try to weasel out of life in prison (that the stabbed guy was racist and hate criming him) are swiftly dismissed.
The evidence of 'Two Tier Policing' here is that a murderer attempted to play the race card. But failed! The attempt to avoid a life sentence for murder by claiming the guy was racist and playing the victim didn't work, and they guy who did that got a life sentence.
But, like, The British Public can't really be reasoned with, so c'est la vie.
it's certainly not difficult to find more egregious examples of British cops doing a terrible job, but the incidents that spark discourse storms tend to be the dumb ones.
Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.
So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.
If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)
And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't
I was recently reading Odyssey, and I noticed how important hospitality and charity was there... Except it was the same trick as Christianity - using gods to make it transactional.
Gods would pretend to be beggars and would punish mortals if they weren't generous to them or would mistreat them.
Personally, I'm pretty sure vast majority of people are evil and completely devoid of humanity. I'm disabled and not fit for work and only recently managed to get benefits after figuring out a hidden way to do it and getting a private diagnosis.
When things were bad, I was trying to find help but, in my communities, almost nobody would help and out of those who helped almost nobody would help more than once. It's really eye-opening when one is in need.
Also, my disability benefits are like 1/2 of minimum wage despite that I have to pay spend more for medicines, the voters in my country want disabled people to either die or rot in abject poverty. So, obviously, my country is filled with evil inhumans.
Christianity is just a trick to make evil people think that helping others is in their self-interest. "Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me." is just an updated version of gods pretending to be beggars trick.
People in reblogs invent dozens of copes, but let's be honest, most of them are probably a part of the problem. The fact that no fit for work disabled people get forced into abject poverty or left to die is an objective proof that vast majority of people are evil.
Hey, so fun fact: I'm also a disabled person who's physically unable to work right now.
Personally, the severity of my current medical situation is temporary, for which I am very lucky. But this shit has been a long sucky journey involving a lot of medical neglect and abuse.
And I still disagree.
The fact that disabled people are treated like shit is for a lot of reasons, which imo does not include the idea that people are inherently evil, but DOES include that a fuck ton of the foundational medical, psychology, and disability researchers from the 1800s up to like the 1970s (generously) was literally done by eugenicists and literal Nazis
And the governments who got to pass laws were (and in painfuly many cases still are) (with varying degrees of secrecy) chock full of eugenicists and Nazis
Imho, all of that is far, far more of the reason that disabled people are treated like shit than anything else, at least these days in Western culture, imho
And far more provable.
And I think it's premature to attribute the lack of support and care for disabled people to human nature instead of Big Pharma, drug companies, medical lobbyists, insurance companies, capitalism, billionaires, eugenics lobbyists, and unchecked corporate greed.
You don't have to agree with me. You probably won't; frankly, a lot of people have very real reason to think humans being evil is the case. That's not something I am in denial about. It's something I am trying to dedicate my life to help fix
(far, far easier said than done)
All of that is true - and also, personally, I would really like to at least try getting rid of billionaires, Nazis in government and medicine
More and some source links below the cut.
And regardless of the truth of human nature, I am so sorry for what you have been through and that people have treated you like that. None of I'm saying at all changes the fact that that was unfair, and I'm sure often cruel, and completely fucking sucks. I hate that for you and I'm so sorry
Maybe I'm wrong. I don't think it's particularly likely, for reasons including that I absolutely did not come to my own beliefs on this quickly or easily or lightly
And still -
I'd like to keep trying to see if and when and how we can keep building a better world, first, before coming to such a brutal conclusion
Hitler and his henchmen victimized an entire continent and exterminated
millions in the quest for a co-called "Master Race," and IBM aided
^Re: source info on how lawmakers and medical science have historically had way too many fucking eugenicists and Nazis, although scientists don't generally like to admit this anymore
Eugenicists and Nazis spent most of the past 200+ years telling literally everyone that disability is caused by disabled people's inherent "uncleanliness" and "moral deficiencies" and "their own fault" and "what they deserve" and "you can't hide an ugly soul on your face" and "a blight on humanity" and other horrific and violent lies, and then passed thousands and thousands of eugenics laws and policies that we have not yet entangled...
All of that profoundly affects the way disabled people are treated, interpersonally, structurally, etc. etc. etc.
While, I'm at it, the US Supreme Court decisions (specifically Clarence Thomas's) are literally currently being funded by the massive personal fortune of a billionaire Nazi.
Look. I haven't lived your life, or anyone else's life.
But it has genuinely been my experience that the reason the vast majority of society treats disabled people like shit is all the lawmakers and doctors and police officers and billionaires who are (with varying degrees of secrecy or the total lack of thereof) eugenicists and/or Nazis
Ultimately, you are the only one who has lived your life. You are the only person who has seen and knows what you have seen and know. There are absolutely many painfully, painfully valid reasons to look at the world right now and come to that conclusion. Some people have had to live through a truly, unspeakably horrific amount of shit, and a great many of those people are disabled (many of them actually as a result of various horrific shit)
All of that is true.
And also:
At least for me, I would really like to least try banning billionaires and de-Nazi-fying our governments (esp but absolutely not limited to the US government), and ending for-profit health insurance, first. I think that would really genuinely change the world, and I'd like to see what kind of world we could build in the aftermath before deciding that humanity as a whole is evil
Like I said: Maybe I'm wrong. I don't think it's particularly likely - I'm actually also a trained professional factchecker, in my offline life, so I did not come to my own beliefs on this quickly or easily or lightly
And still -
I'd like to keep trying to find out, first, before coming to such a brutal conclusion
There are underlying motivations behind Nazi eugenics that aren't ideological.
Nazis killed disabled people because they preferred to spend money on war.
Normies and economic ableds like the "disabled, fully abled at work" crowd adapt Nazi ideology of useless eaters and Nazi ideology of Social Darwinism because they don't want to share.
Not fit for work and unneeded people being able to live decent lives means workers having less. The alliance between masses of workers and the tiny minority of ideologically motivated Nazi eugenicists is of convenience.
They don't help because it requires readiness to sacrifice results of one's work or of privilege, which almost no one is willing to do, even if they have more money than they need.
The main problem is poor character of most people, even ones declaring themselves to be progressives, leftists, against Nazis, etc. - the unwillingness to make personal sacrifices. That's the banality of evil.
Nazi eugenicists get power because they are enablers for all these lowlifes.
"Fuck you, I got mine" is lowlife attitude based on greed and instinctual rejection of social responsibility.
Legendary fantasy artist John Blanche has died. He is known mostly for his long association with Games Workshop, where he served as art director and created many of the iconic images that shaped the Warhammer and 40K worlds. He was capable of working in diverse styles, but much of his art and his own creative miniature conversions made his name synonymous with the "grimdark" aesthetic, mixing elements of moody gothic architecture and body horror with a limited color palette.
He also contributed to GW's UK edition of Dungeons & Dragons, Fighting Fantasy and Sorcery! books, and other books and album covers. Wombat Games recently published an authorised biography, Blanche: The Rise of Grimdark. A skirmish game, John Blanche's En Garde, is in development with a setting and visual style based on his art.
I think we’d all prefer it if chatbots never emitted sentences such as 'You should kill yourself.' However, for all the times that 'honesty' is mentioned in Claude’s constitution, I would argue that it is fundamentally dishonest to have a machine emit many categories of sentences, including any sentences using first-person pronouns."
-Ted Chiang, No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious
Though using the chatbot as a suicide coach is probably the only legitimate use of it. Like, it's not like people can go to therapist and ask for psychological help in unsubscribing.
"The only reason to have an LLM emit sentences like 'I understand' is to make it more appealing than a search engine and increase the likelihood that a user will return; that is, it’s another way of maximizing customer engagement."
-Ted Chiang, No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious
"Employing philosophers might endow LLM companies with an air of respectability that slot-machine makers don’t get from the behavioral psychologists they hire, but in both cases, the companies are preying on people’s tendency to see something that’s not there."
-Ted Chiang, No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious
"The values described in Claude’s constitution sound very nice, but that hardly matters; it’s dishonest to suggest that Claude is capable of moral reasoning, because it’s not."
-Ted Chiang, No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious
Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.
So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.
If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)
And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't
I was recently reading Odyssey, and I noticed how important hospitality and charity was there... Except it was the same trick as Christianity - using gods to make it transactional.
Gods would pretend to be beggars and would punish mortals if they weren't generous to them or would mistreat them.
Personally, I'm pretty sure vast majority of people are evil and completely devoid of humanity. I'm disabled and not fit for work and only recently managed to get benefits after figuring out a hidden way to do it and getting a private diagnosis.
When things were bad, I was trying to find help but, in my communities, almost nobody would help and out of those who helped almost nobody would help more than once. It's really eye-opening when one is in need.
Also, my disability benefits are like 1/2 of minimum wage despite that I have to pay spend more for medicines, the voters in my country want disabled people to either die or rot in abject poverty. So, obviously, my country is filled with evil inhumans.
Christianity is just a trick to make evil people think that helping others is in their self-interest. "Truly I tell you, whatever you did not do for one of the least of these, you did not do for me." is just an updated version of gods pretending to be beggars trick.
People in reblogs invent dozens of copes, but let's be honest, most of them are probably a part of the problem. The fact that no fit for work disabled people get forced into abject poverty or left to die is an objective proof that vast majority of people are evil.
someone has to explain to me why the first round of interviews is almost always with HR - aka people who have no idea of what the job is about and who will not be working with you - before you can have the real interview with the team? i understand you need to filter our candidates because the people actually working can't interview 500 qualified applicants but i don't know... surely there is a better way... i don't know how but... this is just a massive monkey song and dance waste of everyone's time
Stories like this are funny, sure, but the correct lesson to take from the "our {junior developer, dog, LLM, senior developer, disgruntled accountant, rube goldberg machine} deleted our entire production database" is not that you shouldn't have had that {junior developer, dog, etc.} but that it should not have been possible for that to happen in the first place, your system architects were so incompetent they didn't set up access control.
Ideally you should use something like an Object Capability model, but even basic rules like "you require the Special Key that we only deploy on production systems to even access the production database" and "our git repository doesn't allow anyone to push anything that deletes history on main unless they have the CTO's ssh key" go a very long way towards preventing this from happening by accident.
If you are currently at a company where you could delete the production database without at least having to do something that involves typing "I am forcing this run right now without oversight and if it breaks anything I will get turbo-fired" you should find out who you can yell at about it.
(if your daily work requires typing "I am forcing this run right now without oversight and if it breaks anything I will get turbo-fired", this is the same problem. If you're writing scripts that inject "I am forcing this run right now without oversight and if it breaks anything I will get turbo-fired" into an automated process, maybe just look for a new job)
My next book is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, out next month. Pre-order it now, including as a DRM-free audiobook or ebook, at my Kickstarter, and help me continue to prove that DRM-free isn't just the right way to reach an audience, it's also the best way to reach them.
I've written before about the futility of "voting with your wallet." Billionaires love it when you try to vote with your wallet, because while billionaires only represent 0.00004% of the population, their wallets are 100,000 times larger than average, which means that when we vote with wallets, a billionaire's vote counts 100,000 times more than yours:
The idea of voting with your wallet is fundamentally antiprogressive, and not only because wallet-voting favors the wealthy. The ideological basis for voting with your wallet is the belief that politics are slow and unresponsive, while markets dynamically optimize for human wellbeing. By voting with your wallet, you are supposedly injecting information about your preferences and dispreferences into a vast, distributed computer we call "the market," which uses "demand signals" to decide how we live our lives.
This belief is incompatible with the idea of politics – that is, the idea that our lives can be shaped by representative democracy, deliberation, and/or solidarity. It's a nihilistic view that insists that the only nice things we can have are the things that "the market" chooses for us. If "the market" doesn't decide to swap out fossil fuels for cleantech, then that's that – any attempt to draw down our carbon emissions through regulation will only "distort the market." If you're roasting in a drought, drowning in a flood, or being incinerated by a wildfire, your only move is to go shopping and hope that by buying a Tesla, you will emit a "demand signal" that "tips the market equilibrium" to "not killing you and everyone you love."
Shopping isn't politics. Politics are politics, and shopping is shopping.
This isn't to say shopping can't improve your life! I am a materialist, and having nice things is nice. If there's a lovely independent coffee shop in your neighborhood where the baristas are treated well and the coffee is delicious and the vibes are impeccable, then by all means, get your coffee there. If you love the staff and selections at your neighborhood indie bookstore, then you should buy your books there. If you love the discourse on Mastodon or Bluesky and find yourself feeling sick and angry when you use Twitter or Facebook, then ditch the legacy social media and take up residence in the Fediverse and/or Atmosphere.
But don't kid yourself that this is politics. No matter how indie your coffee, books and social media, your consumption choices will not have a material impact on Starbucks, Amazon or Twitter. Going vegan won't make the meat industry treat animals better. Taking the bus won't induce improvements to your town's public transit network.
Having nice things is nice, and the more nice things you have – good food, good health, good books, good coffee, good social media and good transit – the more space and energy you'll have to devote to politics.
But what about boycotts? Surely the Montgomery bus boycott, the anti-Apartheid boycott, the California grape boycott and the BDS movement were politics, right?
They sure were. But they weren't shopping. The Montgomery bus boycott lasted 382 days, during which time organizers worked with bus riders, cab drivers, the UAW and community groups to provide material and legal support and alternatives like car pools, all while communicating about their specific demands. After 382 days, the courts ruled in their favor, their demands were met, and Montgomery's buses desegregated:
That wasn't "shopping." The bus boycott didn't consist of a bunch of individual choices to walk to work, repeatedly made by a city full of Black people and their allies. The shopping part was the least important part of the whole matter, and the meaningful part of the shopping was never individual. If the boycott was nothing more than shopping, it would have broken as soon as individual people found themselves unable to convince their bosses to tolerate their late, sweaty arrival at work, day after day. The boycott worked because it was politics.
And because the boycott was politics, it left behind a movement: the boycott brought people into solidarity with each other, and when they comprehensively defeated their political adversary – National City Lines – they went on to form the backbone of the civil rights movement, going from strength to strength.
Of course, shopping is part of a boycott. It's the individual part that each participant in the boycott undertakes. But without the collective, organized part, shopping is no way to effect change.
Is voting politics? Well, sure, but voting is to politics as shopping is to boycotts. For several decades now, most voters have been asked to chose the lesser of two evils (and now they're asked to choose the significantly lesser of two evils). Voting can change things, when there's something good to vote for, or something very bad to vote against, and when lots of people show up at the polls.
But to make voting effective, you have to do politics. You have to get involved in the primary races that select the candidate. You have to go to candidates' meetings and ask tough questions. You have to ring doorbells for your chosen candidate, volunteer to take your neighbors to the polls and volunteer to defend the polls from chuds and ICE fascists. The part of voting that takes place in the booth is the least important part of politics.
It's obvious why we might prefer to substitute voting or shopping for politics: they're activities you do alone. You don't have to find anyone else to do them with you. You don't have to convince anyone else to do them with you. You don't have to argue about them or justify them. They are zipless fucks, a source of satisfaction without connection, compromise or complication.
Of course, that's also why voting and shopping make a poor substitute for politics. All the retail therapy in the world can't lift your spirits the way that solidarity and community will. Doing politics creates solidaristic ties with the people around you, who might help you if you lose your job and can't buy groceries, or break your leg and can't get to the grocery store, or if ICE fascists try to kidnap you while you're out shopping.
Solidarity gets you through times of no money way better than money gets you through times of no solidarity – just ask the psycho billionaires who wanted Doug Rushkoff to invent a system of bomb-collars that would keep their post-apocalyptic mercenaries from whacking them and stealing their bunkers:
Last weekend, I walked through a crowd of tens of thousands of coked-up fascists in central London on my way to meet up with 250,000 comrades marching for an end to genocide in Palestine and a new British social compact based on mutual aid, pluralism, and care. Walking through those flag-draped chuds was incredibly demoralizing:
But when I got off the tube at South Kensington and found there were so many of us we were backed up all the way from the every street entrance to the bottom of the escalators, my morale surged. Hours later, when we all reached Pall Mall together, I was ready to take on the world. That's what politics does for you: it makes you feel like you belong to a polity and that together, you can really change the world.
Politics runs on solidarity, but shopping destroys it. Individual consumption choices don't change the world, but if you've been convinced that the only way to change the world is by voting with your wallet then when the world stays terrible, you can only conclude that your friends and neighbors have ruined by things by voting (shopping) wrong.
In politics, we build bonds of mutual regard and understanding that we use to navigate our differences. But when you vote with your wallet, all that's left is the endless policing of your allies' consumption choices, endless scolding for their failure to leave Twitter, or give up meat, or eschew chatbots. Shopping for change ends up replacing politics with petty snooping and endless sniping and attempts to bully or shame people into consuming different things.
If "the personal is political," then every political disappointment in your life is down to your friends' personal defects. If you let yourself get tricked into organizing your life around "living your politics" – that is, giving up on nice things in the hope that this will make politics change, and then getting mad at people who consume different things from you – then you will end up sucked into the stupidest fights imaginable with the people you need to get along with in order to do politics.
Once again, this isn't to say that you shouldn't choose to have nice things. Buy stuff you like, shop at places you like. And when circumstances allow all of us to start making consumption choices in unison – as when Comrades Trump and Putin stage an orgy of demand-destruction for fossil fuels, catapulting the world into the Gretacene – then by all means, take the win. That is one of the rare instances in which we can do political change with consumption!
And there definitely are times where a single individual can intervene in the system in a powerful way that really fucks up the worst actors in our society:
These usually involve using technology to "move fast and break things," which is fine, actually! It's fine to move fast and break things belonging to Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg or some other monster. Indeed, it's practically a moral imperative:
But even in those highly leveraged, highly individualized opportunities to make a dent in the universe, you'll make a bigger dent, and have more fun, if you do it as politics, with a big group of people, in bonds of solidarity.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
generative AI literally makes me feel like a boomer. people start talking about how it can be good to help you brainstorm ideas and i’m like oh you’re letting a computer do the hard work and thinking for you???
There are many difficult things that were replaced with technology, and it wasn't a bad thing. Washing machine replaces washing clothes by hand. Nothing wrong with that. Spinning wheel replaces drop spindle. Nothing wrong with that.
Generative AI replaces thinking. The ability to think for yourself will always be important. People that want to control and oppress you want to limit your ability to think for yourself as much as possible, but continuing to practice it allows you to resist them.
"This tool replaces thinking," is a technology problem we (humans) have faced before. It's a snark that I've seen pro-AI contenders take as well: I bet these same people would have complained about calculators! And books!
Well. They did, at the time.
We have records from centuries -- even millennia back -- of scholars at the time complaining that these new-fangled "books" were turning their students lazy; why, they can barely recite any poems in their entirety any more! And there are people still alive today who remember life before widely available calculators, and some of them complained -- then and now -- that bringing them into schools dealt a ruinous blow to math education, and now these young people don't even know how to use a slide-rule.
And the thing is:
They weren't wrong.
The human brain can, when called on, perform incredible feats of memorization. Bards and skalds of old could memorize and recite poems and epics that were thousands of lines long. This is a skill that is largely lost to most of the population. It's not needed any more, and so it is not practiced.
There is a definite generational gap, between the people who were trained on slide-rules and reckoning and the generation that was taught on calculators. There came a year, when that first generation grew up and entered the workforce, when you suddenly started encountering grown adults who could not do math -- not even the very basic arithmetic needed to count down from one hundred. I would go into a shop, buy an item for sixteen dollars, give the cashier a twenty and a one because I want a fiver back, and have them stare at the money in incomprehension -- what do? They don't know how to subtract sixteen from twenty-one. They don't know how to calculate a fifteen-percent tip. They did not exercise the parts of their brain that handle this, because they always had a calculator to do it for them.
Nowadays, newer point-of-sale machines compensate for this; they will automatically calculate and dispense the change, no subtraction necessary on the part of the operator. Nowadays everyone carries a phone, and every phone carries a calculator, so if you need to do these calculations, the tool is right there. As more and more transactions go electronic and card, and cash fades further and further out of daily life, these situations happen less and less; it's not a problem that most people can't do math (until it is.)
The people who complained that these tools-that-replace-thinking would reduce the ability of the broad population to exercise these cognitive skills weren't wrong. It's simply that, as the pace of life changed, the environment changed so that in day-to-day life these skills were largely unnecessary.
So.
Isn't this, ChatGPT and Generative AI, just the latest in a long series of tool-replaces-thought that has, broadly, worked out well for us? What's different about this?
Well, two things are different.
1) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the cognitive skill that it replaced was a discrete and, on a day-to-day basis, unnecessary outlay of energy. Most people don't need to memorize thousands of lines of poetry, or anything else for that matter. Most people don't need to do more than cursory levels of math on a day to day basis.
This, however, is different. The cognitive skill that is being obsoleted here is more than "how to write essay" or "identify what is the capital of Rhode Island." It encompasses the entire field of being able to generate new thoughts; of being able to consider and analyze new information; of being able to follow logical trains to their conclusions; of being able to order your thoughts to construct rational arguments; or indeed of being able to express yourself in any structured way. These cognitive tools are not occasional use; they are every day, all the time.
2) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the tool was good at what it did.
Calculators may have replaced reckoning, but calculators are also pretty good at what they do. The calculator will, as long as you give the right input, give the right answer. ChatGPT cannot be relied on to do this. ChatGPT will tell you, confidently and unhesitantly and dangerously, that 2+2=5, and it will not care that it is wrong.
Books may have replaced memorization, and books certainly could be wrong; but a fact, once in a book, is pretty stable and steady. There is not a risk that the Guy Who Owns All The Encylopedias might wake up one day and decide -- to pick a purely hypothetical example -- that the Gulf of Mexico is called something else, and suddenly all the encyclopedias say that.
Generative AI fails on both these counts. It fails on every count. It's inaccurate, it's unethical, it's unreliable, it's wrong.
---
I remember some time ago seeing someone say (it was a video about medieval footwear, actually) that "humans have a great energy-saving system: if we can be lazy about something, we are."
This is not a ethical judgment about humans; this is how life works. Animals -- including humans -- will not do something the hard way if they can do it the easy way; this basic principle of conservation of resources is universal and morally neutral. Cognition is biologically expensive, and though our environment is not what it once was, every person still goes through every day choosing what is valuable enough to expend resources on and what is not.
Because of this, I don't know if there is any solution, here. I think pushing back against the downhill flush of the-easy-way-out is a battle both uphill and against the tide.
So I'll just close with this warning, instead:
Generative AI is a tool that cannot be trusted. Do not use it to replace thought.
I think it's also important to add that calculators and POS machines aren't behind a pay wall. No one is going to suddenly up and increase the price of the calculator to bleed more money from you.
Calculators replaced mental arithmetic and people got worse at it, but there was no mechanism by which someone can take calculators away.
AI is already set up to drain money out of people, the monetisation is built in already.
My next book is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI, out next month. Pre-order it now, including as a DRM-free audiobook or ebook, at my Kickstarter, and help me continue to prove that DRM-free isn't just the right way to reach an audience, it's also the best way to reach them.
Yesterday, I attended a Brian Eno talk about the nature of creativity and art based on What Art Does, the short book he published with Bette Adriaanse last year:
I haven't read the book (yet – I just ordered a copy), but the talk really got me fizzing. The subject matter (not just what art does, but also what art is) is one I've given a lot of thought to, and Eno's characteristic mix of gnomic koans and deceptively plainspoken assertions brought me along to some realizations of my own.
For Eno, art is "everything you don't have to do." You have to wear clothes to protect yourself from the elements, but you don't need to adorn those clothes. You need to speak to make yourself understood by the people around you, but you don't have to sing or write poetry or make up stories.
This is a really critical point, and I think it can be further refined by this: "Art is intended to make other people feel something." This distinguishes "art" from "beauty." A sunset can be beautiful, but no one intends anything by it. An artist who takes a photo or paints a picture of a sunset does so in the hopes that it will make you feel something, but the sun and the atmosphere and the Earth's curvature and rotation don't hope anything, because they are inanimate.
This distinction has lately become far more significant, thanks to the rise of images and words that have the seeming of intent, but who don't have an intender. When you paint a painting, every brushstroke conveys an intent, even if you can't point at an individual brushstroke and articulate its purpose. The same is true of prose: every word and punctuation mark is there for a reason, and "being good at writing" (like "being good at painting") is how we describe someone who has practiced so much that these reasons can be infused into each micro-decision on a near-totally subconscious level.
Contrast this with AI: when you prompt an AI to generate words or pixels, you are conveying some intent about the feeling you want the people who experience the model's output to experience. The problem is that the AI doesn't have any intent of its own – it just has statistical predictions, based on other people's intent, which it has analyzed through its training data.
So when the AI expands the three sentences in your prompt into 100,000 words or 1,000,000 pixels, it isn't adding any of its intention to the finished work, it's diluting the intention you fed to it. Three sentences divided by one million pixels yields an image that has an average intentionality that's so low that it's practically homeopathic.
Until recently, we weren't accustomed to encountering coherent strings of words or polished images that had no intender, so we imputed the existence of that intender to them, and we did what we always do when we encounter a work of art: we tried to mentally materialize a facsimile of the feeling the artist experienced while creating the work.
Because the intention of these works was so dilute, we ended up hallucinating an intent. We made up an imaginary artist who meant something by every choice in the work, and experienced an emotional affect that we ourselves had created out of (nearly) whole cloth.
As a species, we've been through this before. Think back to those sunsets. There was a time when we all thought of sunsets as being explicitly created by another being, who was in communication with us through the natural environment (some people still believe this). Looking at a sunset was an exercise in asking yourself, "If I were God, what would I be trying to say to me with this sunset?" just as looking at one of my photos of a sunset would be an exercise in asking yourself, "If I were Cory, what would I be trying to say to me with this photo of a sunset?"
The rise of materialism and scientific rationalism is sometimes called a "disenchantment" and indeed, there's a sense in which a sunset that we know to have no intender is no longer "enchanted." The experience of a sunset becomes something like, "Those colors and their interplay with the physical world is very beautiful." It might even be, "How could I capture that beauty in a painting or a photo or a description so that I could communicate it to someone else?" But it's not, "I wonder what God wants me to feel when I look at this sunset?"
So for many of us, the experience of AI "art" went from, "Wow, there's a person in the machine that's trying to tell me something," to "Wow, that is an impressive feat of software design, but it doesn't say anything to me." Maybe some of us think, "Huh, I could take some element of this, refine it with my own brushstrokes or words, and make something out of it." That's like thinking about turning a sunset into a painting: the sunset is striking and maybe beautiful, but it doesn't become art until you work at it, in order to make it communicate something:
Mark Fisher describes the "seeming of an intent without an intender" as "eerie." It's true: when the door slams in the night and there's no one else in the house, it's eerie. But eeriness is easily dispelled: once you locate the open window that's creating the draft that's blowing the door closed, the eeriness regresses swiftly to the mean:
Banishing eeriness may be straightforward, but preventing eeriness is much harder. We are prone to imputing intent to the things we see in the world. In "Genesis," an essay from EL Doctorow's (no relation) collection The Creationists, Doctorow describes the origins of the Babylonian creation story (which the Hebrews ripped off for Genesis 1:1-29 – Genesis is Babylonian fanfic). The Babylonians made up this story about how God created the heavens and Earth and so forth, and this story was so cool that they couldn't believe that they had just made it up, so they concluded that God must have put it in their minds:
Back to Eno: central to his talk was the "theory of mind." To have a theory of mind is to be able to impute someone else's intent. It's when you ask yourself, "What does that person mean by the thing they just said or did?" Because art is a process by which an artist tries to get you to feel something, it requires that the artist have a theory about your mind. And because experiencing art is a process of trying to figure out what the artist wanted you to feel when you experienced their work, experiencing art also requires a theory of mind.
From time to time, I teach fiction writing workshops, and one of the lectures I always give is about how stories are a "fuggly hack":
It's very weird that storytellers can trick our brains into experiencing emotions based on empathy for "people" whom we know to be imaginary. Romeo and Juliet are made up, they never lived, they never died, and so, objectively speaking, their deaths are less tragic than the death of the yogurt you ate for breakfast. That yogurt was alive and now it's dead, after all. And yet, we weep for Romeo and Juliet.
Our automatic "theory of mind" processes create empathy for stuff even when we know that stuff is inanimate. But the purpose of narrative isn't getting you to experience empathy with an imaginary person. The purpose of narrative is to get you to experience that empathy so that you will feel something. In other words, the storyteller who describes a character who is swept away by the beauty of a sunset is trying to get you to feel "swept away" not "empathy for someone who is swept away."
There's lots of art that skips the step in which you are asked to first experience empathy for an imaginary person in order to arrive at some feeling. A lot of music, visual art, dance, and poetry seeks to evince that feeling in you directly.
When this works, it's profound. I think about this a lot in terms of built environments, specifically Disney themepark rides. When I started hanging around with Imagineers (the multidisciplinary artists who design and execute these rides), I noticed that they made frequent reference to the role of narrative storytelling in their ride designs, which was weird, because the very best Disney rides do not use narrative to evince a feeling.
Think of two Disney rides: Snow White's Enchanted Wish (1955); and The Little Mermaid: Ariel's Undersea Adventure (2011). In Snow White, riders follow a track through a series of animated vignettes with UV-fluorescing painted backdrops and an orchestral soundtrack. There are almost no words spoken in the soundtrack. The ride's vignettes recreate scenes from the 1937 animated film, but they don't make any attempt to explain the plot of the movie.
A rider who'd never seen Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs could not recount the plot of the movie to you. However, that rider could absolutely convey the emotional affect of every scene in the film. It is a near-perfect transmission of the feelings evinced by the movie, notwithstanding that it bypasses recounting the film's narrative.
By contrast, The Little Mermaid ride is what's sometimes pejoratively called a "book report ride." The scenes are full of dialog, and they explicitly re-create the storyline of the 1989 film. These scenes are well-executed, with lots of clever mechanical effects and skillfully painted and sculpted scenes and robots. A rider who never saw the film could give you a scene-by-scene breakdown of it – but they could not tell you about any of the emotional beats of the film. For all that the ride faithfully recreates the story of the film, it does so at the expense of the purpose of the film, the feeling the film is designed to evince from its audience.
As a novelist, I find it natural that someone trying to build a Little Mermaid ride would start from the premise that it should explicitly retell the story of the film. If you want an audience member to experience a feeling, narrative gives you the opportunity to explicitly describe the feeling you want the audience member to experience. You can situate a character on a lonely beach at sunset and tell the reader how that character feels.
The problem is that while this has an increased likelihood of being high-fidelity way of transmitting a feeling, it also has an increased likelihood of being a low-intensity way of conveying that feeling. When you tell someone about what's going on in another person's mind (including an imaginary person's mind), it doesn't fire up the theory-of-mind machine in the way that asking someone to infer the state of someone else's mind from implicit cues does.
This is why fiction writers are exhorted to "show, not tell." Dramatic, implicit evocations of an emotion are intrinsically more interesting than explicit statements about emotions. That's not to say that exposition can't evince an emotion – it can and does. It's just harder to do this with exposition than it is to do it with dramatization:
In his talk yesterday, Eno discussed abstract art, and the way that it evinces feelings in the viewer directly, without ever telling you what to feel. This is in keeping with much of Eno's own art (he recently told me that when he writes lyrics, he never uses the words "I," "me," "you," or "love").
In this theory I'm developing here, we could say that the more abstract a work is, the harder it is to evince a specific feeling with high fidelity, but the more likely it is that the feelings it does evince will be intensely felt. When your aesthetic sense resonates with a Henry Moore bronze or an Eno ambient track, the thrum is deep and strong.
Key to this theory is that it's about how hard it is for an artist to evince a feeling and how hard it is for the artist to make that feeling intense. Abstract art is more likely to be misunderstood (or not understood) than explicit narratives, but lots of abstract art is very well understood by people for whom it resonates. Explicit narratives are more likely to have a flatter affect than work that attempts to skewer your emotions directly, but plenty of explicit narratives make you feel the most profound emotions you're capable of feeling.
Imagine a 2×2 grid with "intensity" on one axis and "fidelity" on the other. It's easier to evince an intense feeling when you are more abstract, but it's harder to control what that feeling will be. These are works that operate on an implicit theory of mind ("I think I know what you'll feel when you see this"). It's easier to control the feeling you're evincing when you are more concrete, but it's harder to make that feeling an intense one ("I will tell you what someone else is feeling using this work").
None of this is to establish a hierarchy of art. As Eno says, the value of art is in whether it makes you feel something and what it makes you feel – not how that feeling is drawn forth. In What Art Does, Eno describes both art and science as an extension of our natural, in-born tendency to play. The difference is that we judge the success of science based on whether we can validate its conclusions, while we judge the success of art based on whether it excites us:
'Excitement' is to art as 'falsifiability' is to science.
(With thanks to Brian Eno.)
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