for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.
Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.
Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.
And so on.
The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.
But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.
If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.
But they wouldn't understand any of it.
That's ChatGPT.
And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.
But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.
good for him. this man had a vision and he made it happen. homie hiked into the desert, changed into his sluttiest armor and positioned himself just so in front of a blade of grass to hide his shlong.
I yearn to be able to live with this kind of whimsy.
First Contact, a short story from Runaway to the Stars. Talita, having grown up in human foster care, was about 5 years old when she first met another centaur.
This is one of many rotating habitats in Nexus Jovia, a space station megacity in high orbit of Jupiter. The spherical structure is something like a looping valley, with centrifugal “gravity” that decreases exponentially the further you walk up the the sides. The Capital Ball district is the center of most governmental functions for the polity of Jovia, but it’s also a bit of a tourist hotspot.
Read this in a pdf format here! Read more stories from Talita’s childhood here and here!
More comics on PATREON | STORE | Runaway to the Stars
Here's some of the notes, starting with the things multiple people brought up:
SHRIMP COCKTAIL:
banahbanah: #flashback to that one fic where Peter Parker frets about drinking shrimp cocktail because of the alcohol
generaldeliciousness: adding: what a prawn/shrimp cocktail is
#why is your character turning it down because they're under 21 #do you think prawn cocktail is a cocktail #this lives in my brain rent-free constantly #the rest of the fic was so normal #and good enough that i'll still re-read it #but bro
And then many, MANY, people wondering if this was actually authour mistake, since Peter really would do this!
POMEGRANATES:
zhajhassa: #haha where's that post that was like someone describing someone eating a pomegranate but they ate it like an apple
thornhands: #once someone wrote persephone biting into a whole Pomegranate #had to stop and stare at a wall for a minute
sungsingsanguine: I once saw someone very confidently write about a character eating slices of pomegranate.
FRUIT TREES:
zagreuses-toast: #given a very endearing glimpse into a writers blindspots by seeing them describe someone sitting under a ''pineapple tree''
salatrash: I remember something about picking watermelons... OF A FUCKING TREE
baander: #cranberry trees
DOUGH/BATTER:
maycelium: #I'm a chef so I'm really used to people not accurately describing how to cook food #But I was surprisingly flabbergasted when someone was writing making a cake and was kneading it. Which uh #Not necessary for cake. It was interesting for sure but just bizarre
livebloggingmydescentintomadness: #the one that drove me nuts was when a character set aside a batch of PASTA DOUGH 'to rise' #pasta doesn't have yeast!! #it does need to REST but it will never RISE #you do not want an airy crumb on your noodles
lovesodeepandwideandwell: #THE ONE WHERE THEY MADE COOKIES BY LADLING BATTER INTO A TRAY
Some other topics:
ANIMALS:
catenarwhal: #mandatory 'how cows produce milk' mention#i'll never recover from that one I fear
piromantic: #one time i saw someone fake their way through describing how spiders behave
pluto-lichen: horses
misskittypotter: #stardew valley faking its way through what fresh fish smell like
pa-pa-plasma: #saw someone faking their way through knowing what a seal is once #i still am fucked up over that one to this day. they just straight up did not know #& they were NOT good at guessing it either like it was clear they had never googled that animal ever #& was only just now realizing via answering questions from anons that seals are not!! what they assumed. initially
SEX:
dykevandyke: #what a prostate is #and where it is located #as in. external.
dreamyeyedrose: #I remember back in the ff.net days reading an Ichigo/Renji fic where the writer assumed the penises go inside each other #and I was like “I mean I don't know how it works for sure I don't have one but idk if that's how it works”
SOME OTHER FOOD STUFF:
thetrekkiehasthephonebox: #add another one to the list bloggers#this character is cooking a salad
shosta: #still baffled about the published work that didn't know food could freeze
sun-dari: #once i read a fic where the author didn't understand cinnamon
alto-tenure: #read something recently where the author was just. blatantly wrong about spices
dramatic-dolphin: #i saw someone try to fake their way through what ramen is once. like 14 years ago.#but i remember.#i was very confused about ramen for a few months. they were writing it so authoritatively.
the-celery-stalks-at-midnight: #i will never ever forget someone putting leftover fries in the microwave to reheat them and setting the timer for five minutes
typeghost: #this sparked a memory of a hannibal fic where the author had to fake their way through writing about gravy
draculin: #the one fanfic where the author knows about coffee only as a concept wrote a character as a coffee drinker#was very interesting#I don't remember the fandom or the plot but I was mesmerized by the coffee actions and choices
11235811235811: #there's a lot of faking their way thru congee in the svsss fandom i'll also note
fishali3n: #read one where the person clearly didnt know what tofu is
emmy-everafter: #in the aftermath of shadow and bone s2 i saw a lot of people pretending to know what stroopwafels are #babes they are more like cookies than breakfast waffles #like yes there is a waffle pattern but you're not gonna cut into a stack of them with syrup and sugar#🤣🤣🤣
NON-FOOD STUFF:
red-umbrella-811: Shoutout to Dame Agatha Christie for faking her way through what a wrench is in a very popular published work.
bluebeetle: #once saw someone have a character put an entire phone book in their pocket
nonametis: #- sex talk in languages other than english #<- or just the petnames in a different language other than English
sadisticpony: #the fanfiction i saw this week where op DIDNT KNOW HOW AUTOMATIC DOORS WORKED #and that they arent in peoples homes!!! of course. also opening the automatic door for someone is unironically very funny but its not #its not like. grabbing the door handle to let someone in. helpppp
danmeichael: #reminds me of the fic with the figure drawing class where the character started with the feet. #i love you feet first figure drawing author
meowmix1100blr: #me watching this one fic absolutely obliterate what the board of directors does
vexedhexes: #one time i read an architect character making a doorway bigger by building a bigger door #what a beautiful world. #OH. also gravity falls fic where they go 'oh piedmont is in california so its warm all year round'
leveragehunters: #characters going to a beer garden #And it's literally a garden outside the pub#It was a very cute mistake
fitofpique: #yes! #grown men do not get blind drunk off two beers #but i am possibly guilty of the hypothermia one #assuming it does not make you very horny?
dadvans-likes: #always thinking abt the soup kitchen fic #the entire setting of the fic was 'soup kitchen' #and i very quickly realized #the author did not know what a soup kitchen was #and they thought that soup kitchens only served soup #fic
msmargaretmurry: #i love fanfiction #once read a fic where the characters played 20 questions #but the author seemed to not know how to play 20 questions and was just kind of winging it........ #immaculate
shakespeareaddict: #Look I know not all of us are hockey experts #But it takes about ten seconds of research or any attention paid to the show to realize #That the Stanley cup playoffs are not in fucking September
baejax-the-great: #the funniest one i saw #was someone faking what church is like #like 1. they really didn't have to write an entire church experience for their fic #and 2. they had clearly never even watched a show where people went to church #it was bonkers weird
twosunson: #things ive seen authors faking #knowing how to unclog a drain #knowing. literally any history #knowing what ketamine looks like (apparently- oregano) #(you know who you are)
waterhorseyblues-ao3: #beltane being celebrated in winter #wales being portrayed as a completely separated land from england (i wish) #characters getting up after weeks of bedrest like that dosnt completely fuck you up
violetfairydust: #i once read a fic where the flight time from london to seattle was 3 hours
purekesseltrash: One time, in a fic set specifically in Des Moines, IA, two of the characters casually drove 20 minutes to the ocean. The memory continues to delight me. I want to know where that author thought that Iowa was.
One of the most spiritually profound moments of my life was when I was sixish and at a natural history museum with my parents that had a whale skeleton hanging from the ceiling.
I remember my dad picking me up to sit on his shoulders (possibly one of the last times he did that because I was getting too big to hold there for long) so I could be close to it's flipper because he wanted to show me something. He had me hold up my arm parallel to the whale's, and explained that we had the same bones, pointing to it's scapula and humerus and radius and ulna and so on while poking the same bones in my skinny little arm, all they way down to the tips of my fingers and it's own.
And in that moment, I could suddenly see how the whale and I were the same animal, just stretched and shrunk into different proportions by nature. There was an entire exhibit with skeletons of different animals and we went through all of them, picking out the hands and faces of all of them on myself.
I had never felt such a profound connection to the world around me before as I realized on a visceral level that not only was I related to all these creatures, they were very literally my distant cousins, and that in a way, they were me from back then and I was them from now, and we all were others still from the future.
Every living thing on earth is your cousin. The most distantly related humans are your 50th cousins. Chimps are your several thousandth cousins. An octopus is your 25 millionth cousin. Trees are your billionth cousins. You and I are surrounded by family. And that makes me feel profoundly loved.
So thanks dad, for pulling your shoulder a bit to show me that I am part of the universe. I love you too.
I love this incredibly niche complaint! Get some heritage breeds, they do totally still exist. Same could likely be said about some other animals like pigs, sheep, and cows.
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