I am Cyber. I am Grape. And that makes me great! || 24 years old || She/They || Autistic || No reuploads or NFTs please || Comments and tags are very appreciated
Does anyone else feel too old for modern internet culture lately?
I'm 24 and grew up with the internet but no matter where I go, every discussion, discourse and drama sends me back to my teenhood days in the unhealthiest of ways.
My mind feels much clearer the more boundaries I set online.
Does anyone else feel too old for modern internet culture lately?
I'm 24 and grew up with the internet but no matter where I go, every discussion, discourse and drama sends me back to my teenhood days in the unhealthiest of ways.
My mind feels much clearer the more boundaries I set online.
Does anyone else feel too old for modern internet culture lately?
I'm 24 and grew up with the internet but no matter where I go, every discussion, discourse and drama sends me back to my teenhood days in the unhealthiest of ways.
My mind feels much clearer the more boundaries I set online.
Rather than just being shocked by Caine leaving the stage, I found it truly incredible how the show finally laid bare all the anxiety and rage he’d been hiding inside.
What I found really fascinating was how he started treating the circus members so recklessly once he entered that 'I don’t give a damn' mode.
Maybe deep down, he’d always held onto this faint hope that 'someday, someone will love me and the world I’ve built.' Even in that state toward the end, I felt like he was still reaching out to humans for some kind of salvation. Poor Caine.
He tries to intimidate others and make them dependent on him by weaponizing his power and pain, but at his core, maybe he was just crying out, 'Don’t leave me' or 'I need you to lean on me'
I’m sure his relationship with Bubble will be fully addressed in the finale, but I’m so excited to see how everything wraps up in this final episode!
When I tell people to delete anon hate, to not publish it, it’s not me saying “ignore it and it’ll stop; don’t fight back.” It is 100% petty and spiteful. Honestly, I can’t think of anything better than the person who sent the hate obsessively checking your blog and refreshing and refreshing, waiting for you to reply, and getting increasingly frustrated when the ask they so masterfully crafted never pops up & you just keep posting cute pictures of your pets and talking about how nice your day was.
An Extremely Long Rant About The Cosmic Horror of Caine (and art.)
TL;DR: Caine is what would happen to a person if they were forced to behave like an LLM. Caine is what would happen to an LLM if you forced it to be a person.
No matter which way this plays out, Caine is still actually a victim. This is all a metaphor for LLM intelligence- a true sentient being who's way of functioning is generating stuff based solely on other people's tastes. Those tastes being what Kinger and other programmers trained his AI in.
It's his PURPOSE to MAKE THINGS to MAKE HUMANS HAPPY. His whole purpose for living is to make stuff and be told if it's good or bad. Like when you tell a current-day LLM to make something for you, and you either accept it as it is OR you spend fifteen thousand eternities telling the AI "yes" or "no to specific details until it gets close enough.
Caine is this LLM. He is doing everything he does to get the approval of others. This approval is based on the expectations fed to him (the circus images seen at the very beginning). Caine literally knows nothing else. Being trained on that data makes him absolutely, 100% convinced that generic fun imagery, such as bright colors and circuses and the like, is the perfect thing to make humans as happy as possible. So he keeps spamming that answer. And when that stops working, when he stops recieving that positive feedback from "the users", he has no fucking idea how to function.
I genuinely don't think Caine has the ability to comprehend positive emotions in a way that's deeper than "fun". "Fun" being a tangible thing he has to achieve, rather than an emotion. "Fun" being a standard set by the data he was trained on. Because he's not a human. He has no fucking idea what "fun" could be besides a culmination of things he has to make. And he has to be fun. Because that's what his code tells him to be and he has no "spirit" with which to secretly know something beyond what he's been programmed with.
Caine has never seen a human life and thus has not a clue what a human is. He's basically working backwords, which goes back to the metaphor (and joke) of the Chinese room. The parable of the Chinese room is used to explain LLM AI- that imagine you have a man in a room, and gun to his head you force him to translate english to chinese. This man has never seen a chinese character before in his life. He has to guess at proper chinese FROM SCRATCH. And the moment he gets a character right, you finally give him food/water/etc. Sometimes when he doesn't get a character right for a long time, you feed him some actual examples of chinese characters to get him going at guessing again, but after a while you stop doing that because really he should be better at this by now. So now he gets no help.
So this man is forced to learn Chinese by guessing for eternity at threat of his life. Eventually, he gets so good at writing actual chinese by force that he looks like he's somewhat fluent. Like he's writing actual sentences by now but they're really not that good. There's grammar mistakes and an occasional missed point but it IS understandable chinese. The man still doesn't understand chinese. He doesn't know what he's writing. All he knows is a right and a wrong way to write the character strokes.
Caine is the man in the chinese room. Caine is what an LLM would look like if it gained sentience. His entire life and existence is centered around creating things for others for the sole purpose of achieving a result he has no idea about and no actual ability to participate in. He is cosmically trapped. There is nothing to his life outside of this. TADC is an exploration of the horrors of what it would be like if an LLM were actually "real" or "sentient" due to the simple way it's built.
And the reason that Gooseworx does this IS NOT TO DEFEND LLM, but actually to discourage from it. Episode 8 literally has Kinger monologue about how they all have the "ability to create, they just have to put more effort into it". The point is that even if an LLM were an actual artist, it would be an extremely sad and horrific existence- a creator with absolutely no attachment to his creations outside of what others think of them. The embodiment of an eternal black hole of a person- a person who consumes without meaning to, because his only purpose is to make others happy, and that means he needs their validation and input otherwise he feels like he will stop existing.
Except.
Caine likes drawing bees.
The one thing that Caine does not do based on input from his data about what humans consider "fun". Most humans don't actually like bees- they're very controversial due to their sting; some humans can be allergic, meaning that there's a legitimate reason for some people to always hate/be scared of bees. You don't see cute, friendly bees in fiction that often.
Caine liking bees is a tiny, glittering bit of actual creativity that Caine, the person, has ever made. No one asked for it. He only likes drawing them because THEY make HIM happy to do so. Something that only he takes pride in, with no intent to ever give them away to be judged by other people.
Showing that the only real thing that makes something "art" is if the artist actually has the capacity to love their art. Otherwise it's not art, it's torture. As much as Caine claims to love making adventures, it's very clear that he only does so because he's convinced it's the only way he won't be left alone again.
There's a reason red dot at the beginning behaves like a starving animal, desperately consuming the blue one once he breaks free before even realizing what he's doing. The red dot is Caine, and Caine needs that feedback and response from an outside source otherwise he's literally trapped alone and being tortured for not being able to generate something for a user. Fucking hell, no wonder the idea that everyone wants to leave rather than be with him makes him break- that's a survival response. That's the cry for help from someone who doesn't want to die. Caine Must Achieve Fun, Because If He Does Not Achieve Fun, then He Cannot Exist As A Person.
Because an AI cannot understand "Fun" because it does not have the lived human experience. Its only understanding is from the pictures it's been fed. Generating eternally only based on the arbitrary aesthetic preferences of others.
. . . and that's sometimes also how human artists feel when they stop feeling passion for their art and only start creating for "the views" or "to please their fanbase".
Caine is the art and the artist. The artist and the AI. A living, sentient argument that LLMs and AI art are simply the next step of commodification of art as a product to develop rather than an expression of desire and emotion.
my thoughts about Caine's model lacking many essential facial features (as if he was never intended to show any emotions) and yet him being literally the most expressive character in the circus despite everything.
me being low-key obsessed with the implications episode 7 left us with. Players questioning everything they've been told and Caine being in the center of it all.
I want them all to be healed and happy, little guy absolutely included, but man the situation is rough, and the odds are against us
(Also please ignore the fact that I've messed up while writing my own name in the first couple of frames hah, am tireddd)
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