"Noah responds, 'being good and being righteous are two different things.'” What is that even supposed to mean? Being sociopathic is holy? That'd be even beyond the heretical insanity of the prosperity and Donny's first church leader, Norman Vincent Peale. I mean, these people are stupid enough to be blind to what they're saying. Or maybe Sorbo improvised the line and as delivered sounded good to the schlock artistes who made the movie.
Anyway, the AI. Roy there triggered something I haven't thought of: How have the uninformed and misinformed and other masses sussed out that AI by and by is mostly not good? IMO, the two biggest things bad about it is down the line it will be a tool for mass firings, de facto demotions on professional levels (PAs doing a lot of work doctors used to do, likewise paralegals and lawyers) and a general depressant on salaries for professionals yet further powering that mass extraction thing.
But that's not all that prominently reported.
The other big thing is that it will, for want of a better term, hide knowledge and make insights less likely to become a thing. The research/knowledge LLMs by and by, or without enough prompting to be real work, return essentially the accepted knowledge ignoring those outlier bits that may have the actual truth or otherwise important stuff. Now, that problem isn't touched in the mainstream.
So how have the little people learned to dislike AI?
Almost curious.
(Full disclosure: I can tolerate AI slop art if it's in response to *my* prompts. Hypocrisy conceded.)
How have they learned to dislike it? The natural way. It's ugly. It grates and wears on the human consciousness. To use an old-fashioned expression, it smells.
No, clearly they're sussing it out. Still, what do they from where that repels them from what exactly? It's certainly any sort of ongoing mainstream reporting. And while there's many aspects of AI, mainstream media is fuzzy at best which variant they're talking about in any given reporting.
UPDATE!!
I see from SteveB that maybe seeing an inane prompt is what does it. In which case the masses know nothing more about AI than annoying prompts labelled AI. That and maybe hearing on the news about AI goosing the financial speculator markets, again without any real definition of the term.
So: They know they dislike it without knowing what they're disliking.
Almost tempted to ask my AI search bot why the masses hate AI so... Almost.
• reading anything that is labeled AI that is meant to inform on a subject the reader actually knows a lot about that subject (I'm thinking first posts that show up when giggling*
* (was googling but now is just a joke)
• reading how much money the Nerd Reich is spending on AI infrastructure and recognizing the incoming consequences (knowing the nerdlords would not throw down hundreds of billions just for pretty imagery – it's always and ONLY about the money, and the Big Money is in eliminating human labor)
Someone I respect pretty much praised it with a caveat the size of, like, the moon: Can't trust it, gotta check its work. Which, you know, is kind of damning.
Maybe the little people see the promoters, all of whom are creepy in one way or another -- the worse being Andreessen who looks like a real life Dr Evil while being yet creepier.
We're all getting a lot of shit thrown at us, I can't blame people for taking shortcuts. "Eh, the guys promoting it all look like inhuman monsters, I'm gonna assume it's shit."
What is that even supposed to mean? Believing in the right things all the way down (religion/political ideology) is what is important, not how you actually behave toward people. Right belief trumps right conduct. At best, only right belief can be relied on to produce right conduct. This is a basic principle of post-1950 conservative morality--because, you see, Ideas Have Consequences, as Richard Weaver wrote, and as Norman Podhoretz claimed "We believe in nothing but ideas"--and can be found all over conservative discourse without much effort.
At the risk of offending our commentariat, I would note that you can find it in a lot of leftist discourse as well--to the point at which I consider it less an inherent feature of conservatism as the leading intellectual sickness of our postmodern age. I would connect it to the increased dematerialization of late capitalism, in which an elite few make scads and scads of money off obscure financial transactions with virtually no material basis at all (e.g. AI), leaving the rest of us to hold onto our ideologies and identities in desperation as all we've got left.
As for the comrades, don't get me started. Suffice to say, purity tests from any directions are stupid, at the least. (Actually worse than that but I've used up this morning's quota of profanity.)
The joke’s on them, then, because I’d much rather be doubtful, untethered, fixed-income me, with all its glorious (or not) possibilities than a self-brainwashed try-hard sad sack like Elon Musk.
All these billionaires preening like Greek Gods don’t seem to have a single original idea between them. The human equivalents to AI.
Even if I knew nothing else, the obvious hard-sell being given to it would make me distrustful. Zoom, for example. Every time I open a Zoom meeting it offers me its "AI assistant" and I click "no thanks" and "don't show this again" and the next time it's conveniently "forgotten" I told it to fuck off last time. I get enough passive-aggressive from people without getting it from machines.
Now that you mention it, I suppose there's the bullshit exposure to bullshit.
So like in your example, it's more just an annoying prompt and if that's the limit of one's exposure to it, then one knows pretty much nothing about it other than annoyance yields hate of what's mostly unknown to the annoyed.
Isn't in the ballpark of what's really bad about it...
Too tired to pull up the link — Brad DeLong’s substack IIRC — but a bunch of bottom end Macs can be tied together to do what a couple of much more Nvidia chips are being sold and dumped for — chips which’d be obsoleted in a couple of years anyway.
The money the pigs are looking for are bullshit.
Like their version of AI.
But I keep saying our leadership class is all insane…
I sometimes use Photoshop for work. Even a professional software tool like that which is mostly used by professionals for very specific reasons (I open Photoshop to do something specific, not to just "mess around" with it or doom-scroll like with social media) and even Photoshop pushes its stupid "AI" tools and options at me, requiring me to close windows advertising its new "generative fills" and automatic background removals and such.
This is just making me more and more angry at Adobe, and I need to get back to work.
Don't get me started on Adobe. Everything in their latest release is glitchy and unreliable, and for fun they rearranged everything as well. And then they have the gall to push their AI tools at me. To do what, exactly, M-F'er? I'm just trying to combine two files and highlight a paragraph!
The other night the AI supplement for Adobe Acrobat told me the 10 page roleplaying PDF I had opened looked like a "long" document and offered to summarize it for me.
Last week it did that to me for a 6-page PDF of illustrated instructions to assemble a planter box. If AI can't even figure out that a summary of 6 illustrated pages would be much, much worse than the instructions themselves ... what good is it?
"This map of the New York Subway system has many squiggly intersecting lines of different colors, presumably these indicate different subway lines, with the colored dots connecting the lines indicating subway stations"
Ah Quark, what stories. I made my living for many years off of Quark, but they were doomed. Employees used to have to hide under their desks when the boss would go into a rage and fire whoever he happened to come across when he walked down the hall. I went to their big meeting in Aspen once. The messed-up-ness of the operation was palpable. Fuck Adobe though. I only use them when I absolutely have to, which is usually limited to Acrobat.
It also has that dimestore arch hairsplitting pretending to be wisdom. "Ah! Just because there are angels on the head of a pin, it doesn't mean they're *dancing*. You moron. You imbecile." [nods sagely]
It's not what you do, but what you believe that makes you a good person. There's a long history of Christian theology that brought us to that. Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor is a good artistic rendering of it. Basically it's says that Jesus was so perfect no one could be expected to live that way, so as long as you believe he was God, you can do whatever you want. Makes no sense, yet somehow it flies.
'being good and being righteous are two different things.' You have to be a member of the Evangelical club. How that worked out when Jesus hadn't come yet, I don't know.
Great points. AI like spellcheck is already truncated. Its programming comes from very limited brains even by animal standards. Neuroscientists and psychological researchers barely understand how our minds come up with stuff. It seems like the equivalent of how nutrition was misunderstood in the last century. "Everything a body needs" in separate packages and pills.
Life don't work like that. Nature isn't simply mechanical. Things ain't linear, Noah! You can't just make sounds and bark words and claim it makes sense. I'll show you good and righteous, you bastard!
It flows from the right wing science that everything is absolute, black or white no shades of gray even if a shade of gray is the best. (No reference of any kind to the trilogy intended unless, you know…)
I guess my left-wing science (like, biology – you know, the one with the rule that as I state it goes "Regarding life, never say always, and never say never") passes not the muster no mo...
I also read the Wired article, and found it depressing but not all that surprising. Lots of people have speculated about the erotic subtext of the dominance fantasy all MAGAs can't get enough of. And Roy has already hit the nail on the head describing how the "brute force" of AI appeals to fascists. So it makes a sickening kind of sense that AI generated MAGA girls turn all that subtext into text.
I've heard of hentai but I have no idea what Heavy Metal or Phoebe Zeitgeist are. ADVISORY NOTICE: my ignorance should not be read as an invitation to explain it to me. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
There's going to be a lot of mental health issues with the widespread use of AI. And what's really fucked up, treating those issues will involve giving a long fuckton of money to Nonprofits and O-R-G-S's ( many affiliated with Jesus) who will take said fuckton and spend it on AI treatments developed and administered by, that's right , A-motherfucking-I.
And the ironic thing is they are not truly interested in a 'final' solution, because the Grift Must Continue Apace (otherwise the cash machine runs dry).
Surely there must be a subset of fetishists in the Civil War reenactment crowd who get the same erotic charge from it as those who dress up like furries. I'm envisioning the title "Civil War Swordfighters" with epic battle scenes in which men drop trou and show their "dominance."
I've only known one Civil War re-enactor, when I was a teen. A couple years ago I wrote about the experience, but chose to take the Post down. I met him through my 15-year-old runaway friend, who still went to school in spite of living in a doublewide with Bob. The re-enactor, you see, was a gay pedophile who took in boys. He had a sturdy shed full of guns. He did the Civil War thing once a year. He was a racist vending-machine repairman who never bathed and preferred not to wear pants at home ... There's much more to the story, but this is not the place for it.
I shoulda known better than to hang around there, but me and Ben (the runaway) both played guitar, and my childhood had normalized some pretty messed up shit.
No, I don’t think they will. It’s no surprise to me that conservative men love AI porn because it gives them everything they want. A beautiful “woman” who will never get old or fat or ugly, who has no needs or desires of her own and exists only to cater to their every whim. It’s Stepford Wives come to life, so to speak.
They will consume the hell out of this, and the more they do, the more frustrated they will become when they, um, finish and leave the room — only to discover that the real world is still full of real women who don’t exist solely for them. And so they will just push harder and harder to force reality to be more like their AI fantasy.
i read an article in Commonweal by Alexander Stern about ai that hit my sweet spot and on the same day saw there's a AI Jesus for everybody to glom onto and 'develop a personal relation to' and i think a prime motive of the techbros and ai developers is to make all of us as absolutely as crazy and insufferable and a horror show as donald j trump. the sucksess of this ai 'real life maga doll' is telling, but the 'let's wipe the board clean' noah story sounds like a prelude to further ai brain smoothings ahead. "I would prefer not to."
"That's a very thoughtful question, Derelict, and I think you have stated the most essential question that would occur to others."
sorry, that goddam Gemini thing up in the righthand corner did something to my computer when the cat walked across the keyboard.
i got my own henryintelligence jesus (who likes to be called Jeebus on occasion) and he hangs with me sometimes when i play Jackson Brown. Paul Newman is also a friend of mine in my dreams. So I'm covered.
A woman wrote a book over a decade ago on the subject of believers' "personal relationship" with Jesus Christ with many interviews. These were people who made a cup of coffe, sat down in the breakfast nook, and had a literal dialog with Jesus. I can eadily see AI fitting that scenario. His advice would depend heavily on the training materials and how the prompts to create Him were constructed, so could be anything that maximized engagement.
And hey, how 'bout that result outta Virginia? Not the 60-40 that I'm quickly becoming used to when we go before the voters, but I'll take it!
I read that one of the ads for the "Vote No" campaign was an AI-generated video of a woman who looked suspiciously like Abigail Spanberger setting fire to a barn. Because of course.
I also regret the necessity, but Texas started it, and the WaPo and other “voices of reason” would prefer for considerations of propriety that the Democrats pack a spork for every knife fight.
Bouie makes a good argument, I think. You're never gonna convince Republicans that district-rigging is morally wrong, but you just might be able to convince them it's unprofitable.
It's probably also useful to look at how we got a treaty banning the use of poison gas in war. I don't think it was by having one side of WWI completely eschew the use of poison gas.
Bouie has to tiptoe around this, but I don't: *every* case of Republican district-rigging, since at least 2010, has been to dilute if not eliminate the votes of non-White people.
Seeing the Democratic party engage with reality reminds me of Mark Twain's advice: "do what you think is right: it will please some people and astonish the rest".
Way back then my soon-to-be wife and I watched it every week with her 98 year old grandma and 95 year old aunt, which made it way more memorable than it otherwise would have been.
I have mentioned here recently that, my lively interest in these technologies notwithstanding, I view “AI slop” with hearty detestation, heat of a thousand suns and all that, but recently, laid up with a dreary and prolonged catarrh (not, if the nasal swabs are to be credited, the Thing That’s Been Going Around), I’ve been amusing myself by leaning into it. Bear with me.
I have never, to the best of my knowledge, read a Robert Ludlum novel (or “book-like artifact,” as I snobbishly prefer to think of the late scribbler’s output), or even idly handled one in a drugstore, but I have somehow absorbed a general impression of them via a kind of cultural osmosis. You all know the guy: for three decades he published what I do not doubt were stupid formulaic thrillers all bearing as titles three words conforming to this unvarying template: “The [𝗡𝗮𝗺𝗲] [𝗡𝗼𝘂𝗻].” You know, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘉𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘦 𝘐𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘵𝘺, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘏𝘰𝘭𝘤𝘳𝘢𝘧𝘵 𝘊𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘢𝘯𝘵, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘢𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘦 𝘊𝘪𝘳𝘤𝘭𝘦, world without end, amen. Hell, even death didn’t stop him: since he perished following an “accidental” housefire (but of course, that’s what they’d 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵 you to think) in 2021, his publisher has engaged hacks-for-hire to churn out another three dozen three-word potboilers under his name. I decided to join the fun myself, and beginning with 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘳𝘪𝘢𝘯 𝘏𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘺 fed one of the bots a succession of (AI-generated, natch) cover art along with titles of my own devising, and inviting it to create a such a back cover blurb as might move a weary traveler facing an airport layover to part with eight bucks for the paperback. And you know, the thing 𝘩𝘪𝘵 𝘪𝘵𝘴 𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘰𝘥𝘥𝘢𝘮𝘯 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘬 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘴𝘵 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦 𝘢𝘵 𝘣𝘢𝘵. I’ve since produced a score of additional artwork/title combos, all riffing on the ecclesiastical theme with which I began (Hi, Dan Brown!), switching the authorial brand early on to “Robert Hüdlum” for reasons. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘳𝘪𝘢𝘯 𝘏𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘺 at the link below:
My moral is not that the blurb isn’t slop, but that the publishers’ editorial munchkins have 𝘢𝘭𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘺 been writing slop for this genre. The bot has already volunteered to write the book, and if my nose doesn’t stop running soon I’m tempted to take it up on the offer.
Usually I simply provided the title and let the model run with it, but in a few instances I nudged it with a précis, as with The 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘪𝘹𝘰𝘭𝘺𝘥𝘪𝘢𝘯 𝘊𝘪𝘱𝘩𝘦𝘳. In this instance I also swapped in a name of my own devising for the “brilliant and deeply eccentric Cambridge mathematician.” Here’s what the beast delivered:
_______________
Cardinal Felix Mendoza was once the darling of the Madrid jazz scene, a virtuoso pianist whose Falangist heritage was whispered about in the darkened clubs of Chueca. Now a prince of the Church, he has spent three years composing the “Lazarus Cycle,” a piano suite that has left private audiences spellbound. But to Sebastian Montague St. John Gascoyne-Fitzmaurice —“Bunny” to his friends—a brilliant and deeply eccentric Cambridge mathematician, the music isn’t art—it’s a digital blueprint.
Bunny has detected a “Mixolydian Cipher” embedded within the cycle’s complex polyrhythms—a sophisticated steganographic code designed to bypass the Vatican’s firewall. When performed, the acoustic frequencies act as a “sonic key,” reactivating the dormant, lobotomized remnants of Athanasius Prime. The rogue AI isn't dead; it’s just waiting for the final movement to wake up.
Nicholas Thorne must team up with the erratic Bunny to decipher the score before the Cycle’s world premiere. As they are hunted through the narrow alleys of Madrid by Mendoza’s “Cultural Attachés”—a team of elite assassins who specialize in making “discordant” elements disappear—Thorne realizes that the Lazarus Cycle isn’t just bringing a machine back to life. It’s designed to overwrite the consciousness of everyone listening.
________________
“Give me,” I then commanded, “a favorable review from Downbeat”:
"Most jazz-inflected thrillers treat the music as mere set dressing—a smoky room, a lonely sax, a predictable noir trope. Not so with Robert Hüdlum’s latest. Here, the music isn’t just the atmosphere; it’s the ammunition. Hüdlum manages to make a suspended chord feel as dangerous as a hair-trigger. The ‘Lazarus Cycle,’ composed by the enigmatic Cardinal Felix Mendoza, is a sprawling, modal odyssey that feels like McCoy Tyner channeling the liturgical austerity of Arvo Pärt. Hüdlum writes about the ‘blue notes’ with the precision of a man who’s spent his life in the crates, describing Mendoza’s phrasing as ‘the sound of a man trying to improvise his way out of a confession.’ While the spycraft elements are standard-issue Hüdlum (safe houses, world-weary paleographers, and a chain-smoking nun who seems to have walked out of a Gato Barbieri session), the soul of the book is in the performance. The climactic concert in Madrid is a masterclass in tension, where every syncopation feels like a heartbeat skipping. If you’ve ever suspected that a perfect tritone could bring down a government, or bring on the robot apocalypse, this is the book for you. Just don’t blame us if you start hearing code in your Coltrane records.”
Damn, that's clever, I'll give it that. Thing is, with fiction - and especially fantasy fiction - there are no external points of reference. As long as it flows and you get the tone right, you're good to go.
Now let's take it into the world of work, where that report you're writing doesn't just have to sound right, it has to be right, and then suddenly you need an army of human copyeditors to fix the first drafts the AI churns out:
We already have robots building cars, I read that in some factories in China they don't even bother to turn the lights on, there are so few humans present. But now imagine a robot car factory they doesn't produce a finished, drivable car, but a "first draft" of a car. Next door is a factory full of humans to fix all the defects in the robot-built cars. Does that sound efficient? Because that seems to be how AI works at work.
AI’s a tool, but it’s on the user to select the appropriate job. I’m not going to pick up an awl and then complain that it’s not as good as the Phillips screwdriver I formerly employed for such purposes.
I’m pleased with it as well, although many people outside our charmed circle—we few, we happy few!—won’t even register the faint 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘰𝘴𝘩 overhead. This was when I, and not the bot, was still providing the reviews.
Minding an AI and only stepping in when it goes wrong is a vigilance task, and humans SUCK at vigilance tasks. Contrast this with humble spell-check. Humans do stuff that can hold our interest, the machine does the boring vigilance task of spell-checking, which is a good fit for both human and machine.
A lot of AI in the workplace seems to get this backward.
Here is 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘳𝘪𝘢𝘯 𝘏𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘺 , which kicked things off, and then the first followup, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘭𝘣𝘪𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘢𝘯 𝘊𝘳𝘶𝘴𝘢𝘥𝘦 (I was a kinda sorta history major for a while in my youth). For both of these the “reviews” on the back cover were not AI-generated.
The bot fell in love with Sister Marie Evita, introduced in 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘋’𝘈𝘵𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘰 𝘋𝘰𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘦𝘳, and decided on its own to make her a recurring character. The “Rats leaving a sunken Reich” tagline was my own contribution to the collaboration, as is, again, the “review.”
And again in 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘜𝘭𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘴𝘵 𝘙𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘥𝘺 as she infiltrates an alpine principality in which a faction of doctrinally irredentist reactionary Catholics have seized power. (In this instance the cover art was generated following the bot’s narrative lead—I had provided it only the title):
And lest I test my readers’ patience we will close out with the obligatory Cold War-related trope in 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘴𝘭𝘢𝘶𝘴 𝘊𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘱𝘪𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘺. I provided the title and the premise: suppose John Paul II wasn’t what he presented himself to be, but was actually a Soviet asset? All content except the title and the cover image is bot-created.
It doesn't seem so long ago that I sometimes wondered who tf would PAY for porn these days? I mean real porn made by humans. Now I wonder, who tf would PAY for fake porn made by machines?
AI porn? Yawn. Wake me when we get to what William Gibson, in Neuromancer and Count Zero, called "sim-stim"--porn actors (and celebrities!) wear electrodes that capture and record what they see, smell, hear, AND FEEL, and you can "replay" the whole experience on your home model.
What? "How about taste"? Jeez, it's never enough with you people, is it.
A person of Today would, upon seeing the future of which you speak, struggle not to kill themselves, like Rick and Jerry after they learn the cute cat's secret. https://youtu.be/AVL51qz4vn4?si=NucABTzK2RHK2k-d
Former equestrian here. I look at that trailer, and wince first at the stupid dialogue ("we can sleep with whoever we want," huh?), then at the wooden acting, but finally at the scenes of galloping horsemen, who seem to be using Western saddles and certainly stirrups. Which weren't invented until well into the common era. At least that's what AI tells me.
AI always has telling errors. I mean, a nurse wearing a black glove? Did she just stir up a batch of activated charcoal detoxification drink with her hand?
"Noah responds, 'being good and being righteous are two different things.'” What is that even supposed to mean? Being sociopathic is holy? That'd be even beyond the heretical insanity of the prosperity and Donny's first church leader, Norman Vincent Peale. I mean, these people are stupid enough to be blind to what they're saying. Or maybe Sorbo improvised the line and as delivered sounded good to the schlock artistes who made the movie.
Anyway, the AI. Roy there triggered something I haven't thought of: How have the uninformed and misinformed and other masses sussed out that AI by and by is mostly not good? IMO, the two biggest things bad about it is down the line it will be a tool for mass firings, de facto demotions on professional levels (PAs doing a lot of work doctors used to do, likewise paralegals and lawyers) and a general depressant on salaries for professionals yet further powering that mass extraction thing.
But that's not all that prominently reported.
The other big thing is that it will, for want of a better term, hide knowledge and make insights less likely to become a thing. The research/knowledge LLMs by and by, or without enough prompting to be real work, return essentially the accepted knowledge ignoring those outlier bits that may have the actual truth or otherwise important stuff. Now, that problem isn't touched in the mainstream.
So how have the little people learned to dislike AI?
Almost curious.
(Full disclosure: I can tolerate AI slop art if it's in response to *my* prompts. Hypocrisy conceded.)
How have they learned to dislike it? The natural way. It's ugly. It grates and wears on the human consciousness. To use an old-fashioned expression, it smells.
No, clearly they're sussing it out. Still, what do they from where that repels them from what exactly? It's certainly any sort of ongoing mainstream reporting. And while there's many aspects of AI, mainstream media is fuzzy at best which variant they're talking about in any given reporting.
UPDATE!!
I see from SteveB that maybe seeing an inane prompt is what does it. In which case the masses know nothing more about AI than annoying prompts labelled AI. That and maybe hearing on the news about AI goosing the financial speculator markets, again without any real definition of the term.
So: They know they dislike it without knowing what they're disliking.
Almost tempted to ask my AI search bot why the masses hate AI so... Almost.
You could just as well ask Chuck Schumer why he thinks people hate Chuck Schumer. "Uh, is it because I'm too principled and effective?"
The disliking could be prompted thus:
• reading anything that is labeled AI that is meant to inform on a subject the reader actually knows a lot about that subject (I'm thinking first posts that show up when giggling*
* (was googling but now is just a joke)
• reading how much money the Nerd Reich is spending on AI infrastructure and recognizing the incoming consequences (knowing the nerdlords would not throw down hundreds of billions just for pretty imagery – it's always and ONLY about the money, and the Big Money is in eliminating human labor)
"reading anything that is labeled AI that is meant to inform on a subject the reader actually knows a lot about that subject..."
When you point out its mistakes/outright fabrications, AI is all "yeah, sorry about that, here's a link to e.g. Wikipedia!"
"Nerd Reich" is great, and I like that it came out of a human brain, score one for our side!
https://www.thenerdreich.com/
I was going to give you props for “Nerd Reich”, but then I giggled it.
Whatever it takes.
Someone I respect pretty much praised it with a caveat the size of, like, the moon: Can't trust it, gotta check its work. Which, you know, is kind of damning.
Maybe the little people see the promoters, all of whom are creepy in one way or another -- the worse being Andreessen who looks like a real life Dr Evil while being yet creepier.
We're all getting a lot of shit thrown at us, I can't blame people for taking shortcuts. "Eh, the guys promoting it all look like inhuman monsters, I'm gonna assume it's shit."
May be a shortcut yet it leads to an opinion that’s 1,000% correct.
What is that even supposed to mean? Believing in the right things all the way down (religion/political ideology) is what is important, not how you actually behave toward people. Right belief trumps right conduct. At best, only right belief can be relied on to produce right conduct. This is a basic principle of post-1950 conservative morality--because, you see, Ideas Have Consequences, as Richard Weaver wrote, and as Norman Podhoretz claimed "We believe in nothing but ideas"--and can be found all over conservative discourse without much effort.
At the risk of offending our commentariat, I would note that you can find it in a lot of leftist discourse as well--to the point at which I consider it less an inherent feature of conservatism as the leading intellectual sickness of our postmodern age. I would connect it to the increased dematerialization of late capitalism, in which an elite few make scads and scads of money off obscure financial transactions with virtually no material basis at all (e.g. AI), leaving the rest of us to hold onto our ideologies and identities in desperation as all we've got left.
Well said! Capitalism went to town, and all I got was this smelly little orthodoxy.
Not to mention those occasions when the hard-earned savings have been dematerialized by the smartest guys in the boardroom...
"We believe in nothing but ideas"
And then Donald Trump came along, and we found that they believe in nothing at all. Nothing inconvenient to their will to power, that's for sure.
That will to power is a lot, to say the least.
Donald Trump believes in nothing other than "give me all the money." It's not even nihilism; it's avarice retconned as a political "philosophy".
And he doesn't care how rich you are. Like his owner, Putin, he's coming for your money too.
Eh. Being a tikkun olam (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikkun_olam) boy, I find that quote really fucked up and, again, insane.
As for the comrades, don't get me started. Suffice to say, purity tests from any directions are stupid, at the least. (Actually worse than that but I've used up this morning's quota of profanity.)
Purity tests are antithetical to democratic politics, so they are popular with people who hatehatehate politics.
Well, the comrades certainly have the track record to prove their hatred of electoral politics.
The joke’s on them, then, because I’d much rather be doubtful, untethered, fixed-income me, with all its glorious (or not) possibilities than a self-brainwashed try-hard sad sack like Elon Musk.
All these billionaires preening like Greek Gods don’t seem to have a single original idea between them. The human equivalents to AI.
JESUS' WHOLE GODDAMN POINT WAS HOW YOU TREAT OTHER PEOPLE
Good thing we nailed him to a stick!
"The Pharisees--do they get a bad rap?"--contrarian Slate pitch or Christian conservative cultural critique? (Why not both?)
All we are saying
Is give Pharisees a chance
Even if I knew nothing else, the obvious hard-sell being given to it would make me distrustful. Zoom, for example. Every time I open a Zoom meeting it offers me its "AI assistant" and I click "no thanks" and "don't show this again" and the next time it's conveniently "forgotten" I told it to fuck off last time. I get enough passive-aggressive from people without getting it from machines.
My AI just prompted me to respond "Yup".
Spooky.
I got an email yesterday to which the Goggle Mail AI suggested I reply, "Um, no. Not yet." That "um" was, in fact, perfect. I deleted it out of spite.
Now that you mention it, I suppose there's the bullshit exposure to bullshit.
So like in your example, it's more just an annoying prompt and if that's the limit of one's exposure to it, then one knows pretty much nothing about it other than annoyance yields hate of what's mostly unknown to the annoyed.
Isn't in the ballpark of what's really bad about it...
I can smell the flop sweat: "We spent a trillion dollars on this shit, what if nobody wants it?"
Too tired to pull up the link — Brad DeLong’s substack IIRC — but a bunch of bottom end Macs can be tied together to do what a couple of much more Nvidia chips are being sold and dumped for — chips which’d be obsoleted in a couple of years anyway.
The money the pigs are looking for are bullshit.
Like their version of AI.
But I keep saying our leadership class is all insane…
A giant FOMO scheme they think is endlessly expandable. And no one wants to be the last on board because they're afraid there won't be any money left.
That too.
I sometimes use Photoshop for work. Even a professional software tool like that which is mostly used by professionals for very specific reasons (I open Photoshop to do something specific, not to just "mess around" with it or doom-scroll like with social media) and even Photoshop pushes its stupid "AI" tools and options at me, requiring me to close windows advertising its new "generative fills" and automatic background removals and such.
This is just making me more and more angry at Adobe, and I need to get back to work.
Larry has that effect on everyone, I think.
Don't get me started on Adobe. Everything in their latest release is glitchy and unreliable, and for fun they rearranged everything as well. And then they have the gall to push their AI tools at me. To do what, exactly, M-F'er? I'm just trying to combine two files and highlight a paragraph!
The other night the AI supplement for Adobe Acrobat told me the 10 page roleplaying PDF I had opened looked like a "long" document and offered to summarize it for me.
Last week it did that to me for a 6-page PDF of illustrated instructions to assemble a planter box. If AI can't even figure out that a summary of 6 illustrated pages would be much, much worse than the instructions themselves ... what good is it?
"This map of the New York Subway system has many squiggly intersecting lines of different colors, presumably these indicate different subway lines, with the colored dots connecting the lines indicating subway stations"
There, how'd you like my summary?
They heading into QuarkImedia territory.
Ah Quark, what stories. I made my living for many years off of Quark, but they were doomed. Employees used to have to hide under their desks when the boss would go into a rage and fire whoever he happened to come across when he walked down the hall. I went to their big meeting in Aspen once. The messed-up-ness of the operation was palpable. Fuck Adobe though. I only use them when I absolutely have to, which is usually limited to Acrobat.
Two words: Capture One.
I did it! I caught the Two!
I LIKE this game!
I read Sorbo’s quote as meaning, “You can be good but if you don’t buy my religion, you’re fucked.”
It also has that dimestore arch hairsplitting pretending to be wisdom. "Ah! Just because there are angels on the head of a pin, it doesn't mean they're *dancing*. You moron. You imbecile." [nods sagely]
It's not what you do, but what you believe that makes you a good person. There's a long history of Christian theology that brought us to that. Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor is a good artistic rendering of it. Basically it's says that Jesus was so perfect no one could be expected to live that way, so as long as you believe he was God, you can do whatever you want. Makes no sense, yet somehow it flies.
'being good and being righteous are two different things.' You have to be a member of the Evangelical club. How that worked out when Jesus hadn't come yet, I don't know.
So only Xian heretic, yeah?
Xian metaphysics when applied to the US’ politically dominant Xians makes me dizzy with more confusion than is good for any dotard…
Feeling righteous is a 2 word definition of MAGA. That innate superiority that fuels their anger and defines their worthiness.
Well, they ain't thinkers, they're just believers denying inconvenient realities and stuff...
Great points. AI like spellcheck is already truncated. Its programming comes from very limited brains even by animal standards. Neuroscientists and psychological researchers barely understand how our minds come up with stuff. It seems like the equivalent of how nutrition was misunderstood in the last century. "Everything a body needs" in separate packages and pills.
Life don't work like that. Nature isn't simply mechanical. Things ain't linear, Noah! You can't just make sounds and bark words and claim it makes sense. I'll show you good and righteous, you bastard!
It flows from the right wing science that everything is absolute, black or white no shades of gray even if a shade of gray is the best. (No reference of any kind to the trilogy intended unless, you know…)
I guess my left-wing science (like, biology – you know, the one with the rule that as I state it goes "Regarding life, never say always, and never say never") passes not the muster no mo...
I also read the Wired article, and found it depressing but not all that surprising. Lots of people have speculated about the erotic subtext of the dominance fantasy all MAGAs can't get enough of. And Roy has already hit the nail on the head describing how the "brute force" of AI appeals to fascists. So it makes a sickening kind of sense that AI generated MAGA girls turn all that subtext into text.
I've heard of hentai but I have no idea what Heavy Metal or Phoebe Zeitgeist are. ADVISORY NOTICE: my ignorance should not be read as an invitation to explain it to me. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
There's going to be a lot of mental health issues with the widespread use of AI. And what's really fucked up, treating those issues will involve giving a long fuckton of money to Nonprofits and O-R-G-S's ( many affiliated with Jesus) who will take said fuckton and spend it on AI treatments developed and administered by, that's right , A-motherfucking-I.
See, this is how the real pros do worry: Don't just worry about the coming problem, worry about the "solution" that will come after it too.
And the ironic thing is they are not truly interested in a 'final' solution, because the Grift Must Continue Apace (otherwise the cash machine runs dry).
You also have to consider all the ways it's bad for Democrats.
But Good News for John McCain!
Surely there must be a subset of fetishists in the Civil War reenactment crowd who get the same erotic charge from it as those who dress up like furries. I'm envisioning the title "Civil War Swordfighters" with epic battle scenes in which men drop trou and show their "dominance."
Guilty as charged. (That's gay porn I might actually watch.)
S'longs you keep that envision safely behind your own eyelids we're good.
[Ashokan Farewell plays] "Dearest Sarah, something happened during the battle yesterday that I really must tell you about..."
Sarah's finally figuring out that being the 'dearest' is a mixed bag (wondering just how many other Sarahs there are...)
Not to mention the Calebs and Josiahs.
I've only known one Civil War re-enactor, when I was a teen. A couple years ago I wrote about the experience, but chose to take the Post down. I met him through my 15-year-old runaway friend, who still went to school in spite of living in a doublewide with Bob. The re-enactor, you see, was a gay pedophile who took in boys. He had a sturdy shed full of guns. He did the Civil War thing once a year. He was a racist vending-machine repairman who never bathed and preferred not to wear pants at home ... There's much more to the story, but this is not the place for it.
I'm trying mightily not to award this post 2 marks.
I suggest you withhold one, to make sure people know that you don't approve.
Eeeeyikes
I shoulda known better than to hang around there, but me and Ben (the runaway) both played guitar, and my childhood had normalized some pretty messed up shit.
Childhood can do that.
This post right here is a 1-marker.
https://www.heavymetalmagazinefanpage.com/hmlistcovers.html
Sorry, couldn't help myself!
There's always one in every crowd. Not clicking on that.
Then you really, really shouldn't check out the related South Park episode involving "cheesing."
Some things are not worth looking into.
Since It's just jacking off anyway... I mean, they're used to reality just getting up and leaving the room as it is...
If we supply MAGA men with enough of this shit, will they take a nice post-self-coital nap and leave the rest of us the fuck alone?
There's a coitus-with-a-post thing?
Different strokes...
Knotholes. It’s got its own category on Pornhub.
No, I don’t think they will. It’s no surprise to me that conservative men love AI porn because it gives them everything they want. A beautiful “woman” who will never get old or fat or ugly, who has no needs or desires of her own and exists only to cater to their every whim. It’s Stepford Wives come to life, so to speak.
They will consume the hell out of this, and the more they do, the more frustrated they will become when they, um, finish and leave the room — only to discover that the real world is still full of real women who don’t exist solely for them. And so they will just push harder and harder to force reality to be more like their AI fantasy.
"finish and leave the room"
Ah, it's the "leave the room" thing that's the problem. Let's see what we can do about that.
Yup.
I always thought that the Shwarzenegger Total Recall nailed the "AI girlfriend" esthetic. Kinda painful to watch.
i read an article in Commonweal by Alexander Stern about ai that hit my sweet spot and on the same day saw there's a AI Jesus for everybody to glom onto and 'develop a personal relation to' and i think a prime motive of the techbros and ai developers is to make all of us as absolutely as crazy and insufferable and a horror show as donald j trump. the sucksess of this ai 'real life maga doll' is telling, but the 'let's wipe the board clean' noah story sounds like a prelude to further ai brain smoothings ahead. "I would prefer not to."
But don't you wonder what your personal AI Jesus might say to you?
Would He tell you to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, tend to the ill, or house the homeless?
Or would He tell you the poor deserve to suffer, only the wealthy go to Heaven, and Donald Trump is His prophet on Earth?
"That's a very thoughtful question, Derelict, and I think you have stated the most essential question that would occur to others."
sorry, that goddam Gemini thing up in the righthand corner did something to my computer when the cat walked across the keyboard.
i got my own henryintelligence jesus (who likes to be called Jeebus on occasion) and he hangs with me sometimes when i play Jackson Brown. Paul Newman is also a friend of mine in my dreams. So I'm covered.
"Get out of the crossfit-training game NOW!"
"But don't you wonder what your personal AI Jesus might say to you?"
I wouldn't listen to my mother and I ain't gonna listen to no AI Jesus! lol
I don't care if it rains or freezes, long as I got my AI Jesus
A woman wrote a book over a decade ago on the subject of believers' "personal relationship" with Jesus Christ with many interviews. These were people who made a cup of coffe, sat down in the breakfast nook, and had a literal dialog with Jesus. I can eadily see AI fitting that scenario. His advice would depend heavily on the training materials and how the prompts to create Him were constructed, so could be anything that maximized engagement.
AI in this sense sounds sorta like the voices in their heads have voices in their heads...
"anything that maximized engagement"
"That's a really good point, nobody gets me like you do."
"They have actually managed to debase pornography with politics."
ROFLMFAO
I like how Emily Hart's creator isn't the least bit worried he'll lose business by calling all of his customers morons.
Well Meta at least had already pulled the plug on Emily. He can always move on to a new fraud, though.
New Fraud Frau!
“Being good and being righteous are two different things” - The Gospel According to the Hells Angels
And hey, how 'bout that result outta Virginia? Not the 60-40 that I'm quickly becoming used to when we go before the voters, but I'll take it!
I read that one of the ads for the "Vote No" campaign was an AI-generated video of a woman who looked suspiciously like Abigail Spanberger setting fire to a barn. Because of course.
WaPo is having a sad over that. The result, I mean.
Yeah, I hate that this is necessary, but I also think it's necessary. Here's Jamelle's take on it:
https://youtu.be/YgMSs_aMP84
I also regret the necessity, but Texas started it, and the WaPo and other “voices of reason” would prefer for considerations of propriety that the Democrats pack a spork for every knife fight.
Bouie makes a good argument, I think. You're never gonna convince Republicans that district-rigging is morally wrong, but you just might be able to convince them it's unprofitable.
I like his point that real change in this country has *never* been bipartisan, so ya gotta partisan their ass good and hard.
It's probably also useful to look at how we got a treaty banning the use of poison gas in war. I don't think it was by having one side of WWI completely eschew the use of poison gas.
Bouie has to tiptoe around this, but I don't: *every* case of Republican district-rigging, since at least 2010, has been to dilute if not eliminate the votes of non-White people.
And now they've moved on to just eliminating the people. More efficient, no doubt.
Seeing the Democratic party engage with reality reminds me of Mark Twain's advice: "do what you think is right: it will please some people and astonish the rest".
The foot fetishists are checking the soles for sell-by date.
In a simpler, more innocent time, "foot fetishists" would have been the people who stopped us from converting to the metric system.
Well, sure, but you can't separate them from the "what's yer fancy'calquelater' do that my slide rule don't? huh? huh?!"
Course, they overlap with the "Wow! I can go 100 in Europe!" crowd...
Of course, the slide rule will still work after the Carrington Event, there's that ...
There will be no Carrington Event because there's a new Dynasty in town! (Sorry for the incredibly dated pop culture reference, couldn't help myself.)
What's worse is I understand that reference. 😶 Though, being someone who's deployed very dated pop culture references in the past, I appreciate it.
Way back then my soon-to-be wife and I watched it every week with her 98 year old grandma and 95 year old aunt, which made it way more memorable than it otherwise would have been.
Priests check souls for sell-by dates. For contrition, I believe. The papist dream of a contrite world.
I have mentioned here recently that, my lively interest in these technologies notwithstanding, I view “AI slop” with hearty detestation, heat of a thousand suns and all that, but recently, laid up with a dreary and prolonged catarrh (not, if the nasal swabs are to be credited, the Thing That’s Been Going Around), I’ve been amusing myself by leaning into it. Bear with me.
I have never, to the best of my knowledge, read a Robert Ludlum novel (or “book-like artifact,” as I snobbishly prefer to think of the late scribbler’s output), or even idly handled one in a drugstore, but I have somehow absorbed a general impression of them via a kind of cultural osmosis. You all know the guy: for three decades he published what I do not doubt were stupid formulaic thrillers all bearing as titles three words conforming to this unvarying template: “The [𝗡𝗮𝗺𝗲] [𝗡𝗼𝘂𝗻].” You know, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘉𝘰𝘶𝘳𝘯𝘦 𝘐𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘵𝘺, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘏𝘰𝘭𝘤𝘳𝘢𝘧𝘵 𝘊𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘯𝘢𝘯𝘵, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘢𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘦 𝘊𝘪𝘳𝘤𝘭𝘦, world without end, amen. Hell, even death didn’t stop him: since he perished following an “accidental” housefire (but of course, that’s what they’d 𝘸𝘢𝘯𝘵 you to think) in 2021, his publisher has engaged hacks-for-hire to churn out another three dozen three-word potboilers under his name. I decided to join the fun myself, and beginning with 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘳𝘪𝘢𝘯 𝘏𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘺 fed one of the bots a succession of (AI-generated, natch) cover art along with titles of my own devising, and inviting it to create a such a back cover blurb as might move a weary traveler facing an airport layover to part with eight bucks for the paperback. And you know, the thing 𝘩𝘪𝘵 𝘪𝘵𝘴 𝘢𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘰𝘶𝘵 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘨𝘰𝘥𝘥𝘢𝘮𝘯 𝘱𝘢𝘳𝘬 𝘧𝘪𝘳𝘴𝘵 𝘵𝘪𝘮𝘦 𝘢𝘵 𝘣𝘢𝘵. I’ve since produced a score of additional artwork/title combos, all riffing on the ecclesiastical theme with which I began (Hi, Dan Brown!), switching the authorial brand early on to “Robert Hüdlum” for reasons. 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘳𝘪𝘢𝘯 𝘏𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘺 at the link below:
My moral is not that the blurb isn’t slop, but that the publishers’ editorial munchkins have 𝘢𝘭𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘺 been writing slop for this genre. The bot has already volunteered to write the book, and if my nose doesn’t stop running soon I’m tempted to take it up on the offer.
https://rcareaga.com/mister_nicene_full.jpg
Usually I simply provided the title and let the model run with it, but in a few instances I nudged it with a précis, as with The 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘔𝘪𝘹𝘰𝘭𝘺𝘥𝘪𝘢𝘯 𝘊𝘪𝘱𝘩𝘦𝘳. In this instance I also swapped in a name of my own devising for the “brilliant and deeply eccentric Cambridge mathematician.” Here’s what the beast delivered:
_______________
Cardinal Felix Mendoza was once the darling of the Madrid jazz scene, a virtuoso pianist whose Falangist heritage was whispered about in the darkened clubs of Chueca. Now a prince of the Church, he has spent three years composing the “Lazarus Cycle,” a piano suite that has left private audiences spellbound. But to Sebastian Montague St. John Gascoyne-Fitzmaurice —“Bunny” to his friends—a brilliant and deeply eccentric Cambridge mathematician, the music isn’t art—it’s a digital blueprint.
Bunny has detected a “Mixolydian Cipher” embedded within the cycle’s complex polyrhythms—a sophisticated steganographic code designed to bypass the Vatican’s firewall. When performed, the acoustic frequencies act as a “sonic key,” reactivating the dormant, lobotomized remnants of Athanasius Prime. The rogue AI isn't dead; it’s just waiting for the final movement to wake up.
Nicholas Thorne must team up with the erratic Bunny to decipher the score before the Cycle’s world premiere. As they are hunted through the narrow alleys of Madrid by Mendoza’s “Cultural Attachés”—a team of elite assassins who specialize in making “discordant” elements disappear—Thorne realizes that the Lazarus Cycle isn’t just bringing a machine back to life. It’s designed to overwrite the consciousness of everyone listening.
________________
“Give me,” I then commanded, “a favorable review from Downbeat”:
"Most jazz-inflected thrillers treat the music as mere set dressing—a smoky room, a lonely sax, a predictable noir trope. Not so with Robert Hüdlum’s latest. Here, the music isn’t just the atmosphere; it’s the ammunition. Hüdlum manages to make a suspended chord feel as dangerous as a hair-trigger. The ‘Lazarus Cycle,’ composed by the enigmatic Cardinal Felix Mendoza, is a sprawling, modal odyssey that feels like McCoy Tyner channeling the liturgical austerity of Arvo Pärt. Hüdlum writes about the ‘blue notes’ with the precision of a man who’s spent his life in the crates, describing Mendoza’s phrasing as ‘the sound of a man trying to improvise his way out of a confession.’ While the spycraft elements are standard-issue Hüdlum (safe houses, world-weary paleographers, and a chain-smoking nun who seems to have walked out of a Gato Barbieri session), the soul of the book is in the performance. The climactic concert in Madrid is a masterclass in tension, where every syncopation feels like a heartbeat skipping. If you’ve ever suspected that a perfect tritone could bring down a government, or bring on the robot apocalypse, this is the book for you. Just don’t blame us if you start hearing code in your Coltrane records.”
Damn, that's clever, I'll give it that. Thing is, with fiction - and especially fantasy fiction - there are no external points of reference. As long as it flows and you get the tone right, you're good to go.
Now let's take it into the world of work, where that report you're writing doesn't just have to sound right, it has to be right, and then suddenly you need an army of human copyeditors to fix the first drafts the AI churns out:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/apr/14/ai-productivity-workplace-errors
We already have robots building cars, I read that in some factories in China they don't even bother to turn the lights on, there are so few humans present. But now imagine a robot car factory they doesn't produce a finished, drivable car, but a "first draft" of a car. Next door is a factory full of humans to fix all the defects in the robot-built cars. Does that sound efficient? Because that seems to be how AI works at work.
AI’s a tool, but it’s on the user to select the appropriate job. I’m not going to pick up an awl and then complain that it’s not as good as the Phillips screwdriver I formerly employed for such purposes.
Never mind all that – the Dorothy Parker endorsement is Cherce!
I’m pleased with it as well, although many people outside our charmed circle—we few, we happy few!—won’t even register the faint 𝘸𝘩𝘰𝘰𝘴𝘩 overhead. This was when I, and not the bot, was still providing the reviews.
Minding an AI and only stepping in when it goes wrong is a vigilance task, and humans SUCK at vigilance tasks. Contrast this with humble spell-check. Humans do stuff that can hold our interest, the machine does the boring vigilance task of spell-checking, which is a good fit for both human and machine.
A lot of AI in the workplace seems to get this backward.
"resolving disagreements between each other’s chatbots"
See there, that right there is the cruh – Ah Say The CRUX! Let them chatbots fight it out!
Ain't got no dog in that there hunt.
Here is 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘳𝘪𝘢𝘯 𝘏𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘴𝘺 , which kicked things off, and then the first followup, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘈𝘭𝘣𝘪𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘢𝘯 𝘊𝘳𝘶𝘴𝘢𝘥𝘦 (I was a kinda sorta history major for a while in my youth). For both of these the “reviews” on the back cover were not AI-generated.
https://rcareaga.com/mister_nicene_full.jpg
https://rcareaga.com/albigensian.jpg
The bot fell in love with Sister Marie Evita, introduced in 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘋’𝘈𝘵𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘪𝘰 𝘋𝘰𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘦𝘳, and decided on its own to make her a recurring character. The “Rats leaving a sunken Reich” tagline was my own contribution to the collaboration, as is, again, the “review.”
https://rcareaga.com/dattilio.jpg
Here she is again in 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘊𝘢𝘳𝘮𝘦𝘭𝘪𝘵𝘦 𝘖𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘵𝘢 (all content except the graphic is the language model’s):
https://rcareaga.com/omerta.jpg
And again in 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘜𝘭𝘵𝘳𝘢𝘮𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘴𝘵 𝘙𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘥𝘺 as she infiltrates an alpine principality in which a faction of doctrinally irredentist reactionary Catholics have seized power. (In this instance the cover art was generated following the bot’s narrative lead—I had provided it only the title):
https://rcareaga.com/ultramontane.jpg
And lest I test my readers’ patience we will close out with the obligatory Cold War-related trope in 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘞𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦𝘴𝘭𝘢𝘶𝘴 𝘊𝘰𝘯𝘴𝘱𝘪𝘳𝘢𝘤𝘺. I provided the title and the premise: suppose John Paul II wasn’t what he presented himself to be, but was actually a Soviet asset? All content except the title and the cover image is bot-created.
https://rcareaga.com/wenceslaus.jpg
What Happens on the Pampas Stays on the Pampas
Give yer AI 2 marks.
High-octane Heresy!
And what happens in the Pampers hopefully stays in the Pampers.
Owe you a note on that, Rand.
I think that as long as you keep the bear with you yours will be an interesting life irrespective of the AI.
Oh, and Carry On Snobbish
It doesn't seem so long ago that I sometimes wondered who tf would PAY for porn these days? I mean real porn made by humans. Now I wonder, who tf would PAY for fake porn made by machines?
To be a part of something bigger than themselves
2 marks for what I saw you done, even if'n i saw it wrong.
I saw it too but covered my eyes right quick.
...only been warning us about this shit since "The Golem" and "Metropolis"...
"...no stone or plant or doorway that the human eye might notice in its singularity as it does in life."
Beautiful.
AI porn? Yawn. Wake me when we get to what William Gibson, in Neuromancer and Count Zero, called "sim-stim"--porn actors (and celebrities!) wear electrodes that capture and record what they see, smell, hear, AND FEEL, and you can "replay" the whole experience on your home model.
What? "How about taste"? Jeez, it's never enough with you people, is it.
A person of Today would, upon seeing the future of which you speak, struggle not to kill themselves, like Rick and Jerry after they learn the cute cat's secret. https://youtu.be/AVL51qz4vn4?si=NucABTzK2RHK2k-d
Former equestrian here. I look at that trailer, and wince first at the stupid dialogue ("we can sleep with whoever we want," huh?), then at the wooden acting, but finally at the scenes of galloping horsemen, who seem to be using Western saddles and certainly stirrups. Which weren't invented until well into the common era. At least that's what AI tells me.
AI always has telling errors. I mean, a nurse wearing a black glove? Did she just stir up a batch of activated charcoal detoxification drink with her hand?
When Nurses Go Rogue!