Satirical, fake AI-generated clips show Rishi Sunak declaring, “Please don’t vote us out, we would be proper gutted!” and making unevidenced claims about how the Conservative leader is spending public money - including how he will send his “mates loads of dosh”.
I thought this article would be making a case against TikTok.
So many times I wanted to know the name of an actor who played a character after the first episode and the top result was something like “[Character Name] (deceased)” or " Villain: [Character Name]."
Some of my common uses are:
Asking extremely niche scientific questions: I don’t depend on these answers but in the answer is usually the specific terminology I can then search and find the answers I was looking for. I have learned a lot about the properties of metals and alloys this way and what the planet could look like with different compositions.
Re-phrasing things: At work when I’m drained and out of patience I can tell that what I’m writing in my emails is not really appropriate, so I have GPT re-phrase it. GPT’s version is typically unusable of course but it kicks my brain in the direction of re-phrasing my email myself.
Brainstorming: The program has endless patience for my random story-related questions and gives me instant stupid or cliche answers. This is great for me because part of my creative process since I was a kid has been seeing in media something that was less than satisfying and my brain flying into all the ways I could have done it better. I ask the program for its opinion on my story question, say “no idiot, instead:” and what comes after is the idea I was looking for from my own mind. Sometimes by total chance it has a good suggestion, and I can work with that too.
Fun uses which are less common:
Comedy use: I once had it generating tweets from Karl Marx about smoking weed every day. The program mixed marxist philosophy and language with contemporary party music to endlessly amusing results. Having historical figures with plenty of reference material from their writings opining on various silly things is very funny to me, especially when the program makes obvious mistakes.
Language Manipulation: If some philosophical text which was written to be deliberately impenetrable is getting too annoying to read, the program is decent at translating. If I plug in a block of text written by Immanual Kant and have the program re-write it in the style of Mark Twain, the material instantly becomes significantly easier to understand. Re-writing it in the style of stereotypical gen-z is hilarious.
This could actually happen soon. Outside of office use most casual users in younger generations are using laptops. Desktops are getting to be more niche and associated with computer builders and power users. As Windows gets shittier, Linux gets easier to use and customize, and desktop use shrinks to just enthusiasts, we could very well see Linux on the majority of desktops.
Are you unaware of the leap of logic you’re making here or is this an attempt at trolling? If it’s the latter, 6/10. If it’s the former. I’m sorry.
What you described is a prejudice which is not great. This prejudice, like all prejudices, can be mitigated through exposure. Because of the stigmitization which you described this exposure has additional barriers than just population size. You’re right that this is enough of a problem.
What I’m talking about is weaponizing this prejudice through politics. There has been a major push to pin “the fall of western society” on “trans ideology.” Idiots may repeat these moronic talking points to one another, but they are not the ones who wrote those talking points for them to parrot mindlessly. In fact, these talking points are derived from a movement which has existed for just over a century.
One of the reasons fascism is so attractive to many people is that it unites the “proper” people against the enemy which is simulaneously corrupt and foolish but also masterminds who will undermine and destroy the culture unless they are stopped. Because these foes exist, the state must exercise greater social control and violence to manage the “menace.” Because this population is small and stigmatized (by coincidence, relatively about the size of the Jewish population in 30’s germany), the state can establish the apparatuses for social control and violence. Because these mechanisms are ostensibly to use against just trans people, idiotic bigots support them and a far greater number of people simply don’t care. The thing is though, that from a fascist politician’s point of view the excuse for creating these authoritarian devices is not important really. The point is to establish an authoritarian fascist government. Any defenseless group can be demonized and persecucted, they just have to pick a group that the population will let them persecute. As long as the greater population doesn’t mind what they do to the scapegoat they can build up a system which can eventually be deployed against any threat to fascist power.
Trans should be mundane because it really is but unfortunately since they are such a small part of the total population by the nature of being trans they are an extremely convenient scapegoat. As long at they’re on the chopping block like they are in Texas and Florida, there is a chopping block, and that’s everyone’s business. Only the delusional believe that it could never be their turn if these kinds of politics proliferate or become mainstream.
This is funny but also an excellent example. There are people who honestly believe that, and those pretending to believe that because it’s to their advantage that others be made to believe it. They are all humans behaving as humans in the context of the system they are in. Despite having the same tendencies, if these same people were living in a system that leveraged their personalities and talents to pro-social purposes we would have a very different world. The part we haven’t figured out yet is how exactly that system would work and also work despite millions to billions of different people interacting with it in more ways that can be comprehended by any individual. This is quite a group project we’re working on.
Edit: Whoops, I thought I was responding to someone in this thread. Interesting how much it connects here.
Reddit didn’t survive its slow death many years ago. The rotting corpse it left behind is just becoming a bigger problem.
I think it’s less of an issue of LLMs being drunk and more that ostensibly sober people put them behind the wheel totally aware of how drunk they are while telling everyone that they’re stone cold sober.
Another victory for humanity.
This is kind of like saying in war, old weapons getting phased out reduces violence. While I am relieved I don’t have to worry about musket ball injuries, the new weapons are more effective at what they are designed to do and the people driving the need for newer and more effective weapons have not fundamentally changed in their motivations.
The businesses themselves aren’t driving the economy or how the megarich really make their money. Businesses are only the tools used by what’s actually driving the economy which is Capital. The same Capitalists which drive businesses to behave ruthlessly in a marketplace, grow rapidly, and ultimately collapse under their own weight will simply reinvest in an entity which will competently bring in a return on investment. The only redistribution of wealth happening is Capital investment being diverted to other tools of Capitalism. Capitalists don’t care which businesses or industry they’re investing in, they only care about maximising the return on their investment and using their influence to ensure that happens as much as possible.
When I think of historical wealth distribution which has had major impact on the lives of regular people, I can’t think of any which were caused by an outdated business clearing up some room in the market for newer and more lucrative capital investments to take its place. I have seen it through government action though.
I could use the predictive text android uses and come out with as readable a novel as anything an LLM can produce. This scam only works because people aren’t reading what they’re buying.
Having used Mint on my laptop for the last few months, I can say I have had to do far less technical meddling with the OS to get it to work correctly than I did with Windows 11. I have also been able to totally resolve all issues encountered (1 issue) which I didn’t have the time or expertise to do with my Windows OS. It’s refreshing not having to work with a system that feels like a broken mess I’m too incompetent to fix.
Context: During the Haitian Revolution, France hired Polish mercenaries to go to Haiti and help with putting the slave rebellion down. After arriving, the Polish mercenaries immediately recognized they had much more in common with the other people being oppressed by major European powers and joined the revolution on the Haitians’ side. After the revolution and because of some of the most severe international sanctions in world history (many of which are still in effect to this day), the Polish mercenaries were now completely Haitian and were legally declared “black” by the new Haitian government.
Duolingo, the app to work on something every day for years and be no more skilled in that ability than if you did nothing. Now fewer people will have useless jobs which is a problem since in many ways it’s difficult to survive working a useful job.
The Luddites should have been dismantling capitalists if they wanted to solve their problem.