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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 months

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I assure you, an AI didn’t write a terrible “George Carlin” routine

There are only TWO MORE DAYS left in the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle, the sequel to Red Team Blues, narrated by @wilwheaton! You can pre-order the audiobook and ebook, DRM free, as well as the hardcover, signed or unsigned. There's also bundles with Red Team Blues in ebook, audio or paperback.

On Hallowe'en 1974, Ronald Clark O'Bryan murdered his son with poisoned candy. He needed the insurance money, and he knew that Halloween poisonings were rampant, so he figured he'd get away with it. He was wrong:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Clark_O%27Bryan

The stories of Hallowe'en poisonings were just that – stories. No one was poisoning kids on Hallowe'en – except this monstrous murderer, who mistook rampant scare stories for truth and assumed (incorrectly) that his murder would blend in with the crowd.

Last week, the dudes behind the "comedy" podcast Dudesy released a "George Carlin" comedy special that they claimed had been created, holus bolus, by an AI trained on the comedian's routines. This was a lie. After the Carlin estate sued, the dudes admitted that they had written the (remarkably unfunny) "comedy" special:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/01/george-carlins-heirs-sue-comedy-podcast-over-ai-generated-impression/

As I've written, we're nowhere near the point where an AI can do your job, but we're well past the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

AI systems can do some remarkable party tricks, but there's a huge difference between producing a plausible sentence and a good one. After the initial rush of astonishment, the stench of botshit becomes unmistakable:

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/03/botshit-generative-ai-imminent-threat-democracy

Some of this botshit comes from people who are sold a bill of goods: they're convinced that they can make a George Carlin special without any human intervention and when the bot fails, they manufacture their own botshit, assuming they must be bad at prompting the AI.

This is an old technology story: I had a friend who was contracted to livestream a Canadian awards show in the earliest days of the web. They booked in multiple ISDN lines from Bell Canada and set up an impressive Mbone encoding station on the wings of the stage. Only one problem: the ISDNs flaked (this was a common problem with ISDNs!). There was no way to livecast the show.

Nevertheless, my friend's boss's ordered him to go on pretending to livestream the show. They made a big deal of it, with all kinds of cool visualizers showing the progress of this futuristic marvel, which the cameras frequently lingered on, accompanied by overheated narration from the show's hosts.

The weirdest part? The next day, my friend – and many others – heard from satisfied viewers who boasted about how amazing it had been to watch this show on their computers, rather than their TVs. Remember: there had been no stream. These people had just assumed that the problem was on their end – that they had failed to correctly install and configure the multiple browser plugins required. Not wanting to admit their technical incompetence, they instead boasted about how great the show had been. It was the Emperor's New Livestream.

Perhaps that's what happened to the Dudesy bros. But there's another possibility: maybe they were captured by their own imaginations. In "Genesis," an essay in the 2007 collection The Creationists, EL Doctorow (no relation) describes how the ancient Babylonians were so poleaxed by the strange wonder of the story they made up about the origin of the universe that they assumed that it must be true. They themselves weren't nearly imaginative enough to have come up with this super-cool tale, so God must have put it in their minds:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/29/gedankenexperimentwahn/#high-on-your-own-supply

That seems to have been what happened to the Air Force colonel who falsely claimed that a "rogue AI-powered drone" had spontaneously evolved the strategy of killing its operator as a way of clearing the obstacle to its main objective, which was killing the enemy:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/04/ayyyyyy-eyeeeee/

This never happened. It was – in the chagrined colonel's words – a "thought experiment." In other words, this guy – who is the USAF's Chief of AI Test and Operations – was so excited about his own made up story that he forgot it wasn't true and told a whole conference-room full of people that it had actually happened.

Maybe that's what happened with the George Carlinbot 3000: the Dudesy dudes fell in love with their own vision for a fully automated luxury Carlinbot and forgot that they had made it up, so they just cheated, assuming they would eventually be able to make a fully operational Battle Carlinbot.

That's basically the Theranos story: a teenaged "entrepreneur" was convinced that she was just about to produce a seemingly impossible, revolutionary diagnostic machine, so she faked its results, abetted by investors, customers and others who wanted to believe:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theranos

The thing about stories of AI miracles is that they are peddled by both AI's boosters and its critics. For boosters, the value of these tall tales is obvious: if normies can be convinced that AI is capable of performing miracles, they'll invest in it. They'll even integrate it into their product offerings and then quietly hire legions of humans to pick up the botshit it leaves behind. These abettors can be relied upon to keep the defects in these products a secret, because they'll assume that they've committed an operator error. After all, everyone knows that AI can do anything, so if it's not performing for them, the problem must exist between the keyboard and the chair.

But this would only take AI so far. It's one thing to hear implausible stories of AI's triumph from the people invested in it – but what about when AI's critics repeat those stories? If your boss thinks an AI can do your job, and AI critics are all running around with their hair on fire, shouting about the coming AI jobpocalypse, then maybe the AI really can do your job?

https://locusmag.com/2020/07/cory-doctorow-full-employment/

There's a name for this kind of criticism: "criti-hype," coined by Lee Vinsel, who points to many reasons for its persistence, including the fact that it constitutes an "academic business-model":

https://sts-news.medium.com/youre-doing-it-wrong-notes-on-criticism-and-technology-hype-18b08b4307e5

That's four reasons for AI hype:

to win investors and customers;

to cover customers' and users' embarrassment when the AI doesn't perform;

AI dreamers so high on their own supply that they can't tell truth from fantasy;

A business-model for doomsayers who form an unholy alliance with AI companies by parroting their silliest hype in warning form.

But there's a fifth motivation for criti-hype: to simplify otherwise tedious and complex situations. As Jamie Zawinski writes, this is the motivation behind the obvious lie that the "autonomous cars" on the streets of San Francisco have no driver:

https://www.jwz.org/blog/2024/01/driverless-cars-always-have-a-driver/

GM's Cruise division was forced to shutter its SF operations after one of its "self-driving" cars dragged an injured pedestrian for 20 feet:

https://www.wired.com/story/cruise-robotaxi-self-driving-permit-revoked-california/

One of the widely discussed revelations in the wake of the incident was that Cruise employed 1.5 skilled technical remote overseers for every one of its "self-driving" cars. In other words, they had replaced a single low-waged cab driver with 1.5 higher-paid remote operators.

As Zawinski writes, SFPD is well aware that there's a human being (or more than one human being) responsible for every one of these cars – someone who is formally at fault when the cars injure people or damage property. Nevertheless, SFPD and SFMTA maintain that these cars can't be cited for moving violations because "no one is driving them."

But figuring out who which person is responsible for a moving violation is "complicated and annoying to deal with," so the fiction persists.

(Zawinski notes that even when these people are held responsible, they're a "moral crumple zone" for the company that decided to enroll whole cities in nonconsensual murderbot experiments.)

Automation hype has always involved hidden humans. The most famous of these was the "mechanical Turk" hoax: a supposed chess-playing robot that was just a puppet operated by a concealed human operator wedged awkwardly into its carapace.

This pattern repeats itself through the ages. Thomas Jefferson "replaced his slaves" with dumbwaiters – but of course, dumbwaiters don't replace slaves, they hide slaves:

https://www.stuartmcmillen.com/blog/behind-the-dumbwaiter/

The modern Mechanical Turk – a division of Amazon that employs low-waged "clickworkers," many of them overseas – modernizes the dumbwaiter by hiding low-waged workforces behind a veneer of automation. The MTurk is an abstract "cloud" of human intelligence (the tasks MTurks perform are called "HITs," which stands for "Human Intelligence Tasks").

This is such a truism that techies in India joke that "AI" stands for "absent Indians." Or, to use Jathan Sadowski's wonderful term: "Potemkin AI":

https://reallifemag.com/potemkin-ai/

This Potemkin AI is everywhere you look. When Tesla unveiled its humanoid robot Optimus, they made a big flashy show of it, promising a $20,000 automaton was just on the horizon. They failed to mention that Optimus was just a person in a robot suit:

https://www.siliconrepublic.com/machines/elon-musk-tesla-robot-optimus-ai

Likewise with the famous demo of a "full self-driving" Tesla, which turned out to be a canned fake:

https://www.reuters.com/technology/tesla-video-promoting-self-driving-was-staged-engineer-testifies-2023-01-17/

The most shocking and terrifying and enraging AI demos keep turning out to be "Just A Guy" (in Molly White's excellent parlance):

https://twitter.com/molly0xFFF/status/1751670561606971895

And yet, we keep falling for it. It's no wonder, really: criti-hype rewards so many different people in so many different ways that it truly offers something for everyone.

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

Back the Kickstarter for the audiobook of The Bezzle here!

Image:

Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

Ross Breadmore (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/rossbreadmore/5169298162/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

#pluralistic #ai #absent indians #mechanical turks #scams #george carlin #comedy #body-snatchers #fraud #theranos #guys in robot suits #criti-hype #machine learning #fake it til you make it #too good to fact-check #mturk #deepfakes

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transformhim · 17 days

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Pose

“We good here?”

The model’s question caught him off guard as Raul looked up from from his camera, adjusting the frame and focus for his next shot while his assistant, Damien, moved onto the set to adjust the light and prop placements. The deep bass background music played throughout the apartment in the awkward silence.

The fuck does he mean, are we done?? We’ve hardly started! Raul thought with an annoyed scratch at the back of his head. The model had been a terrible subject to begin with, giving poses and taking heavy sighs at each direction Raul tried to give him, and essentially treated the shoot as though it was something he was bored doing. His payment was way more than modest and the shoot wasn’t supposed to take more than an hour, but he looked like he was ready to leave just 20 minutes in.

Raul cleared his throat, “Uhh, actually we still need a couple more shots. The client is looking for a pretty varied spread to choose from. So if we could j—..”

“Come on, man, you’re really gonna make me do this for another 40 minutes? I’m sure what you got is fine.”

Raul breathed in heavily, “Look, it’ll just take a bit more, the contract said that it wouldn’t be—..”

“Well, you can take it up with my agent, man, I got places I gotta be,” the model started stepping off the set, turning his back to Raul to start packing his things.

Raul turned his eyes towards Damien, lifting his palms up in a disbelieving gesture and shaking his head. Damien just rolled his eyes and shrugged with a dejected smirk. They’ve dealt with these kinds of divas numerous times before. Almost too many to count, actually.

But money had been tight at the studio since the pandemic hit, and even all these years later it still hadn’t recovered. they couldn’t afford to keep getting these types of dismissive twats leave shoots before they were supposed to. Clients were always very specific about what they wanted and could cut pay if they weren’t satisfied.

But Raul and Damien had their own means of dealing with these kinds of rude bastards. As they exchanged wordless looks expressing their annoyance and frustration, Damien’s eyes began to slowly drift towards the model off set, gathering his belongings. His dejected look changed to one of curiosity as he bit his lip. He looked towards Raul and narrowed his eyes with a cheeky grin.

‘Should I?’ Damien mouthed silently towards Raul.

A sly grin spread across Raul’s face as he considered Damien’s proposal. He looked back at the model—turned away from them as he texted to his agent or slam piece or gym family or whatever—and back at Damien, biting his lip mischievously and nodding.

Damien smiled wider and stretched. He took off his tank top and tossed it aside, his toned hairy torso now bare. His fingers hooked under his waistband, and his basketball shorts and boxers drop silently to the floor as he kicked them over on top of his tank top. Now naked and hardening quickly, he arched his back in a stretch, rolled his neck, and rubbed his palms together as he stepped towards Raul. He leaned in for a quick kiss with his partner as he took the bottle body oil next to Raul that the model had used and squirted a massive helping into his hand, slathering it over his chest, arms, and face. Quickly, he moved towards the model gathering his things, ducking down lower as he approached.

“When you get to it, make sure my payment goes t—UUUHHHNNGGG!!” The model was interrupted in the middle of his sentence as Damien, in one fluid motion, pulled the model’s speedo down and plunged his face between his globular asscheeks. The model groaning and grunting in mindless pain and confusion, gripping the sides of the table where his things were sitting, as Damien popped his oily face and head into model’s tight hole, sending a loud squelching *SCHLORP* echoing through the apartment.

Damien’s slick body then began to suck up into the model’s hole, his muscular tan form thinning and contorting as he slithered deeper and deeper into the model’s guts, the entire process emitting a familiar meaty, slimy, slurping sound Raul knew and loved so well. Raul licked his lips, pawing his swelling package, as he watched the model’s sculpted ass distend slightly as his tight hole widen more and more as it hungrily slurped Damien inside him, his tattooed, lubricated form and limbs compressing in on themselves as he plunged deeper. Raul couldn’t help but feel a little jealous of the model—he knew full well how ecstatic and orgasmic it felt to have Damien slither up inside him… and what came next.

Just as Damien’s ass and throbbing rod sank into the model’s guts, his thighs and legs shot up into the hole at a much faster speed, whipping into the model’s hole noisily. Raul had shoved his hands into his shorts and was stroking eagerly as the Damien's feet slurped inside while the model groaned and contorted, arching his neck and back and standing on the tips of his toes, cringing at the pain and pleasure racking through his body.

Damien was gleefully readjusting his out-of-proportion frame within the squeezing, slimy, meaty confines of the model’s body, feeling different parts of the model’s sides, abs, and back twitch, flex, and contort, as his body tried to adjust to its invader. He could hear the muffled sounds of Raul’s horny, drunken laughter from the outside, thinking he for sure must have been making the model appear to have a substantially pregnant beer gut as Damien’s body centralized in his torso. After using a stretched out hand to brush his lubricated, wet hair out of his face, Damien went to work shoving his limbs into the model’s extremities.

Damien loudly moaned from within the body as he felt his arms and legs come to new life with increased strength and size while his limbs shoved through slick meat like a tight sleeve into the model’s beefy appendages. He smirked, feeling cocky and horny as he felt his arms burst into massive cannons and his heart fluttered as he felt the rest of him come to life. Damien arched in exhilarated bliss as he felt his chest, torso, and back first compress under the weight of the model’s squeezing body and then surge outward in new sensations of power and mass as Damien’s senses merged with the model’s, enticing him to give his big chest a flex to feel it bounce with new weight.

Raul nearly blew his load from an observer’s perspective. The model’s head was lolled backwards and his eyes rolled back while his body underwent what looked to be an instant pump, his muscles standing out more prominently under his skin, bit by bit, as his boyfriend filled him up like a balloon. Raul gasped as he stroked himself, watching Damien fill up the model’s lower half, making his already impressive thighs and glutes swell larger still. The thong he was wearing for the shoot looked somehow more risqué than earlier, hugging the model’s sweaty skin more tightly and accentuating his now-larger parts. The model was no longer the shredded twunk he was when he came into the apartment, but a swaggering thicc muscle stud with his and Damien’s combined mass.

Finally, Raul could see a sizable lump appear from near the model’s collarbone, stretching the model’s gold chain to its limit, as Damien began to shove his own head upwards into the model’s. He began to elicit deeper, gurgling groans as Damien wiggled and stretched his head up into the neck. Raul felt himself nearing completion as the model’s head suddenly jolted upwards with a dull crack, the lump in the model’s throat now gone. It wasn’t until Raul heard Damien utter his first satisfied groan in the model’s low voice that he blew his pent up load all over the floor in front of him.

Damien rolled his head around in his new body, stretched his shoulders and panted a few more breaths. He touched the foreign curves and angles in his face for a moment, turned on by his own handsome, sharp, smooth face. He felt sweat dripping off him from his exertion and huffed a big whiff of the new musk he emitted. Not bad!

“Alright!” He rubbed his hands off his face and down his pillowy chest.

“Let’s take some pictures.”

Damien turned to see that Raul had blown a sizable load all over the floor, some even on the set, and giggled as Raul chuckled, panting, coaxing the last of his load out of his shaft, letting it dribble down his fingers and onto the puddle below.

“Already?! Come on, man,” Damien chastised playfully.

“Sorry, babe, I just love the way you filled him out, dude. Fuck!”

“Oh? Y’like?” Damien teased walking towards him, saucily lolling his tongue out while he flexing his arms hard and tensing his pec muscles several times. He was being corny like always, but Raul was kicked into 5th gear again, instantly ready to blow another load.

“Yeah, dude, I fuckin’ do,” Raul took the liberty of feeling up Damien’s slick muscle gut, running his hands over his protruding abs. Damien could see how into this his boyfriend was and decided to move things forward a bit.

He grabbed Raul’s hand and shoved it into his thong, feeling his new hardening 7 incher steel against his boyfriend’s palm. He humped and gyrated his mammoth cock against Raul’s hand and asked, “What about the shoot?”

“Shoot can wait,” Raul moaned as he gripped onto Damien’s slick dick and stroked, lifting up Damien’s huge arm with his other hand and burying his face into Damien’s sweaty pits, licking and lapping at the moist surface while inhaling deeply.

Damien lifted up his other arm for Raul to let his boyfriend worship his other pit, bouncing his pecs a bit as Raul slathered his greedy face across his sweaty jugs on his way to the next pit. Damien grinned as he felt Raul continue to lovingly work his shaft. He was looking forward to a hedonistic, indulgent weekend with his boyfriend—he just hoped they eventually remember to finish the shoot.

#male transformation #male tf #muscle #muscle growth tf #male body suit #body suit tf #male possession #straight to gay tf #absorption #musky #male scent #male body transformation

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