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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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groovesnjams · 2 years

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youtube

“Step By Step” by Braxe + Falcon ft. Panda Bear

MG:

Beyond any thoughts I might have on what it all means and why now, I am intensely curious about what prompted Panda Bear to offer himself up for all these collaborations, the best of which is undoubtedly this one: a union between Hype Machine’s Braxe + Falcon and Pitchfork’s Animal Collective, finally. These two forces, in their historical context, existed in parallel — there was never any sense that Animal Collective drew influence from the popular dance music around them nor that DJs like Braxe + Falcon were at all interested in the shaggy, surfy musings of four Brooklyn stoners. But there were tons of people, a former MG included, who liked both in a sort of artificial pursuit of a lack of aesthetic boundaries. Life was a swirl back then, but it was more a task of the end user to do the mixing. Liking cowboy boots, Lauren Conrad, adderall and Marlboro Reds, Fred Falke remixes, Bright Eyes, and the J. Crew store wasn’t a substitute for a personality (I had that, too) but it was the start of communicating something about myself, a refusal to be pinned down or fit neatly with any group, whether they’d have me or not. In the little over a decade since those were my signifiers, the niche ideas have gone mainstream and the mainstream icons have withered to niche — such is life — but I’ve also seen that pursuit of individuality become its own group dynamic and perhaps that’s what accounts for the vibe shift. No one likes feeling that their interests, the way they spend their time and present themselves to the outside world, are reductive and just a role they play to gain entry into society. We want to feel genuine, authentic. Carles was right, and it is kind of funny in an ironic way. But it’s also a rubberband snapping.

We have enough songs that approximate the sound of “Step By Step,” but there’s still something incredibly precious and important about having these two halves of the same whole fused, to know with certainty that it’s a yacht rock dance song, a pre-Pharrell amber haze lit with the gentle but awkward voice of Noah Lennox. I guess, to return to my first thought, I think that Panda Bear, too, surfed the Hype Machine, that stars really are just like us. I still don’t know why now, but after an extended period of doing as little as possible to betray the canonical classic status of Person Pitch, “Step By Step” reasserts the singular weirdness of a guy who used to have his anxious, wide eyes noted by interviewers but now poses that way on purpose. Panda Bear is back to the familiar comfort of the unknown.

DV:

We can’t really be nostalgic for a decade ago the way people could at any other time in human history, can we? If you wanted to experience the 60s Beach Party movies in the 1970s, you were stuck until they aired on a TV channel at a time you couldn’t choose, or showed at a revival theater that might be possible for you to get to. If you wanted to relive a Nirvana video in 2001, you had to hope a friend had recorded it on VHS, or wait for a channel dedicated to music videos to show some old ones. This remained more or less the case until wide adoption of YouTube, and now if you want to wallow in how long Panda Bear could make his songs in 2007 there’s an entire professionally-recorded show waiting for you to get the itch. If you ever think to - because Spotify and Apple and every major label are already dedicated to feeding you a steady feed of monetized catalog music, presumably because it’s less risky/more profitable than fully supporting new artists, and so you’re almost certainly getting a steady diet of classic Panda Bear via the algorithm without ever having to think about it.

Sometime this century, it feels like the past never became past. MG and I might reminisce about the days when we could pop pills and smoke smokes without a care in the world, but we’re not nostalgic for the shows we saw or the places we went, we’re just missing bodies that were resilient enough to traverse a night of bad decisions and still function the next day. “Step by Step” isn’t good enough to make me feel young again, so all it does is remind me that if I want to hear Panda Bear repeat a few catchy phrases over a vaguely danceable production, I can scroll down three notches to when he was doing this the first time.

#panda bear #braxe + falcon #nostalgia #music #fuck nostalgia?#this is currently a grooves n jams debate #hype machine

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unpretty · 1 year

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i know that bandcamp's whole deal is that they are but a humble storefront, which cannot be expected to have Features of any kind, but also. do you know what i would give to be able to make playlists directly in bandcamp. and share them. and if someone sent me a playlist that fucking ruled i could just buy all the songs on it and have them forever. do they understand how bad it sucks that i cannot do this.

#original #i know hype machine merch table exists #but that requires me to use spotify so

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gabe-lovebot · 7 months

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how do we kill this thing

#two war machines looking at each other #hey gays let's play spot the blue robot which i won't tag because it's too tiny #i showed this to my dad and he says it looks like something you'd find at a dentist's office and honestly? yeah. yeah i can see that #anyways I WAS ALREADY HYPED FOR VIOLENCE BUT THIS IS SOMETHING ELSE ENTIRELY #HOW DOES HAKITA MANAGE TO SUBVERT MY EXPECTATIONS EVERY SINGLE TIME #my doodles #ultrakill #earthmover #earthmover ultrakill #ultrakill spoilers

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ingravinoveritas · 2 months

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wtf is that all she has to say about her boyfriend michael fans praised him more than. so is this her saying the show phenomenal or her boyfriend cos honestly this chick don't make sense what ur thoughts on this post

Hi there! And oh, wow. I've had a little time to process this now that I'm home, and I think the biggest thing that comes to mind is how this Insta story feels so...obligatory, and the bare minimum. As you said, it's not clear whether Anna is talking about the production itself or Michael's performance, and there is hardly any energy or enthusiasm to the post, especially not compared to the multiple posts AL made about Photobombing Michael J. Fox at the BAFTAs.

It becomes even more noticeable when you look at it next to the Insta story that Georgia posted:

Georgia and David didn't even attend the show tonight, and yet they hyped Michael up in a way Anna did not. You can feel the warmth and silliness and love in how they're rooting for him and cheering him on--David, in his manic Scottish way, and Georgia in her more sarcastic/dry English way--and how they seem genuinely excited for Michael. Yet I got absolutely none of that from AL's post.

All of the above is augmented by the choice of pictures in the post, with David and Georgia's photo centering Michael, literally and figuratively. He is the focus of the picture and of their attention, and the message there seems to be that Michael is what David and Georgia are most excited about. In contrast, the picture AL used is of a nearly empty dimly lit stage with a hospital bed on it, and I do not think that is by accident.

As I have said previously, my reaction is never to any one post in isolation, but to the continuation of a pattern of posts/comments from Anna over the course of several years. The same thing happened when production photos were released of Michael as Prince Andrew a few months ago, and when he played Chris Tarrant in Quiz in 2021:

AL hated the wig then, and my feeling is that she hates the wig Michael is wearing now, as well as the pyjamas that are his costume for a significant portion of the play and how he looks in them. I think that she does not care at all about the play itself or its significance to Michael, and has no desire to hype him up because his appearance in Nye is not what she considers "attractive." In addition, a fan posted stage door pictures on Twitter, including one with AL, and it seems to very much echo the lack of enthusiasm in her Insta story.

So yes, I think AL's post seems very generic (at best). It makes her come across as disinterested and somehow "removed" from both Michael and the show itself, again in contrast to David and Georgia's picture that conveys the exact opposite.

Those are my thoughts, at any rate, and I could be completely off the mark, but as always I'd be glad to hear from my followers about what you think. Thanks for writing in! x

#angel19924 #reply post #michael sheen #welsh seduction machine #nye the play #national theatre #david tennant #soft scottish hipster gigolo #georgia tennant #when your boyfriend and his wife hype you up more than your own girlfriend #they just do not give 'couple' energy and never have #yikes #choices #not all of them good #i just hope Michael knows he is lovely #and deserves good things #anna lundberg #discourse

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the-valiant-valkyrie · 10 months

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Don't think I've posted these yet, but a while ago I made some ieytd palettes, and I decided to clean them up a little in preparation for the third game, you know how it is

Use them if you'd like, share them around, all of that fun stuff. And if you make something cool um 😳🥺 I would love to see if you decided to tag me in it 👉👈 tee hee

#I expect you to die #ieytd #maaan. these games have the worst tagging conventions in the WORLD dude adbhskjfsd. im not tagging the sequel indivisually #i picked up a pen (art)#dude i am HYPED for the third game and for making color palettes for the third game #color palette #you already KNOW im titling the title screen palette cog in my machine baby. you already know

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sotwk · 3 months

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Rainy weather means Wet Éomer time.

It's a gloomy, rainy, stormy morning!

Perfect atmosphere to load up on some Karl Urban / Éomer inspo and get work done on THE SCENE. (Taken, Final Chapter in progress)

I finally completed the scene that needed to be written before the scene I've been dying to write, and every fellow writer knows the joy and relief that brings.

Here's a lil' moodboard teaser for the fun and hype. Happy Friday y'all!

Extra special tag for @scyllas-revenge cause I know you won't want to miss this one.

#wet eomer time #forgive me for being my own hype machine #i promise i will just shut up and do it already #im still slow but im just so happy and relieved #im no longer blocked #eomer #eomer fanfiction #eomer moodboard #eomer x oc #eomer x reader #sotwk fanfiction #sotwk fanfic: taken #lotr #sotwk moodboard

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why-the-heck-not · 4 months

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19.12.23, tuesday

0.5h of coding lol

wasn’t having the best day so decided to finally watch the barbie-movie (it’s on hbo rn) bc figured that could cheer me up

but bc the universe loves a good timing, on the grocery store trip after, some dudes came to me like ”which one of us would u fuck?” and that annoyed me way more than it should’ve. Like cmon, it’s 10pm at a grocery store; if you’re not cottage cheese or olive oil get tf out of my face

just a short evening walk bc it was windy and I was annoyed

#also the barbie-movie; it was fine #not my favorite but I didn’t think it’d be bc I don’t rly usually go for that genre #also at this point the hype had got to me so my expectations were very unfair #the set tho; it looked so good #I love how I planned that I’d be a machine now this week so could actually not stress during christmas but it’s looking out to be like one #of the most unproductive days I’ve had all autumn lol #i’m thinking if I should just call it and start the holidays now and just idk catch up on some of the days in between christmas & new years #and I do have 8 days after new years before other courses start #but idk if I do thay I might not rly be able to chill during christmas #like rn I’m thinking if I should bring my laptop with me just in case I could squeeze a couple hours here & there during the few days #which is not the thing to do obviously; like it’s 5 days I can be apart from my laptop for 5 days #but it feels like with the amount of stuff I’ve gotten done I rly couldn’t afford a 5 day break rn #idk I’ll figure it out I won’t bring a laptop just to haunt me #(I’m bad at fully relaxing; there’s always the ’’u could be doing something productive tho’’-voice)#(which I don’t listen but then I just get nothing done and also never rly relax which is good super good)#(can u tell im still annoyed at everything rn lol sorry for the tag rant)#december 2023 #2023 #today

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mushiewrites · 10 months

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Got Your Back

Hiya! So I’ve had this fic since last September, I wrote it for @emmadoodlewrites when we both went insane for tickle machines and made up a few in a flustered frenzy. I recently rediscovered this fic and shared it with @wishitweresummer, who encouraged me over and over to upload it. So, I reworked it, somehow added 1K words, and here we are. Thank you @awkwardtickleetoo + summer for reading this through for me and for hyping it up and making me want to post it! (and thank u cal for the title ur a genius). I love how it turned out, and I hope you do too!

After George confessed his love for tickling to Dream, he decides to make him something special in support. Dream gets curious, and before he knows it, he’s stuck

(lee!Dream / tickle machine : 3.6K words)

Dream had always been curious. Everyone who knew him was aware of this fact, mostly due to the blonde getting himself into trouble because of it. Whether he was exploring new places without a map or tinkering with things he shouldn’t, he was used to things backfiring. But he didn’t really mind. He much preferred taking the risk in favor of trouble in order to learn everything he could about anything and everything he was interested in - including people.

Another thing Dream was known for was his generosity. Gift giving was absolutely one of his main love languages, and he constantly used it to show his friends and loved ones just how much he cared for them. Dream was thoughtful, always collecting things that reminded him of specific people and being so excited to give it to them, relishing in the way their faces would light up at the unexpected gift.

Recently, George had revealed some very personal information about himself with Dream. A few weeks ago, while sitting underneath an oak tree in the rain, George had told Dream his thoughts and feelings on tickling - about how much he loved it, and how much he adored the feeling of it. He told Dream how warm and safe the action made him feel, sputtering and whining through it all. It took some much needed coaxing and reassurance from the blonde, but in the end, George got it all out. Dream was there to support him through the whole thing, wrapping him into the biggest hug he could while showering him in praise.

Immediately after George had left that day, the cogs in Dream’s brain began to turn. He was set on creating things to show George that he didn’t have to be embarrassed about his secret adoration for tickling, wanting to make him something special and just for him. Dream spent many nights hunched over his crafting table drawing up blueprints, feeling like a madman whenever he came up with a new contraption to torture George with. After coming up with a few solid ideas, the building began.

It started with a small tickle machine.

It was around the same size and shape of a normal backpack, and designed to sit against the back the same way. There were eight retractable arms that sat over the shoulders, ribs and sides, much like how a koala would cling onto a person. The arms were designed to be able to perform the meanest of tickles that George could handle (or not, but that wasn’t Dream’s problem). The ends of the metal rods were covered in small rubber nubs, molded to glide expertly between ribs, to skitter up and down squishy sides, to poke and prod against sensitive stomachs - the possibilities were endless on someone as ticklish as George.

The machine was still in the prototype stages, but it was ready to be tested to make any final adjustments. He planned on waiting until the next time he was with George to test it, wanting to see how the machine worked on the smaller boy and hoping to find ways to make improvements. But the longer the device sat idly, waiting for its first victim, the more Dream’s curiosity grew.

So he decided to test it himself.

After a lot of pacing and contemplating, he walked over to the chest in the corner of the room where he kept the machine, opening the lid and chuckling nervously when he saw it. It looked like some kind of giant upside down bug, with the legs curled in on themselves while in the ‘off’ position. Dream lifted it from the chest, holding it in his hands and inspecting it while the butterflies in his stomach erupted into a whole new wave of panic. It took a bit of self convincing but he finally decided that yes, he was absolutely going to test this now. What George didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.

Dream let out a nervous giggle as he pressed the little green power button on the middle of the machine, reaching around and holding it against his back the best he could to try and secure it. He struggled with the positioning, taking a few steps back until he felt his heels hit the wall. Dreamed leaned against it, using the wall to help hold the machine in the correct spot and allowing the arms to finally extend out and over his body, clinging on and tightening to hold itself in place. The blonde watched in amusement as the arms reached over his shoulders and hugged around different parts of his ribs and sides, settling down after a few minutes and becoming still against him. He smirked to himself, happy with the way the machine was working so far.

Dream jumped forward with a yelp as the arms began to move, pulling him from his thoughts and bringing his attention to the new sensation that was spreading across his torso. It was only the first stage of the tickling, Dream having set different settings and stages for different tickling speeds and techniques. But even at the lowest stage, it had Dream doubled over, squirming against the wall as the ends of the metal arms pressed lightly against his ribs. The drew small, slow circles into the bones, pulling strained laughs out of Dream even as he tried his hardest to hold them in. He didn’t expect it to be this bad, but it was, and all he could think about was how much this would get to George. Through his panicked giggles he cheered at his success in making a functioning tickle machine.

The arms slowed to a halt, giving Dream time to catch his breath. He stood back up on his feet, turning around to face the wall and leaning his forehead against it with a groan. He closed his eyes as he continued to take in deep breaths, smiling at the thought of George screaming and squealing having to endure this himself. Suddenly the arms sprung back to life, digging in with a little more pressure at a quicker speed. Dream was thrown into loud cackles almost immediately, pushing off the wall and throwing his head back, his arms pressed as tightly as he could to his sides in an attempt to block out the tickly feeling.

“Ohoho my Gohohod, fuck! Thihis is bahahad!” Dream knew no one was around but couldn’t help but narrate the feeling. It was just so much more ticklish than he ever thought it would be, and it was only the second stage. He clenched his fists tightly, his eyes still squeezed shut as he let out a wheeze through his laugh, hiccups and high pitched squeals following closely behind.

The arms that rested over his shoulders were prodding into his top ribs, just below his armpits. They dug in slightly, vibrating over the bones every few seconds and making Dream feel weak in the knees. The other three sets of arms were poking into his ribs and sides, moving slightly every time they lifted up and touching down, always tickling a new patch of skin to keep him squirming. He leaned forward as he cackled, trying his best to stay standing as he laughed himself silly. He couldn’t remember the last time he was tickled this much - in his defense, he couldn’t really remember anything anyway with how fiercely the machine was tickling. Through it all, though, he did have one consistent thought; it tickled, and it tickled bad.

Dream gasped for air the minute the machine came to another pause, his giggles remaining as the metal arms stayed pressed against the bones of his ribs. He couldn’t shake the ghost tickles that had his stomach doing somersaults, even when he used his hands to rub the areas around where the arms were resting. The blonde found himself giggling helplessly, deciding he’d done enough testing for one day and reaching back in an attempt to power off the machine. George could try out the more intense settings the next time he stopped by.

But as Dream felt around blindly for the power button, he realized he couldn’t reach it from this position. He opened his eyes in a panic, quickly looking around on the table beside him for anything he could use to help reach it.

“Shit. Uhm….” Dream was mumbling under his breath as he searched through different tools, eventually giving up and turning around to gently press against the wall behind him to try and successfully hit the power button. But it was no use, and the familiar sound of the machine whirring to life echoed through the room once more.

Suddenly the arms were digging into his ribs and sides, only this time, the bottom set of arms made their way over to his very sensitive tummy. He let out a shriek as they vibrated into the pudge of his lower tummy, between his belly button and the waistband of his pants.

“No no nahahahaha! Fuhuhuck, plehehease! PLEHEHEASE!” Dream wailed, feeling the second lowest set of arms moving over either side of his belly button and pressing in, vibrating again, but at a much faster pace than before. He doubled over once again, his back arching off the wall before leaning over with his elbows to his knees, cackling towards the floor with his eyes squeezed shut.

Just when he thought it couldn’t get any worse, the top two sets of arms began seeking out even more sensitive spots on his very ticklish torso. The lower of the top two sets found their way to the back of Dream’s ribs, a spot he had programmed purposely to fuck with George. He cried out at the feeling, never having been tickled there before and realizing how absolutely torturous it was. The top set framed themselves perfectly to wiggle their way under Dream’s arms, sending him flying back against the wall with his arms crossed over his stomach tightly.

“Nohoho, oh fuhuhuck, stohohop!” His knees began to wobble and he allowed himself to slowly slide down the wall, only stopping when he hit the ground with a thump. Dream pulled his knees up as much as he could, attempting to try and protect himself from the tickling but finding that it only further pressed the arms into his skin. He quickly straightened his legs out against the ground, kicking as he grabbed fistfuls of his pants, needing to hold onto something.

As the tickling continued, Dream fell to the ground on his side, turning onto his back and rolling back and forth a few times to try and hit the button against the floor. The third set of arms moved a little closer on either side to his belly button and he squealed, thrashing and squirming and kicking out as much as he could. No matter how much he pressed the machine into the ground, no matter what angle, it was no use - Dream was well and truly stuck.

The tickling finally stopped, but Dream couldn’t stop laughing. He was overwhelmed with the vibrations from the ghost tickles, still feeling the tingly circles and pokes over his torso as if they were still happening - even in the spots left untouched. He heard a noise from across the room and opened his eyes quickly, almost choking on his own breath as he saw George standing in the doorway, whose cheeks were bright red with his jaw dropped to the floor.

“G-George! I cahahan-”

“Dream?” George interrupted, his blushy cheeks somehow also appearing to be drained of all color as his eyes focused on the machine still wrapped around the blonde. “..What is that?”

The younger boy opened his mouth to try and explain, to try and make any excuse he could, but was cut off with a loud cackle when the machine clicked back on, the arms back in motion and making him scream.

“Noho not again! Nohoho plehehease! NOHOHO!” Dream let out a squeal that bounced off the walls of the room, startling George with the force of it. The older boy ran over and kneeled next to the blonde, trying to figure out what it was and what exactly was happening.

He watched with wide eyes as the metal arms poked and swirled and vibrated against Dream’s torso, focusing on his ribs and under his arms. The blonde let out a scream when the machine began to pick up speed and the bottom arms moved, making him arch up against the ground before falling back down against it, writhing and kicking as he did. Dream’s hands were wrapped around the bottom set of arms, pulling as much as he could to try and dislodge them, but finding it useless. George’s eyes trailed down to where they disappeared under the blonde’s shirt, moving a hand to grab the bottom of the fabric to slowly pull it up. George felt his face burning up as he saw the two bottom arms tickling at Dream’s belly button - one circling around the edge as the other pulled at it, occasionally dipping in and making Dream cry out in ticklish agony.

Dream swore he saw stars from how hard his eyes were squeezed shut. He knew he was screaming through his laughter, yet everything sounded muffled. His senses were on fire. The arms of the machine were sinking into every sensitive spot with precision, and with the two taunting the small indent in the center of his tummy, he thought he might seriously pass out at any second. His face was hot, and he could hear George talking to him and saying his name, but he couldn’t focus on anything else besides how horribly everything tickled. He attempted to open his eyes, but he was laughing so hard that his cheeks were keeping them squinted, blurring his vision and making it essentially impossible to see. Dream had no choice but surrender to the tickles, throwing his head back and letting himself laugh as much as he needed to.

He felt a hand grab his shoulder and pull him onto his side, and suddenly he could breathe again, taking in gulps of air and gasping through his cackles. George had managed to find the power button, finally freeing Dream from the ticklish hell he had been enduring. The brunette was carding his hand through the blonde waves, adjusting the two so that Dream’s head was resting against his thighs.

“Thank you, ohoho my God…” Dream managed through his left over giggles, turning to lay flat on his back as he draped a hand over his chest, letting out a deep sigh when he felt how fast his heart was beating. His eyes were still shut but he could hear the brunette laugh from above him, feeling his hand being moved from his chest and being replaced with one much smaller than his own. Dream moved his hand back, laying it over George’s and holding it for comfort.

“What even was that thing?” George asked hesitantly. Dream could sense the nervousness in the elder’s voice, opening his eyes slowly to adjust to the light and allowing them to focus on the brunette. George’s face was closer than he expected, making him giggle when George realized and pulled back quickly, clearing his throat and looking away from the blonde. Dream watched with a wide smile as George’s face grew an even deeper shade of red, clearly flustered at the situation he had walked in on.

“Well,” Dream spoke through his teeth, grunting as he moved to sit up slowly and cracking his back before turning around to face George. “You were nice enough to trust me with the whole tickling thing, so I wanted to do something special for you!”

Dream laughed as George physically cringed at the mention of the dreaded word, turning his attention from the blonde once again and looking down at his lap, picking at a loose thread in his pants to distract himself as he continued.

“O-Okay, and what? You decided you wanted to torture yourself to relate, or….?” He let out a squeaky giggle when Dream scoffed at the accusation, squirming to the side when a poke landed on his ribs.

“No, idiot. I actually made it…for you. For fun for us, but I was also thinking about it for the times where I can’t be there to help, you know?” Dream spoke gently, suddenly feeling shy about the whole thing and reaching behind him to pick up the small machine to hand to George. He watched as George’s face continued to turn a bright red, biting his lip to hold back the giggle that was threatening to escape to try and remain calm, knowing how embarrassing the subject was for the brunette.

“Dreeeeam,” George whined, holding the machine in one hand and bringing his free hand up to cover his face. “That’s…that’s just…”

He was struggling to find the words, torn between wanting to scream out in embarrassment, and wanting to cry because of how lucky he was to have someone like Dream supporting him. The younger boy giggled at the response, leaning forward and pulling the smaller boy into a hug. He smiled when he felt George lean into him, letting out a shaky breath as Dream used a hand to rub up and down his back soothingly.

“You’re welcome, Gogy.” Dream smirked, feeling George hide his face into the crook of his neck, whining about how much of an idiot he was. He let George pull away after a minute, using the floor to push himself up onto his feet and leaning down to offer George a hand. The brunette accepted it, grabbing the bigger hand and laughing when Dream yanked him to his feet as if he weighed nothing.

“I have a feeling this thing is gonna absolutely destroy you, Georgie.” Dream teased, poking at the machine and giggling when George turned his hips to prevent him from touching it. He noticed the elder’s blush had spread to the tips of his ears, the light pink color slowly turning a lighter shade of red the more flustered he became. George rolled his eyes at the blonde, hugging the machine to his chest as he spoke.

“Well, it sure did destroy you, didn’t it, Dreamie?” Dream made a move to walk towards the door, George suddenly stepping in his path and making the two almost collide together. He felt his own stomach flip at the question, taking a small step back and bringing a hand up to run through his hair as a way to cope with the nervousness he suddenly felt.

“I don’t know about that, but-” he tried to excuse the accusation away, but George was having none of it. He got a sudden wave of confidence, and mixed with his normal cockiness, Dream was doomed.

“No no no, you’re not gonna act like that didn’t just wreck you to pieces, Dream.” The blonde felt himself swallow hard as George took a step forward back into his space. “Which is kind of questionable, actually, because why would someone subject themselves to such torture if they didn’t like it? Care to explain?”

“N-No! No, I-”

“You liked it, didn’t you?” George held up a hand, slapping it over Dream’s mouth when he opened it to protest. “You wouldn’t have tried it if you didn’t think you’d like it at least a little bit.”

George removed his hand to let Dream answer, bursting into bright giggles when the blonde pressed his lips together tightly, his cheeks burning up and turning a dusty pink.

“I don’t!” George laughed at the way Dream was immediately defensive, not having any real excuse to offer other than a denial.

“Don’t worry, Dream. Your secret’s safe with me.” The older boy poked a finger into Dream’s tummy, making him jump back with a squeal. When he looked up again, George was walking towards the door, laughing as he went. Dream groaned, looking down at his shirt and bringing a hand up to his stomach, rubbing out the lingering tingles that George had left behind. He heard the door opening, looking up and being met with a very menacing smirk.

“Just to let you know, I absolutely will be using this against you. Watch your back, Dream. Your very, very ticklish back.” Dream felt a shiver run down his spine as he watched George flash him one last smile before turning to step through the threshold of the door with a wave, closing it lightly behind him.

Dream walked over to the crafting table, leaning back against it and letting out a deep breath he didn’t realize he was holding in. He sat down on the stool next to him, letting his head fall into his hands with a flustered whine, giggling to himself at how ridiculous the whole thing was.

When the flustered feeling finally passed, Dream was back on his feet, scribbling over blueprints of other ideas he had, making little improvements and upgrades as he worked. Dream decided he needed to up his game. If George thought that machine was mean, he decided to show him just how bad it could get. Dream was about to create George’s worst nightmare. Dream was determined to make George cry.

And he had just the idea on how to do it.

#lee!dream #tickle machine #this is different from the normal #and is very clearly set up for a sequel………so if u like this and wanna see more pls lemme know #again thank u to emma for letting me post this #thank u to summer for really hyping the shit out of this i don’t think i would’ve ever posted it without you #and thank u to my puppy cal for reading literally all of my fics and helping with the title #anyway…..enjoy!#mushie fics #mcyt tickle #my stuff

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robmoro · 1 year

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Listen | Swedish trio DEATH AND VANILLA release new single 'Find Another Illusion'

Listen | Swedish trio DEATH AND VANILLA release new single ‘Find Another Illusion’

DEATH AND VANILLA return with news of their new album “Flicker” and their latest dream pop track ‘Find Another Illusion’. More than ten years since Marleen Nilsson, Anders Hansson and Magnus Bodin founded the band in Malmö, Sweden, they have accumulated elements and inspiration from the city’s fierce industrial history and austere present. ‘Find Another Illusion’ is a melancholic dream-pop…

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mostlysignssomeportents · 1 year

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The AI hype bubble is the new crypto hype bubble

Back in 2017 Long Island Ice Tea — known for its undistinguished, barely drinkable sugar-water — changed its name to “Long Blockchain Corp.” Its shares surged to a peak of 400% over their pre-announcement price. The company announced no specific integrations with any kind of blockchain, nor has it made any such integrations since.

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/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way

LBCC was subsequently delisted from NASDAQ after settling with the SEC over fraudulent investor statements. Today, the company trades over the counter and its market cap is $36m, down from $138m.

https://cointelegraph.com/news/textbook-case-of-crypto-hype-how-iced-tea-company-went-blockchain-and-failed-despite-a-289-percent-stock-rise

The most remarkable thing about this incredibly stupid story is that LBCC wasn’t the peak of the blockchain bubble — rather, it was the start of blockchain’s final pump-and-dump. By the standards of 2022’s blockchain grifters, LBCC was small potatoes, a mere $138m sugar-water grift.

They didn’t have any NFTs, no wash trades, no ICO. They didn’t have a Superbowl ad. They didn’t steal billions from mom-and-pop investors while proclaiming themselves to be “Effective Altruists.” They didn’t channel hundreds of millions to election campaigns through straw donations and other forms of campaing finance frauds. They didn’t even open a crypto-themed hamburger restaurant where you couldn’t buy hamburgers with crypto:

https://robbreport.com/food-drink/dining/bored-hungry-restaurant-no-cryptocurrency-1234694556/

They were amateurs. Their attempt to “make fetch happen” only succeeded for a brief instant. By contrast, the superpredators of the crypto bubble were able to make fetch happen over an improbably long timescale, deploying the most powerful reality distortion fields since Pets.com.

Anything that can’t go on forever will eventually stop. We’re told that trillions of dollars’ worth of crypto has been wiped out over the past year, but these losses are nowhere to be seen in the real economy — because the “wealth” that was wiped out by the crypto bubble’s bursting never existed in the first place.

Like any Ponzi scheme, crypto was a way to separate normies from their savings through the pretense that they were “investing” in a vast enterprise — but the only real money (“fiat” in cryptospeak) in the system was the hardscrabble retirement savings of working people, which the bubble’s energetic inflaters swapped for illiquid, worthless shitcoins.

We’ve stopped believing in the illusory billions. Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest. But the people who gave him money — and the nimbler Ponzi artists who evaded arrest — are looking for new scams to separate the marks from their money.

Take Morganstanley, who spent 2021 and 2022 hyping cryptocurrency as a massive growth opportunity:

https://cointelegraph.com/news/morgan-stanley-launches-cryptocurrency-research-team

Today, Morganstanley wants you to know that AI is a $6 trillion opportunity.

They’re not alone. The CEOs of Endeavor, Buzzfeed, Microsoft, Spotify, Youtube, Snap, Sports Illustrated, and CAA are all out there, pumping up the AI bubble with every hour that god sends, declaring that the future is AI.

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/wall-street-ai-stock-price-1235343279/

Google and Bing are locked in an arms-race to see whose search engine can attain the speediest, most profound enshittification via chatbot, replacing links to web-pages with florid paragraphs composed by fully automated, supremely confident liars:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/16/tweedledumber/#easily-spooked

Blockchain was a solution in search of a problem. So is AI. Yes, Buzzfeed will be able to reduce its wage-bill by automating its personality quiz vertical, and Spotify’s “AI DJ” will produce slightly less terrible playlists (at least, to the extent that Spotify doesn’t put its thumb on the scales by inserting tracks into the playlists whose only fitness factor is that someone paid to boost them).

But even if you add all of this up, double it, square it, and add a billion dollar confidence interval, it still doesn’t add up to what Bank Of America analysts called “a defining moment — like the internet in the ’90s.” For one thing, the most exciting part of the “internet in the ‘90s” was that it had incredibly low barriers to entry and wasn’t dominated by large companies — indeed, it had them running scared.

The AI bubble, by contrast, is being inflated by massive incumbents, whose excitement boils down to “This will let the biggest companies get much, much bigger and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves.” Some revolution.

AI has all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump, starting with terminology. AI isn’t “artificial” and it’s not “intelligent.” “Machine learning” doesn’t learn. On this week’s Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete — not our new robot overlord.

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4NHKMZZNKi0w9mOhPYIL4T

We all know that autocomplete is a decidedly mixed blessing. Like all statistical inference tools, autocomplete is profoundly conservative — it wants you to do the same thing tomorrow as you did yesterday (that’s why “sophisticated” ad retargeting ads show you ads for shoes in response to your search for shoes). If the word you type after “hey” is usually “hon” then the next time you type “hey,” autocomplete will be ready to fill in your typical following word — even if this time you want to type “hey stop texting me you freak”:

https://blog.lareviewofbooks.org/provocations/neophobic-conservative-ai-overlords-want-everything-stay/

And when autocomplete encounters a new input — when you try to type something you’ve never typed before — it tries to get you to finish your sentence with the statistically median thing that everyone would type next, on average. Usually that produces something utterly bland, but sometimes the results can be hilarious. Back in 2018, I started to text our babysitter with “hey are you free to sit” only to have Android finish the sentence with “on my face” (not something I’d ever typed!):

https://mashable.com/article/android-predictive-text-sit-on-my-face

Modern autocomplete can produce long passages of text in response to prompts, but it is every bit as unreliable as 2018 Android SMS autocomplete, as Alexander Hanff discovered when ChatGPT informed him that he was dead, even generating a plausible URL for a link to a nonexistent obit in The Guardian:

https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/02/chatgpt_considered_harmful/

Of course, the carnival barkers of the AI pump-and-dump insist that this is all a feature, not a bug. If autocomplete says stupid, wrong things with total confidence, that’s because “AI” is becoming more human, because humans also say stupid, wrong things with total confidence.

Exhibit A is the billionaire AI grifter Sam Altman, CEO if OpenAI — a company whose products are not open, nor are they artificial, nor are they intelligent. Altman celebrated the release of ChatGPT by tweeting “i am a stochastic parrot, and so r u.”

https://twitter.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728

This was a dig at the “stochastic parrots” paper, a comprehensive, measured roundup of criticisms of AI that led Google to fire Timnit Gebru, a respected AI researcher, for having the audacity to point out the Emperor’s New Clothes:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru/

Gebru’s co-author on the Parrots paper was Emily M Bender, a computational linguistics specialist at UW, who is one of the best-informed and most damning critics of AI hype. You can get a good sense of her position from Elizabeth Weil’s New York Magazine profile:

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html

Bender has made many important scholarly contributions to her field, but she is also famous for her rules of thumb, which caution her fellow scientists not to get high on their own supply:

Please do not conflate word form and meaning

Mind your own credulity

As Bender says, we’ve made “machines that can mindlessly generate text, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining the mind behind it.” One potential tonic against this fallacy is to follow an Italian MP’s suggestion and replace “AI” with “SALAMI” (“Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences”). It’s a lot easier to keep a clear head when someone asks you, “Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?”

Bender’s most famous contribution is the “stochastic parrot,” a construct that “just probabilistically spits out words.” AI bros like Altman love the stochastic parrot, and are hellbent on reducing human beings to stochastic parrots, which will allow them to declare that their chatbots have feature-parity with human beings.

At the same time, Altman and Co are strangely afraid of their creations. It’s possible that this is just a shuck: “I have made something so powerful that it could destroy humanity! Luckily, I am a wise steward of this thing, so it’s fine. But boy, it sure is powerful!”

They’ve been playing this game for a long time. People like Elon Musk (an investor in OpenAI, who is hoping to convince the EU Commission and FTC that he can fire all of Twitter’s human moderators and replace them with chatbots without violating EU law or the FTC’s consent decree) keep warning us that AI will destroy us unless we tame it.

There’s a lot of credulous repetition of these claims, and not just by AI’s boosters. AI critics are also prone to engaging in what Lee Vinsel calls criti-hype: criticizing something by repeating its boosters’ claims without interrogating them to see if they’re true:

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

There are better ways to respond to Elon Musk warning us that AIs will emulsify the planet and use human beings for food than to shout, “Look at how irresponsible this wizard is being! He made a Frankenstein’s Monster that will kill us all!” Like, we could point out that of all the things Elon Musk is profoundly wrong about, he is most wrong about the philosophical meaning of Wachowksi movies:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/may/18/lilly-wachowski-ivana-trump-elon-musk-twitter-red-pill-the-matrix-tweets

But even if we take the bros at their word when they proclaim themselves to be terrified of “existential risk” from AI, we can find better explanations by seeking out other phenomena that might be triggering their dread. As Charlie Stross points out, corporations are Slow AIs, autonomous artificial lifeforms that consistently do the wrong thing even when the people who nominally run them try to steer them in better directions:

https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future

Imagine the existential horror of a ultra-rich manbaby who nominally leads a company, but can’t get it to follow: “everyone thinks I’m in charge, but I’m actually being driven by the Slow AI, serving as its sock puppet on some days, its golem on others.”

Ted Chiang nailed this back in 2017 (the same year of the Long Island Blockchain Company):

There’s a saying, popularized by Fredric Jameson, that it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. It’s no surprise that Silicon Valley capitalists don’t want to think about capitalism ending. What’s unexpected is that the way they envision the world ending is through a form of unchecked capitalism, disguised as a superintelligent AI. They have unconsciously created a devil in their own image, a boogeyman whose excesses are precisely their own.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway

Chiang is still writing some of the best critical work on “AI.” His February article in the New Yorker, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web,” was an instant classic:

[AI] hallucinations are compression artifacts, but — like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier — they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world.

https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/chatgpt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

“AI” is practically purpose-built for inflating another hype-bubble, excelling as it does at producing party-tricks — plausible essays, weird images, voice impersonations. But as Princeton’s Matthew Salganik writes, there’s a world of difference between “cool” and “tool”:

https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2023/03/08/can-chatgpt-and-its-successors-go-from-cool-to-tool/

Nature can claim “conversational AI is a game-changer for science” but “there is a huge gap between writing funny instructions for removing food from home electronics and doing scientific research.” Salganik tried to get ChatGPT to help him with the most banal of scholarly tasks — aiding him in peer reviewing a colleague’s paper. The result? “ChatGPT didn’t help me do peer review at all; not one little bit.”

The criti-hype isn’t limited to ChatGPT, of course — there’s plenty of (justifiable) concern about image and voice generators and their impact on creative labor markets, but that concern is often expressed in ways that amplify the self-serving claims of the companies hoping to inflate the hype machine.

One of the best critical responses to the question of image- and voice-generators comes from Kirby Ferguson, whose final Everything Is a Remix video is a superb, visually stunning, brilliantly argued critique of these systems:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rswxcDyotXA

One area where Ferguson shines is in thinking through the copyright question — is there any right to decide who can study the art you make? Except in some edge cases, these systems don’t store copies of the images they analyze, nor do they reproduce them:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/02/09/ai-monkeys-paw/#bullied-schoolkids

For creators, the important material question raised by these systems is economic, not creative: will our bosses use them to erode our wages? That is a very important question, and as far as our bosses are concerned, the answer is a resounding yes.

Markets value automation primarily because automation allows capitalists to pay workers less. The textile factory owners who purchased automatic looms weren’t interested in giving their workers raises and shorting working days. ‘ They wanted to fire their skilled workers and replace them with small children kidnapped out of orphanages and indentured for a decade, starved and beaten and forced to work, even after they were mangled by the machines. Fun fact: Oliver Twist was based on the bestselling memoir of Robert Blincoe, a child who survived his decade of forced labor:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/59127/59127-h/59127-h.htm

Today, voice actors sitting down to record for games companies are forced to begin each session with “My name is ______ and I hereby grant irrevocable permission to train an AI with my voice and use it any way you see fit.”

https://www.vice.com/en/article/5d37za/voice-actors-sign-away-rights-to-artificial-intelligence

Let’s be clear here: there is — at present — no firmly established copyright over voiceprints. The “right” that voice actors are signing away as a non-negotiable condition of doing their jobs for giant, powerful monopolists doesn’t even exist. When a corporation makes a worker surrender this right, they are betting that this right will be created later in the name of “artists’ rights” — and that they will then be able to harvest this right and use it to fire the artists who fought so hard for it.

There are other approaches to this. We could support the US Copyright Office’s position that machine-generated works are not works of human creative authorship and are thus not eligible for copyright — so if corporations wanted to control their products, they’d have to hire humans to make them:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/2/21/22944335/us-copyright-office-reject-ai-generated-art-recent-entrance-to-paradise

Or we could create collective rights that belong to all artists and can’t be signed away to a corporation. That’s how the right to record other musicians’ songs work — and it’s why Taylor Swift was able to re-record the masters that were sold out from under her by evil private-equity bros::

https://doctorow.medium.com/united-we-stand-61e16ec707e2

Whatever we do as creative workers and as humans entitled to a decent life, we can’t afford drink the Blockchain Iced Tea. That means that we have to be technically competent, to understand how the stochastic parrot works, and to make sure our criticism doesn’t just repeat the marketing copy of the latest pump-and-dump.

Today (Mar 9), you can catch me in person in Austin at the UT School of Design and Creative Technologies, and remotely at U Manitoba’s Ethics of Emerging Tech Lecture.

Tomorrow (Mar 10), Rebecca Giblin and I kick off the SXSW reading series.

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

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

[Image ID: A graph depicting the Gartner hype cycle. A pair of HAL 9000's glowing red eyes are chasing each other down the slope from the Peak of Inflated Expectations to join another one that is at rest in the Trough of Disillusionment. It, in turn, sits atop a vast cairn of HAL 9000 eyes that are piled in a rough pyramid that extends below the graph to a distance of several times its height.]

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