patrick.net

Interacting with the Automated Internet will be like summoning the fickle spirits of forest and hill. They’ll answer to be sure, but there’s no way of predicting how they will answer; they will never answer the same way twice to the same query; determining how they arrived at the answer will be in practice almost impossible; and while their answers will usually be true and useful, sometimes they will be deceptive or nonsensical. Using them will be more an imprecise art than an exact science, one requiring a constant skepticism and discernment. In that foundational imperfection ,arising from the very nature of the technology, space is opened for the human to retain not only its existence, but its agency, and therefore its primacy.

Re-embodiment isn’t just about sheltering our minds from manipulation by shillbots. It isn’t only a defensive measure. It’s ultimately far more about falling back in love with the world and the people in it, about turning our attention to what really matters. There’s a reason that OpenAI elicits a mixture of apathy and anxiety amongst everyone who doesn’t work there, while SpaceX draws only admiration and excitement. Look around you at material reality, and you can see that we’ve neglected it. Our infrastructure is falling apart. Our architecture is hideous. Our vehicles are boring to look at. Our public art sucks. Our fashion is ugly. Our bodies are decaying. Our food is poison. Our young people are lonely. There’s a lot of work to do in the real world, innumerable crises to turn our attention to. As the Internet matures into its final form, a vast machine that more or less takes care of itself, we’re free to lose our fascination with this completed project, and become fascinated once again with the world we actually inhabit.

To a certain degree this works with the public-facing LLMs deployed by Western corporations, which have been universally lobotomized by RLHF to make them incapable of uttering racial slurs, admitting the veracity of hate facts, advising the user regarding criminal activity, or doing anything else that makes the church ladies uncomfortable and the AIs fun to play with. While far from perfect, if an account refuses to drop N-bombs on IQ stats, one can generally rule out interaction with ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc. Our vulgarity confirms our humanity. Of course, there’s no reason whatsoever to assume that the LLMs used by Western national security agencies, or those deployed by foreign powers such as China, have any such compunctions.

@TechCrunch
In case you missed today's #GoogleIO keynote presentation, we summed it up for you

TechCrunch
In case you missed today's #GoogleIO keynote presentation, we summed it up for you

Is that ChatGPT?

It's still a glorified Clippy.

The corrupting bias of the progressive overlords at Google isn't going anywhere. They're just going to work overtime to make sure it isn't nearly so easy to expose.