Agreed, Ted. The next new money making industry of the latter part of the 21st Century will be cleaning up the mess created be industry. Somebody will come up with a clever way to remove the flotsam and jetsam of chemicals and plastics in our oceans and some others will embark upon restoring our cultures to pre-AI and Big Tech ravages.
I understand that paper copies of dictionaries and reference books like encyclopedias are becoming fewer and fewer. They are all online these days.
I have subscribed to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary online version for many years. I have my own hard copy versions of the Webster’s Third International Dictionary as well as the 20 Volume Oxford English Dictionary. I use dictionaries daily. It is convenient to refer to the online version when I am out and about and want to check a word I do not know or one on which I am not quite certain.
The Webster’s online version was tremendously handy when I was away from home. This online version was an exact facsimile of the print version.
But on a day, which for me will live in infamy, back in 2013, I logged onto the online version and was horrified. Webster had drastically changed the online version and dumbed it down. I expressed deep dissatisfaction to Webster. They replied that it was a project to make the dictionary easier to use. I wrote them back and beseeched them to restore it to the way they had it before. I even offered to pay a higher subscription fee. The dictionary could have a tiered subscription. The top tier would be the unabridged version of the Webster’s Third International which is of invaluable service to writers and editors, researchers and scholars. The bottom tier, the one they had just launched, the one with the pictures of duckies and Tele-Tubbies would be an option for whoever wanted it. My lament of course, fell upon deaf ears.
Lesson: HOLD ONTO YOUR PAPER COPIES OF REFERENCE BOOKS. We will need to rely on them.
It'll be herculean to clean up this wave of garbage. These techbugs are doing to the digital world what their mogul-overlord predecessors did to the real one. We'll have to rebuild whole worlds back, both in and out of our plane of reality.
I was wondering if it was me or was the spell checkers/dictionaries/thesaurus online and on my desktop getting dumbed down? Just what is the point of dumbing it down as it only reduces its utility?
Reminds me of something .... something about a Newspeak edition coming out.
Years ago I got a 1971 copy of the oxford, the one that weighs ten pounds and comes with a magnifying glass. Online version was dumber too, like an abridgement of the abridged version. It was decent enough for quick applications until it disappeared a few years ago, but if you didn't have that better edition you'd never know what was missing.
One thing though .... isn't the shelf life of any printed material not under glass about a 150 years or so? We're going to need scribes too.
OMG! THANK YOU SO MUCH for sharing this. Will definitely be holding onto mine. Keep everything written as well. If they're changing dictionaries, they'll change novels etc.
To your point, KM, I omitted the fact that in one of the replies I received from a senior editor from Merriam-Webster, she told me that it was impossible to revert back to the original online, perfect facsimile version of the unabridged dictionary because that version was erased after the Orwellian Version was launched.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, has unceremoniously arrived.
Verne, Bradbury, Orwell, Heinlein, Gibson. It is amazing how these creative minds so accurately have written about the future. And I still have an actual eight inch thick Oxford dictionary that my FiL had kept, along with a full set of encyclopedias. They compliment over a thousand books in my home. My wife has taken to reading library books on her IPad, but I won't give up the satisfaction of picking out a book and reading every turned page until I've finished.
They’ve been doing that for years. I tried to buy my kid Swiss Family Robinson, at least 10 years ago, the newer versions had dumber language and all references to religion removed.
I wonder how they will dumb down Dylan Thomas. “Do not go gentle into that good night… Rage, rage against the dying of the light!”. Might be construed as advocating for violence against the night and light.
Would be nice if that happened (what you write in the first paragraph). But what would the business plan look like? That would only be possible through the state, right? Who pays the cleaners, where does the money for the clean-up machines come from, etc.?
I fear that the aberrations that seem silly or outrageous to us now will soon be a common, accepted standard. We know what the difference is, but the generation growing up amidst AI pollution will have no former knowledge to which to compare these false portraist or texts.
"The bookleggers smuggled books to the southwest desert and buried them there in kegs. The memorizers committed to rote memory entire volumes of history, sacred writings, literature, and science, in case some unfortunate book smuggler was caught, tortured, and forced to reveal the location of the kegs…
The project, aimed at saving a small remnant of human culture from the remnant of humanity who wanted it destroyed, was then underway."
- from A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller
One of my all-time favourite books. I bought a new copy of it a few years ago as I had worn the old copy out over the years. I am a rereader. Only had to buy one copy of the sequel but I still read them both now and then.
I suppose that must depend on what the public system is like by you. And I can only imagine the depths of patience you must have. Not all of the teachers my son and daughter had were deeply committed or even so good as mediocre, but most were pretty great, and we used the bad ones as an example of what they could expect out in the real world. I never curtailed what my kids could read so long as they did read. And they did. Now my grandkids are avid readers too. Math can be a struggle but that’s another story.
nothing on the internet feels real anymore - the modern tech world in general feels completely soulless. i feel as though culturally we’re going to revert, in a few years it’ll be trendy to live like it’s the 1800s again, minus the tuberculosis.
If only the medical system, like much else, wasn’t such a corrupted, degraded, and financialized pit, people like those anti vaxxers would be more likely to trust the possible utility of the vaccines. Since, like much else, the medical system is untrustworthy, why should they be trusted? As with the news media, if you keep crying wolf, you best hope that a real one never comes calling.
Someone at Google must read Ted's work because the AI Beethoven image has been replaced. But whoever it is, they aren't a paying subscribers because Isaac Newton is the same.
How do we teach younger generations this when it’s the first image that comes up in a search on their school-issued GOOGLE Chromebooks? I remember the first time I realized things aren’t always what they seem with so-called “authority” meaning teachers, coaches, doctors, etc. I was little and my stomach started to hurt. Kids are smarter than we give them credit for. When they discover the truth of what society is feeding them now, they’ll be angry. Rightfully so.
Who gave big tech authority over our lives and why? Who sold our souls? Again, those same sellouts underestimated those who seek truth and authenticity! Keep fighting the good fight.
This is really true, Kate. When I was in the workforce, on days when it was possible to do so, I would bring a little Bluetooth speaker along with me and play music during the day. Others never objected and often they quite enjoyed the selections. I would play an eclectic array of jazz, classical, pop, rock, blues, folk, bluegrass and so on.
However, on a couple of occasions, at least one or two younger workers expressed deep resentment over what I was playing. The first time this happened I was a bit startled, I wondered if I should just turn the music off. But instead, I turned the music down a bit and politely asked after the reaction. This young man told me that this was really good music and that he had never been exposed to anything like it. His paradigm bubble was shattered and he was disconcerted about the meaning of all this. He felt that he had been let down and cheated and betrayed.
Each of these young men were viscerally jarred by this “new” stuff they had never before heard.
At the first time this happened, I didn’t know how to respond, but I acknowledged what this man had to say and added that if he ever had any questions about this sort of music, that I was always available.
Like Ted described in his piece about AI getting “booed” at the recent SXSW Expo in Texas, I believe that there is hope for our cultural legacy. Fewer and fewer younger people are not buying into this Big Tech roll-out of their vision of the Borg-2.0.
What an honor for you to have shattered it. When young people experience quality art, they deserve to be mentored and guided!! I have a younger woman in my office that calls me mama Kate. I’ve been sharing good music with her, too!! Some stuff I’ve learned here!
She’s very open-minded and smart. I’m glad they can see the light ✨
The image doesn't look anything like Rowan Atkinson, although I agree these AI creations are most unwelcome, but Google has been messing with far more important image results for years.
I couldn't comment on the last article, as I have no intention of paying but I'm trying to think how The Tempest is a critique of technology.
Is the idea magic==technology? I think that's a weak meme. And we do not live in a world full of learned Prosperos who discover forgiveness about to bury their staff, but in a world full of morons with mobile phones.
And I'm also trying think how The Tempest is a "book". It's a play to be performed and watched, here Ted talks once again about "reading" Shakespeare. The Tempest happens to be collated in a book, the First Folio, and presumably existed in quarto. It's recorded, but calling it a book is missing the mark. It's read by actors and directors for a purpose, not to be consumed like a novel.
My bookshelf insists that The Tempest is a book. I've learned the hard way not to argue with my bookshelf. Different books are meant to be "read" differently. For example, song books are meant to be played or sung, coloring books are meant to be colored, note books to be written in, reference books to be read in part, and so on. They all provide some level of durable information storage.
My favorite take on The Tempest as a critique of technology is Forbidden Planet, a science fiction movie. It's a common take. After all, any magic sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from technology. It's about the risks of harnessing powerful natural forces, so it's evergreen. It might be tired, but we're commenting on a post about releasing the AI genie.
You say Forbidden Planet is your favourite "take on The Tempest as a critique of technology". Well that's not The Tempest.
Some people assume it could be some kind of lose adaption of The Tempest. So what are the others ? Wikipedia mentions a Star Trek episode.
Now you've brought this up, I can't help wondering if this is where Ted got his "Tempest as critique of technology". He's not actually familiar with The Tempest all. Or ever seen it performed, or has arrived at any understanding of it personally. It's not impossible he might have even assumed it was a book too, incredible as that sounds.
He's heard about it somewhere and what it's "supposed to mean" by critics who were actually talking about Forbidden Planet and Star Trek, applying their own modern ideas onto it retroactively. Someone tell me how this is an improvement over AI images of Beethoven.
I really wonder if this is the case. There was a novelization of Forbidden Planet too I read. Perhaps he got it muddled up with The Tempest and meant to put that in the list.
Related to this, I was very bothered by the A.I. ads during the Olympics, and the ones that had anything to remotely do with running (my thing)—the father asking Google’s Gemini A.I. to write a letter to Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, or the woman in the Meta ad asking the A.I. bot to design her a training program—really got under my skin. I’m scared shitless that artificial intelligence is going to erode humanity’s actual intelligence to the point where we don’t actually know how to do anything for ourselves, e.g., a young girl writing a sincere letter to her hero, or a coach actually thinking through why they’re putting a training program together a certain way. I’m not a technophobe by any stretch, and there are certainly advantageous use cases for some forms of A.I., but I see so many people not using their brains to actually learn how to do shit or understand how and why things work the way they do, and that’s going to be bad news on a number of levels if we’re not careful. (On the flipside, like you note here, I also believe opportunities will always exist, if not open up more, for folks who are really paying attention, care deeply about developing an understanding and cultivating meaning, and generally aren’t lazy or trying to cut corners.)
I have thousands of books, and decades ago considered whether keeping them was pointless. At the time, I realized that I could read, and share books without surveillance. Around that time, Hemingway’s heirs by his second wife forced a reissue of “A Moveable Feast” that was less critical of their grandmother. I realized then that the cultural establishment was crumbling.
Your post makes a compelling case for epic civilizational collapse. We all have a responsibility to maintain personal islands of civilization, in order to participate, if possible—in however small a way—in the rebuilding of culture after the next Dark Age.
In the age of social media, a very toxic problem arose: anyone could have a platform. Any person with an internet connection could start spreading ideas, at scale, even if they had no idea what they were talking about.
The world had never encountered that problem before. Up until then, stupidity was much easier to amputate and cauterize locally. If someone had terrible ideas or bad information, they generally just never reached a large audience.
The AI Slop Internet is the exponential evolution of this problem: not only can anybody (any AI agent) fill the internet with nonsense, but now there are two more derivative problems.
1. There is close to zero cost in doing so (it is far cheaper/faster for an AI agent to push out gigabytes of nonsense than it is for one person to send stupid Tweets one by one), and
2. The AI will be training off of the incorrect data on the Slop Internet. Meaning the problem goes parabolic, and the entire internet, other than carefully walled gardens, will become not only toxic but completely useless.
(And this doesn't just apply to "information" - soon, Instagram is going to be full of petite Asian women whose asses are literally six feet across.)
And, thinking through this with game theory (Scott Alexander has an outstanding post about this called Meditations on Moloch), look at the incentives.
- Even though nobody wants to have an internet full of garbage,
- Individual economic actors are incentivized to fill the internet with garbage so they can squeeze out that extra click and ad revenue while the going is still good. (And/or to make their enemies look bad.)
In other words, since everybody knows that *someone* will fill the internet with garbage, the incentive becomes perverse: whoever does it first wins. In the short term. Before everyone loses together. (A race to the bottom.)
It’s going to be important in the near future to be part of good clubs on the internet. Because everything outside of those clubs is going to absolutely suck.
And, like you, I'm sickly looking forward to watching this all play out.
I love footnotes. I use them in my posts. They feel anachronistic don’t they? But they also point the way to BAI facts (Before Artificial Intelligence). These are things that were said.
Scary as hell, but I think as AI content feeds upon its own distortions, the public at large will cease to believe anything they see on the internet, and swimming in a sea of falseness (I refuse to use the word ‘misinformation’) will become the norm. What THAT means my crystal ball ain’t tellin’ though.
Ted, I’ve long been 100% down with your anti-tech worldview, to this point where I release my music via snail mail postcards just for some physical evidence of my work to exist. Since we’re talking Beethoven, here’s my take on his 5th symphony. (Also available via snail mail postcard!)
Agreed, Ted. The next new money making industry of the latter part of the 21st Century will be cleaning up the mess created be industry. Somebody will come up with a clever way to remove the flotsam and jetsam of chemicals and plastics in our oceans and some others will embark upon restoring our cultures to pre-AI and Big Tech ravages.
I understand that paper copies of dictionaries and reference books like encyclopedias are becoming fewer and fewer. They are all online these days.
I have subscribed to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary online version for many years. I have my own hard copy versions of the Webster’s Third International Dictionary as well as the 20 Volume Oxford English Dictionary. I use dictionaries daily. It is convenient to refer to the online version when I am out and about and want to check a word I do not know or one on which I am not quite certain.
The Webster’s online version was tremendously handy when I was away from home. This online version was an exact facsimile of the print version.
But on a day, which for me will live in infamy, back in 2013, I logged onto the online version and was horrified. Webster had drastically changed the online version and dumbed it down. I expressed deep dissatisfaction to Webster. They replied that it was a project to make the dictionary easier to use. I wrote them back and beseeched them to restore it to the way they had it before. I even offered to pay a higher subscription fee. The dictionary could have a tiered subscription. The top tier would be the unabridged version of the Webster’s Third International which is of invaluable service to writers and editors, researchers and scholars. The bottom tier, the one they had just launched, the one with the pictures of duckies and Tele-Tubbies would be an option for whoever wanted it. My lament of course, fell upon deaf ears.
Lesson: HOLD ONTO YOUR PAPER COPIES OF REFERENCE BOOKS. We will need to rely on them.
It'll be herculean to clean up this wave of garbage. These techbugs are doing to the digital world what their mogul-overlord predecessors did to the real one. We'll have to rebuild whole worlds back, both in and out of our plane of reality.
An onerous, yet noble task.
I was wondering if it was me or was the spell checkers/dictionaries/thesaurus online and on my desktop getting dumbed down? Just what is the point of dumbing it down as it only reduces its utility?
I couldn’t have said it better. Very good point.
Reminds me of something .... something about a Newspeak edition coming out.
Years ago I got a 1971 copy of the oxford, the one that weighs ten pounds and comes with a magnifying glass. Online version was dumber too, like an abridgement of the abridged version. It was decent enough for quick applications until it disappeared a few years ago, but if you didn't have that better edition you'd never know what was missing.
One thing though .... isn't the shelf life of any printed material not under glass about a 150 years or so? We're going to need scribes too.
Yes, we will need new scribes too. And maybe memorizers, like in Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
OMG! THANK YOU SO MUCH for sharing this. Will definitely be holding onto mine. Keep everything written as well. If they're changing dictionaries, they'll change novels etc.
To your point, KM, I omitted the fact that in one of the replies I received from a senior editor from Merriam-Webster, she told me that it was impossible to revert back to the original online, perfect facsimile version of the unabridged dictionary because that version was erased after the Orwellian Version was launched.
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, has unceremoniously arrived.
Verne, Bradbury, Orwell, Heinlein, Gibson. It is amazing how these creative minds so accurately have written about the future. And I still have an actual eight inch thick Oxford dictionary that my FiL had kept, along with a full set of encyclopedias. They compliment over a thousand books in my home. My wife has taken to reading library books on her IPad, but I won't give up the satisfaction of picking out a book and reading every turned page until I've finished.
Roald Dahl's books recently got sensitivity rewrites.
EXACTLY!
They’ve been doing that for years. I tried to buy my kid Swiss Family Robinson, at least 10 years ago, the newer versions had dumber language and all references to religion removed.
I wonder how they will dumb down Dylan Thomas. “Do not go gentle into that good night… Rage, rage against the dying of the light!”. Might be construed as advocating for violence against the night and light.
God willing that in the near future it will be more obviously profitable to improve things than to destroy them...
Would be nice if that happened (what you write in the first paragraph). But what would the business plan look like? That would only be possible through the state, right? Who pays the cleaners, where does the money for the clean-up machines come from, etc.?
I fear that the aberrations that seem silly or outrageous to us now will soon be a common, accepted standard. We know what the difference is, but the generation growing up amidst AI pollution will have no former knowledge to which to compare these false portraist or texts.
My husband Peco and I recently published "A Guide to Booklegging- How (and why) to collect, preserve, and read the printed word", which provides a practical starting place for perserving our "semantic mountains".https://schooloftheunconformed.substack.com/p/a-guide-to-booklegging-how-and-why
"The bookleggers smuggled books to the southwest desert and buried them there in kegs. The memorizers committed to rote memory entire volumes of history, sacred writings, literature, and science, in case some unfortunate book smuggler was caught, tortured, and forced to reveal the location of the kegs…
The project, aimed at saving a small remnant of human culture from the remnant of humanity who wanted it destroyed, was then underway."
- from A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller
One of my all-time favourite books. I bought a new copy of it a few years ago as I had worn the old copy out over the years. I am a rereader. Only had to buy one copy of the sequel but I still read them both now and then.
oh wow! Thank you so much!
This is why I want to homeschool and not use the education system.
I suppose that must depend on what the public system is like by you. And I can only imagine the depths of patience you must have. Not all of the teachers my son and daughter had were deeply committed or even so good as mediocre, but most were pretty great, and we used the bad ones as an example of what they could expect out in the real world. I never curtailed what my kids could read so long as they did read. And they did. Now my grandkids are avid readers too. Math can be a struggle but that’s another story.
And I am certain you will teach them cursive. (I understand that AI can read a cursive font, however, it cannot read human generated cursive).
What you and your husband are doing is noble, altruistic and visionary. Thank you.
nothing on the internet feels real anymore - the modern tech world in general feels completely soulless. i feel as though culturally we’re going to revert, in a few years it’ll be trendy to live like it’s the 1800s again, minus the tuberculosis.
The anti-vaxxers they are yearning for a world with TB.
If only the medical system, like much else, wasn’t such a corrupted, degraded, and financialized pit, people like those anti vaxxers would be more likely to trust the possible utility of the vaccines. Since, like much else, the medical system is untrustworthy, why should they be trusted? As with the news media, if you keep crying wolf, you best hope that a real one never comes calling.
Thank you for providing clarity, that being so rare these days.
Someone at Google must read Ted's work because the AI Beethoven image has been replaced. But whoever it is, they aren't a paying subscribers because Isaac Newton is the same.
If only I had this kind of influence at Spotify!
How do we teach younger generations this when it’s the first image that comes up in a search on their school-issued GOOGLE Chromebooks? I remember the first time I realized things aren’t always what they seem with so-called “authority” meaning teachers, coaches, doctors, etc. I was little and my stomach started to hurt. Kids are smarter than we give them credit for. When they discover the truth of what society is feeding them now, they’ll be angry. Rightfully so.
Who gave big tech authority over our lives and why? Who sold our souls? Again, those same sellouts underestimated those who seek truth and authenticity! Keep fighting the good fight.
This is really true, Kate. When I was in the workforce, on days when it was possible to do so, I would bring a little Bluetooth speaker along with me and play music during the day. Others never objected and often they quite enjoyed the selections. I would play an eclectic array of jazz, classical, pop, rock, blues, folk, bluegrass and so on.
However, on a couple of occasions, at least one or two younger workers expressed deep resentment over what I was playing. The first time this happened I was a bit startled, I wondered if I should just turn the music off. But instead, I turned the music down a bit and politely asked after the reaction. This young man told me that this was really good music and that he had never been exposed to anything like it. His paradigm bubble was shattered and he was disconcerted about the meaning of all this. He felt that he had been let down and cheated and betrayed.
Each of these young men were viscerally jarred by this “new” stuff they had never before heard.
At the first time this happened, I didn’t know how to respond, but I acknowledged what this man had to say and added that if he ever had any questions about this sort of music, that I was always available.
Like Ted described in his piece about AI getting “booed” at the recent SXSW Expo in Texas, I believe that there is hope for our cultural legacy. Fewer and fewer younger people are not buying into this Big Tech roll-out of their vision of the Borg-2.0.
What an honor for you to have shattered it. When young people experience quality art, they deserve to be mentored and guided!! I have a younger woman in my office that calls me mama Kate. I’ve been sharing good music with her, too!! Some stuff I’ve learned here!
She’s very open-minded and smart. I’m glad they can see the light ✨
Makes me very happy too. Good job! Mentoring is a remedy for the garbage shoved at them by schools and the media.
I am deeply grateful for your insight and writing.
"Society is going to overdose on deception. And resuscitation will be difficult." That is what keeps me awake at night.
In case you missed it there is an interesting NYT article about how easy it is to manipulate AI chatbot results. What could possibly go wrong!
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/30/technology/ai-chatbot-chatgpt-manipulation.html
The image doesn't look anything like Rowan Atkinson, although I agree these AI creations are most unwelcome, but Google has been messing with far more important image results for years.
I couldn't comment on the last article, as I have no intention of paying but I'm trying to think how The Tempest is a critique of technology.
Is the idea magic==technology? I think that's a weak meme. And we do not live in a world full of learned Prosperos who discover forgiveness about to bury their staff, but in a world full of morons with mobile phones.
And I'm also trying think how The Tempest is a "book". It's a play to be performed and watched, here Ted talks once again about "reading" Shakespeare. The Tempest happens to be collated in a book, the First Folio, and presumably existed in quarto. It's recorded, but calling it a book is missing the mark. It's read by actors and directors for a purpose, not to be consumed like a novel.
Goethe's Faust was not a "book" either.
My bookshelf insists that The Tempest is a book. I've learned the hard way not to argue with my bookshelf. Different books are meant to be "read" differently. For example, song books are meant to be played or sung, coloring books are meant to be colored, note books to be written in, reference books to be read in part, and so on. They all provide some level of durable information storage.
My favorite take on The Tempest as a critique of technology is Forbidden Planet, a science fiction movie. It's a common take. After all, any magic sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from technology. It's about the risks of harnessing powerful natural forces, so it's evergreen. It might be tired, but we're commenting on a post about releasing the AI genie.
You say Forbidden Planet is your favourite "take on The Tempest as a critique of technology". Well that's not The Tempest.
Some people assume it could be some kind of lose adaption of The Tempest. So what are the others ? Wikipedia mentions a Star Trek episode.
Now you've brought this up, I can't help wondering if this is where Ted got his "Tempest as critique of technology". He's not actually familiar with The Tempest all. Or ever seen it performed, or has arrived at any understanding of it personally. It's not impossible he might have even assumed it was a book too, incredible as that sounds.
He's heard about it somewhere and what it's "supposed to mean" by critics who were actually talking about Forbidden Planet and Star Trek, applying their own modern ideas onto it retroactively. Someone tell me how this is an improvement over AI images of Beethoven.
I really wonder if this is the case. There was a novelization of Forbidden Planet too I read. Perhaps he got it muddled up with The Tempest and meant to put that in the list.
There's a place in the world for outliers.
You are correct – NOT Mr Bean – it's Bill Murray!
If you thought Beethoven was bad, wait til you see what Google Gemini did to the founding fathers. DEI and ESG infused into AI will turn into Orwell’s nightmare. Let’s elevate authentic human intelligence above artificial machine intelligence: https://yuribezmenov.substack.com/p/artifcial-intelligence-ai-authentic-intelligence?utm_source=publication-search
Related to this, I was very bothered by the A.I. ads during the Olympics, and the ones that had anything to remotely do with running (my thing)—the father asking Google’s Gemini A.I. to write a letter to Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, or the woman in the Meta ad asking the A.I. bot to design her a training program—really got under my skin. I’m scared shitless that artificial intelligence is going to erode humanity’s actual intelligence to the point where we don’t actually know how to do anything for ourselves, e.g., a young girl writing a sincere letter to her hero, or a coach actually thinking through why they’re putting a training program together a certain way. I’m not a technophobe by any stretch, and there are certainly advantageous use cases for some forms of A.I., but I see so many people not using their brains to actually learn how to do shit or understand how and why things work the way they do, and that’s going to be bad news on a number of levels if we’re not careful. (On the flipside, like you note here, I also believe opportunities will always exist, if not open up more, for folks who are really paying attention, care deeply about developing an understanding and cultivating meaning, and generally aren’t lazy or trying to cut corners.)
Brilliant analysis and diagnosis!
I have thousands of books, and decades ago considered whether keeping them was pointless. At the time, I realized that I could read, and share books without surveillance. Around that time, Hemingway’s heirs by his second wife forced a reissue of “A Moveable Feast” that was less critical of their grandmother. I realized then that the cultural establishment was crumbling.
Your post makes a compelling case for epic civilizational collapse. We all have a responsibility to maintain personal islands of civilization, in order to participate, if possible—in however small a way—in the rebuilding of culture after the next Dark Age.
In the age of social media, a very toxic problem arose: anyone could have a platform. Any person with an internet connection could start spreading ideas, at scale, even if they had no idea what they were talking about.
The world had never encountered that problem before. Up until then, stupidity was much easier to amputate and cauterize locally. If someone had terrible ideas or bad information, they generally just never reached a large audience.
The AI Slop Internet is the exponential evolution of this problem: not only can anybody (any AI agent) fill the internet with nonsense, but now there are two more derivative problems.
1. There is close to zero cost in doing so (it is far cheaper/faster for an AI agent to push out gigabytes of nonsense than it is for one person to send stupid Tweets one by one), and
2. The AI will be training off of the incorrect data on the Slop Internet. Meaning the problem goes parabolic, and the entire internet, other than carefully walled gardens, will become not only toxic but completely useless.
(And this doesn't just apply to "information" - soon, Instagram is going to be full of petite Asian women whose asses are literally six feet across.)
And, thinking through this with game theory (Scott Alexander has an outstanding post about this called Meditations on Moloch), look at the incentives.
- Even though nobody wants to have an internet full of garbage,
- Individual economic actors are incentivized to fill the internet with garbage so they can squeeze out that extra click and ad revenue while the going is still good. (And/or to make their enemies look bad.)
In other words, since everybody knows that *someone* will fill the internet with garbage, the incentive becomes perverse: whoever does it first wins. In the short term. Before everyone loses together. (A race to the bottom.)
It’s going to be important in the near future to be part of good clubs on the internet. Because everything outside of those clubs is going to absolutely suck.
And, like you, I'm sickly looking forward to watching this all play out.
I’ve been saying it all along, “garbage in, garbage out.”
I love footnotes. I use them in my posts. They feel anachronistic don’t they? But they also point the way to BAI facts (Before Artificial Intelligence). These are things that were said.
Scary as hell, but I think as AI content feeds upon its own distortions, the public at large will cease to believe anything they see on the internet, and swimming in a sea of falseness (I refuse to use the word ‘misinformation’) will become the norm. What THAT means my crystal ball ain’t tellin’ though.
Ted, I’ve long been 100% down with your anti-tech worldview, to this point where I release my music via snail mail postcards just for some physical evidence of my work to exist. Since we’re talking Beethoven, here’s my take on his 5th symphony. (Also available via snail mail postcard!)
https://jimofseattle-postcards.s3.amazonaws.com/Fifth/story.html