Ian Pierce

Tag: fuck AI

  • non-flushable turds

    There’s been some recent drama between Valve and Epic Games, who run two of the world’s largest online game storefronts. Apparently Tim Sweeney, the CEO of Epic, said in an interview recently that he was opposed to Steam putting disclosures on its storefront informing buyers of AI-generated content. The new version of Epic’s Unreal Engine uses generative AI features that developers can’t turn off, and Sweeney believes that Valve warning gamers about AI slop will be bad for sales. Apparently it’s never crossed Tim Sweeney’s mind that the reason why this would be bad for sales is because people hate AI. 

    You would think that, if there was some invisible hand of the market guiding the laws of supply and demand, companies who make AI garbage generators would recognize that nobody likes their products and would stop making them. But it seems that these corporations have grown so big that they no longer need to worry about what consumers think. If they want us to eat shit, well then, shit we shall eat. And let’s be real: all of the stuff they make is shit. I’ve finally switched away from Google Search because when I search for a website, it seems to think that I want an AI summary of a Reddit post vaguely related to what I’ve typed in. Either that, or they want to shove an ad in my face. 

    Still, even if I’ve finally quit Googling stuff, I’m forced into the Google ecosystem. I have a Gmail address, and all of the (non-pornography) videos that I watch are on YouTube. You kind of have to bend to their will if you want to use the internet these days. It used to be that you could host your own email server out of your closet, but the tubes are so clogged with spam that running your own server is impossible to maintain. We’re forced into the same narrow boxes, the same websites, until Google tries to write our emails for us every time we open a new window. 

    It would be nice to be able to opt out. It would be nice to have a choice. But choices, as far as I can tell, are no longer for people like us. They’re for billionaires, who as far as I can tell, have aspirations far greater than recreating the age of robber barons. They want to bring back feudalism. They want us to pay for everything while they pay us nothing and replace our jobs with AI. 

    This is one of the problems I have with the argument that “we can’t have an income tax in Washington because billionaires ~ * CrEaTe JoBs * ~. If Boeing or Starbucks or Amazon could get away with having no pesky employees demanding annoying things like “paychecks” or “benefits”, they would. Microsoft just spent $110 billion to buy Activision Blizzard, then laid off ten thousand XBOX employees. Corporations don’t create employment out of the goodness of their hearts. They do it because they are obliged to. 

    I’m hoping that soon this whole AI economy collapses like a giant house of cards. Technocrats like to claim that “AI today is the worst it’s ever going to be”. That’s bullshit. AI isn’t learning or thinking. It’s taking words on the internet, stirring them around, and spitting them out in a (sometimes) coherent order. It’s like if you claimed your alphabet soup was intelligent because sometimes words come out when you dip your spoon in. As more and more of the internet gets taken over by AI, the quality of that alphabet soup will deteriorate, like copies of a copy. It’s like how the Melvins pioneered the genre that would be called grunge, but many lesser bands imitated them, then even lesser bands did the same, until eventually we got Nickelback. Do you want the internet to be Nickelback? Because that’s how you get Nickelback.  

    But that’s how bubbles work. Everyone gets super rich until suddenly they’re not. So if you’re a venture capitalist hoping to make a fortune on the next big thing after AI, I have a proposal for you. I’m selling shares in a company that will hold a monopoly on shipping goods from the South Seas. It’s foolproof, I tell you.  

    ~ Ian (listening to Demon Days by Gorillaz)

  • talk to me like humans do

    My friend and fellow Resnick Award nominee Jason Boyd sent me this Penny Arcade comic from a few days ago:

    Screenshot

    That last panel… woof.

    (As a side note, I’ve actually met Jerry Holkins in person. I think that if you spend enough time in tabletop gaming stores in Seattle he will just make himself manifest. As I recall, he was buying Age of Sigmar figurines.)

    Aside from the perils posed by the other issue discussed in that last panel (I speak as someone who has, on occasion, consumed a wee bit too much of humanity’s favorite recreational hydrocarbon), there’s a lot to be said about the act of “creation” under AI that I still have a lot of thoughts about. As far as I can tell, the proponents of AI-based “writing” tools seem to have this belief that the reason writers write is to have a salable produce at the end of it – that the point of writing is to have written. In this worldview, books and stories are entirely fungible, and the act of creation is a burdensome chore. Think of how much time you’ll have, they imply, now that the boring writing part is out of the way!

    I think that, all things considered, if I had more time to write, I would probably spend that time writing.

    Perhaps I should view this narrow, ultracapitalist view of artists and creation as sad, or reprehensible. But I mostly find it confusing. For people who make tools that are ostensibly intended to help artists, I wonder if these tech bro AI proponents have actually ever interacted with an artist in any meaningful way. Or, perhaps, do they only socialize with other brogrammers in their spare time, and their worldview is so warped by that tiny echo chamber?

    This is largely the same reason why I don’t argue with fundamentalist Christians. Not because I think that they’re right, but because it would be impossible. The parameters by which our worldviews operate are so fundamentally different that communication couldn’t exist between us. In order for a discourse to occur, there has to be some kind of consensual reality that we can use as a basis. Otherwise, it would be like trying to discuss which pizza topping is best, only to learn halfway through an increasingly heated argument that when your interlocutor says pizza, they mean small cherrywood box filled with decorative painted thimbles from the Scandinavian region. There is an inherent incompatibility that becomes impossible to overcome.

    If you see nothing fundamentally different between a book written by a human and a hundred thousand words of Markov-chain generated text, maybe AI writing tools are a good idea to you. I suppose they both contain letters and words, and can be held in a .doc file. But if that’s the case, then you must genuinely believe that there is no difference between a human and a Markov-chain computer program, and when you’ve reached that point, our universal parameters are so contradictory that communication between us is impossible.

    ~ Ian (listening to Spine by Myrkur)