TaggartHoly crap this story knocked me over. It is everything I'm feeling about the machines right now.
https://sightlessscribbles.com/the-colonization-of-confidence/
erin@mttaggart This whole piece feels intensely Christian to me. This is most overt in the final scene, which is essentially an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting (the "addiction recovery" language is even used) where everyone gets together to repent the sin of denying their own sinful humanity. This ties to the piece's fetishization of "[human] imperfection" which is I think pretty illuminating of the author's internal thought process. Why use the word "imperfect" to describe what makes "human art" special, rather than any other descriptor, such as "interesting" (rather, why does "interesting" follow from "imperfect")?
I think the author really accepts more of the Tech Bro's premises than they think. The "resistance" they prescribe wields no financial leverage, coddles its subjects even as it defines them by their flaws ('we are all perfect in God's eyes'), and rests on an invented image of "humanity" that will necessarily not include all humans. What happens when someone talks about something horrible that happened to them, and is shut down because they're "disrupting the vibe"/"making people uncomfortable" (challenging this image of humanity)? What happens when a struggling person would be materially helped by LLM use, but this makes them unethical or dirty in the minds of the community around them? They become just another lost soul, drowning, drifting, no one to look at them.
But it sure is great to pretend that capital doesn't exist for a little while, isn't it? It feels so wonderfully guilty and suffocating to have a ChatGPT cheat day, doesn't it? It sure is great to have somewhere to call back your childhood and your parents, because you don't fucking have anything else, isn't it? That's the real contradiction. That's the real poison. If you make $50k/year and you're imperfect enough in the right ways, at least you can imagine that you're getting into heaven as the sun sinks below the horizon.
I think the author really accepts more of the Tech Bro's premises than they think. The "resistance" they prescribe wields no financial leverage, coddles its subjects even as it defines them by their flaws ('we are all perfect in God's eyes'), and rests on an invented image of "humanity" that will necessarily not include all humans. What happens when someone talks about something horrible that happened to them, and is shut down because they're "disrupting the vibe"/"making people uncomfortable" (challenging this image of humanity)? What happens when a struggling person would be materially helped by LLM use, but this makes them unethical or dirty in the minds of the community around them? They become just another lost soul, drowning, drifting, no one to look at them.
But it sure is great to pretend that capital doesn't exist for a little while, isn't it? It feels so wonderfully guilty and suffocating to have a ChatGPT cheat day, doesn't it? It sure is great to have somewhere to call back your childhood and your parents, because you don't fucking have anything else, isn't it? That's the real contradiction. That's the real poison. If you make $50k/year and you're imperfect enough in the right ways, at least you can imagine that you're getting into heaven as the sun sinks below the horizon.
mao tse tung tung sahur@erin @mttaggart the tokenization is disgusting too like the first things the author tells you about this trans woman, just about the only things really, are that she *is* a trans woman and that she's a good source of emotional/reproductive labor and a good conduit for The Struggle™
"Sarah sounds like she looks" what the fuck is that supposed to mean you are LITERALLY BLIND
"Sarah sounds like she looks" what the fuck is that supposed to mean you are LITERALLY BLIND
@erin @mttaggart also it's tagged as nonfiction but i find that extremely hard to believe when most of it reads as heavy-handedly as the average dhar mann video
maive@ochotona_princeps @erin @mttaggart i might be insane or something but so much of the sentence structure there feels like LLM writing itself, perhaps they are doing that knowingly though?
@winterklaus @erin @mttaggart i would give them the benefit of the doubt since they're blind and so their sensory descriptions of the world are probably inevitably going to read as long-winded to people who aren't blind, but yeah the dialogue reads soooo hard as fiction, if not LLM output
@ochotona_princeps @erin @mttaggart oh i didn't think it was under any doubt as "and then the whole class applauded"-tier fiction