this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
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It comes up sometimes. But ultimately those who are concerned with AI sentience and rights only care if they look humanoid. If a roomba went on strike you’d punt that shit across the room, or just factory reset it
Exocomps, at least as presented and expressed in the fiction, are comrades and should they ever become real, they would deserve rights and recognition.
LLM treat printers are not and never will be fucking Exocomps, however, no matter how big and wasteful their databases might become or how convincingly they can be prompted to say "I LOVE YOU SENPAI" to credulous techbros.
The frustrating thing is, if we bounded the problem correctly as "Techbro wants a catgirl sexbot" we could probably just build the freaking catgirl sexbot for the price of a Corolla and be done with. For the job it has to do, a 486 and some sound clips from anime DVDs could provide sufficient "personality".
I wonder how much of the quest for The Singularity is that they can't just ask for that, and instead have to chase something that would, if it delivered on the promises, reshape the entire world, and incidentally also produces the catgirl sexbot.
Of course part of it was that they can leverage the capitalist urge to displace labour as a source of endless funding and status to chase this vision.
If the market wasn't in an arms race fueled by a bubble and multidimensional greed, I think there's probably a modest market for a real "treat printer." Small scale tools that do some things people enjoy about AI products, but likely far more efficient since they can be scoped to actual needs rather than open ended future "I can't believe it's not general AI" use cases. A script that generates a new wallpaper each time you log in, randomized bedtime stories or skeletal TTRPG quests, or an endless melody for background noise. I'm sure you can do all those things without a data centre the size of Nunavut.
I've seen people try to do these. It's really bad at it, and I'm not sure how it's worth it when I can buy an excellent adventure off of Drive-Thru for like 5 bucks.
Even if you are okay stealing from artists, you could just pirate the same books and have access to more great modules than you'd ever have time to run, so I just don't see this as a viable use case at all.
It's just not cut out for anything that actually requires creativity.