Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Ran across a Bluesky thread which caught my attention - its nothing major, its just about how gen-AI painted one rando's views of the droids of Star Wars:
With that out the way, here's my personal sidenote:
There's already been plenty of ink spilled on the myriad effects AI will have on society, but it seems one of the more subtle effects will be on the fiction we write and consume.
Right off the bat, one thing I'm anticipating (which I've already talked about before) is that AI will see a sharp decline in usage as a plot device - whatever sci-fi pizzazz AI had as a concept is thoroughly gone at this point, replaced with the same all-consuming cringe that surrounds NFTs and the metaverse, two other failed technologies turned pop-cultural punchlines.
If there are any attempts at using "superintelligent AI" as a plot point, I expect they'll be lambasted for shattering willing suspension of disbelief, at least for a while. If AI appears at all, my money's on it being presented as an annoyance/inconvenience (as someone else has predicted).
Another thing I expect is audiences becoming a lot less receptive towards AI in general - any notion that AI behaves like a human, let alone thinks like one, has been thoroughly undermined by the hallucination-ridden LLMs powering this bubble, and thanks to said bubble's wide-spread harms (environmental damage, widespread theft, AI slop, misinformation, etcetera) any notion of AI being value-neutral as a tech/concept has been equally undermined.
With both of those in mind, I expect any positive depiction of AI is gonna face some backlash, at least for a good while.
(As a semi-related aside, I found a couple of people openly siding with the Mos Eisley Cantina owner who refused to serve R2 and 3PO [Exhibit A, Exhibit B])
I've noticed the occasional joke about how new computer technology, or LLMs specifically, have changed the speaker's perspective about older science fiction. E.g., there was one that went something like, "I was always confused about how Picard ordered his tea with the weird word order and exactly the same inflection every time, but now I recognize that's the tea order of a man who has learned precisely what is necessary to avoid the replicator delivering you an ocelot instead."
Notice how in TNG, everyone treats a PADD as a device that holds exactly one document and has to be physically handed to a person? The Doylist explanation is that it's a show from 1987 and everyone involved thought of them as notebooks. But the Watsonian explanation is that a device that holds exactly one document and zero distractions is the product of a society more psychologically healthy than ours....
Today I was looking for some new audiobooks again, and I was scrolling through curated^1^ lists for various genres. In the sci-fi genre, there is a noticeable uptick in AI-related fiction books. I have noticed this for a while already, and it's getting more intense. Most seem about "what if AI, but really powerful and scary" and singularity-related scenarios. While such fiction themes aren't new at all, it appears to me that there's a wave of it now, although it's possible as well that I am just more cognisant of it.
I think that's another reason that will make your prediction true: sooner or later demand for this sub-genre will peak, as many people eventually become bored with it as a fiction theme as well. Like it happened with e.g. vampires and zombies.
(^1^ Not sure when "curation" is even human-sourced these days. The overall state of curation, genre-sorting, tagging and algorithmic "recommendations" in commercial books and audiobooks is so terrible... but that's a different rant for another day.)
Back in the twenty-aughts, I wrote a science fiction murder mystery involving the invention of artificial intelligence. That whole plot angle feels dead today, even though the AI in question was, you know, in the Commander Data tradition, not the monstrosities of mediocrity we're suffering through now. (The story was also about a stand-in for the United States rebuilding itself after a fascist uprising, the emotional aftereffects of the night when shooting the fascists was necessary to stop them, queer loneliness and other things that maybe hold up better.)
It doesn't have to be IMO, in particular when it's an older work.
I don't mind at all to rewatch e.g. AI-themed episodes of TNG, such as the various episodes with a focus on Data, or the one where the ship computer gains sentience (it's a great episode actually).
On the other hand, a while ago I stopped listening to a contemporary (published in 2022) audiobook halfway throuh, it was an utopian AI scifi story. The theme of "AI could be great and save the world" just bugged me too much in relation to the current real-world situation. I couldn't enjoy it at all.
I don't know why I feel so differently about these two examples. Maybe it's simply because TNG is old enough that I do not associate it with current events, and the first time I saw the episodes was so long ago. Or maybe it's because TNG plays in a far-future scenario, clearly disconnected from today, while the audiobook plays in a current-day scenario. Hm, it's strange.
(and btw queer loneliness is an interesting theme, wonder if I could find an audiobook involving it)
That is a bit weird, as iirc the robots in star wars are not based on LLMs, the robots in SWs can think, and can be sentient beings but are often explicitly limited. (And according to Lucas this was somewhat intentional to show that people should be treated equally (if this was the initial intent is unclear as Lucas does change his mind a bit from time to time), the treatment of robots as slaves in SW is considered bad). What a misreading of the universe and the point. Also time flows the other way folks, LLMs didn't influence the creation of robots in SWs.
Also if the droids were LLMs, nobody would use them to plot hyperspace lanes past stars. Somebody could send a message about Star Engorgement and block hyperspace travel for weeks.
But yes, the backlash is going to be real.
E: ow god im really in a 'take science fiction too seriously' period. (more SW droids are not LLMs stuff)
People taking sci-fi too seriously was how LessWrong and the AI bubble happened, I'd say you're pretty far from taking it too seriously :P
looks up from recording my new mathematically speaking 'a podcast for the new thinking man' podcast
A phew, I was worried for a moment there.
E: Apologies, it is real I should have googled it. I know nothing of the podcast, I just tried to make a 'this is what a Rationalist/logic bro would name their podcast' joke. Ow god he even has an episode about conflict theory (but in contrast to Scotts post on conflict theory he actually talks about a historical mathematician so not the same thing, but that was a moment of double take). There is also an Adam Allred who is a 'masculinty speaker' or something, who is also into AI, Maga and everything else of course, but not sure if they are the same person (nope different people, turns out if you are called Adam Allred you are forced to make a podcast). But the math podcast Adam seems to be a good guy who is pro lgbt/BLM etc. (He did get his twitter account hacked which is now spamming people).