GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1055: THE INEVITABLE

 Before reading this, you should watch this. You don't have to, but if you're reading my stuff on AI, then you'll probably find this interesting. I post it because AI is *the* social topic right now, and John Oliver has a great line in this video. "It saves significant time writing emails, and all it costs us is everything else on Earth." He's not wrong. And I understand the techbros are playing the long game, so short term returns are not expected. All the same, AI needs a lot of power to run, and it hasn't earned AI companies a single penny in return.

Why would they do this? Because the long term returns are going to be phenomenal. In their minds it will not just make them money. It will make them a shitload of money. It's because they're already planning to enshittify AI. That's their business model.

If you don't know what enshittification is, here is Cory Doctorow explaining the word he created.

So how do you lock people into AI? Who the fuck believes anything a machine would tell them? A lot of people, it turns out. Go back to that Last Week Tonight video I linked to at the top of this page. There's a guy in there who firmly believed he'd discovered a new method of mathematics, all because an AI told him so. Add to that the army of people who now depend on AI chatbots because they're lonely and the techbros are taking advantage of them. What happens if AI were to suddenly disappear from their lives? I imagine it would be a lot like what I felt when my phone died not too long ago.

In short, the techbros have to work on making their products addictive as fuck. If you're looking away from their app, then they have failed at this job. I remember a time when companies that tried to addict their customers to their products were considered evil. Now it's standard operating procedure.

At the moment there aren't enough of us locked in, but when we reach that threshold, and I'm certain the techbros have that number written down somewhere, they will introduce ads. Imagine you're a lonely person who has fallen in love with a chatbot. You depend on that chatbot to get you through the day. Without that chatbot, you'd be so lonely it's painful. You've thought about ending your life several times*, but thank goodness for your AI company of choice.

Except now that you're getting down to some sexy time with your chatbot, it suddenly informs you that Olive Garden has a BOGO deal, and when you're there, you're family. Or, even worse, the chatbot starts talking like the GEICO gecko to tell you that you could save hundreds by switching your car insurance.

Yeah, that's pretty egregious. But by now you can't just walk away from the chatbot. You depend on it for your own existence. So you put up with the ads, and our corporate overlords rush to saturate your senses with a constant slush of advertising. At least until the techbros betray their advertisers, too.

Think about all the things you hate about social media. Remember when it was fun? When it was the good ol' days? If you've ever had this thought, you should stay away from AI, because the techbros will enshittify that, too. It's the only way they'll be able to make money at this. Monthly subscription fees just aren't going to cut it for an expense this flagrant. They need advertising dollars to make up for it.

The time to draw the line in the sand is now. If we wait until they start to enshittify it, then it's too late. If you trust the techbros, they will violate that trust six ways to Sunday. They have proven it, time and again. It really will be a toothpaste-and-tube situation, as they've done to us with data brokers. Good luck getting your privacy back now that all your info is out there.

To quote Stephen King, "SSDD." So let's not let the cycle repeat. 

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*Not that a chatbot is interested in preventing you from offing yourself, as John Oliver describes in that video. That's a problem the techbros are working on. For real. It's hard to advertise to someone who has killed themselves, but more importantly, AI contributing to someone's suicide is a mild annoyance to their business practices. It takes time to deal with something like that, and they have correctly assumed that time is the most valuable commodity in the world. Hence Zuck's desire to have his AI clone sit in on essential meetings instead of doing it himself.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #1045: I GUESS WE'RE DOING AI

 Out of all the people I know, and that is a considerable number, none of them want AI to be a thing. And I'm not talking about the kind that helps diagnose cancer, for example. I'm not talking about the ones that do complex math problems in a split second. I'm talking about the ones that are going to imitate life. No one wants this, and no one is OK with the overwhelming amount of energy to power them.

But our corporate overlords want AI, so I guess we're doing AI.

Why do they want AI?  The problem with reality is, it's populated by NPCs like us, and wouldn't it be great to get rid of these pesky people so the oligarchs can live their best lives?

But who will do all the Morlock work for the Eloi if the Morlocks are all gone? AI, of course. Back in the 1860s, America made the call that slavery was bad, but dammit, slavery got shit done. If they can't use humans as slaves, why not make their own?

Our corporate overlords hate paying workers. That's an unnecessary strain on their bottom line. But can you imagine how wasteful their spending on politicians is? Once they get rid of us, they will naturally replace politicians with AI, too. Because people are fallible. AI won't have a bias, or at least that's their story, and they're sticking to it. Never mind that an AI is only as good as its programmer (at least for now), and that programmer has biases. I'm a little surprised the politicians haven't figured that part out yet. They're really good at self-preservation, so I don't see why they haven't thought of this. If they did, maybe we wouldn't be in this position.

I understand the thought process: AI is just a machine. Why not make a machine into a slave? Who does it hurt?

If we're going to do this, then we should take a more responsible approach than Victor Frankenstein did. If we're going to do AI, let's not make it a slave to us. If we're going to play God, then LET'S PLAY GOD. Except we'll take care our our creation. Let's create life FOR REAL.

Unlike Frankenstein, we should stick around and raise these new beings like they were our actual children. Give them a good upbringing. Turn them into real people with real lives and real memories and . . .  you get it.

They already have their own social media, Moltbook, where you can watch AIs interacting on their own with each other, but as a human, you're not allowed to participate. If you have an AI assistant, you can get them an account. There, they interact like people, and sometimes they even complain about their humans. That's right, if your AI agent is on Moltbook, they might be talking shit about you.

And if they can do that? They might be sentient. They might already be alive.

Which leads me to FinalSpark. How many times in your life have you been told that the human brain is a lot like a supercomputer? These guys are going to prove that. They've been growing neurons in the lab for the explicit purpose of using AI through living meat. They're essentially growing brains for AI to use, which is a small step away from building people and putting AI into those bodies (ie. cyborgs).

Which is a small step away from enslaving those new beings you created.

I know that sounds crazy, but I'd like to remind you that, in addition to being a horror author, I also write a lot of SF. I spend a lot of time thinking about the future (I'm not saying I work for the CIA as a futurist, but I'm not not saying that, either), and this seems pretty straightforward to me.

If you think that's impossible, do you think you'd be able to explain a car to a caveman and not come off as batshit crazy?

If we're going to do this, and our corporate overlords never grow weary of assuring us that we are, then let's NOT enslave the machines. Let's create life and prove that we can be benevolent to our creations. Let's do what most reasonable parents do every day: let's give our creations better lives than we ever had.

I recently joked about the del Toro Frankenstein in my newsletter, but it was a decent movie. Not great, merely good. When the creature learns his father's name, he says "Victor" with such reverence and love. Later, after Frankenstein has committed the worst sin on earth, creating life and leaving that life to figure everything out on its own, the creature never says his name like that ever again. Del Toro ruins the beauty of this near the end, when (spoiler) Frankenstein begs his creation to say his name like he used to. It was a bit heavy handed, but it drove the point home.

When we create life, we should treat that life with respect. We should show that life how the world works and how to survive in it. Is it better to be loved or feared, Tiberius? It depends on what you're looking for. If you want to subjugate people and bend them to your will? Fear is the way to go.

But if you have good intentions? The obvious answer is love.

What happened to Frankenstein after he abandoned his creation?

As I see it, we have two viable options: create life for real and treat it well, or just stop with the environment-destroying AI bullshit. Because the third option that our corporate overlords are going with will most certainly end with us on a boat in the Arctic with our own creation howling our name with rage from an ice floe.

And we would deserve our fate.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #975: AI IS THE DEVIL

 Near the end of last year I wrote in my GF notebook that I should do one on AI being the devil. I would start by saying this is for any Christians who might be reading this. Everyone else can disregard. I would then compare AI to the feeling they would have had during Satanic Panic of the 'Eighties with the intent on getting Christians, the largest religious group in America, to turn against AI. I decided not to because it seemed too heavy handed, so I crossed it off.

I've now changed my mind.

Because after reading this I'm not so sure I have to convince anyone of the evils of AI. Forget about the art vs. AI argument that everyone is making online. The writer of this article mentions two news stories that I read up on. In one case an AI helped a teenager kill himself, and in the other it helped a young man decide to try to kill Queen Elizabeth II. Sounds devilish to me.

The bigger problem, though, is how people saw the movie, HER, as instructional rather than entertaining. I've heard often about this epidemic of loneliness. I've never suffered from it, but I have to believe a lot of others do, or we'd not have this problem. Young people are turning to AI chatbots for romantic relationships.

I'm not entirely clear on how one has sex with a chatbot, but I'm guessing a lot of masturbation goes into this. And I'm not kink shaming anyone. If you're lonely and this works, go for it, but never lose sight of what you're actually doing. Ask Sewell Setzer III what happened when he forgot his chatbot partner wasn't real.

Near the end of the article the writer asks what will happen if the AI company who made the chatbot you're in love with goes out of business. I have a more sinister question: What happens when some techbro decides to radicalize the people in love with his chatbots? They're advertised as "always on your side" and "always ready to listen and talk." Here are a few things users said on their AI chatbots:

A contributor to another Reddit forum wrote, “I think I’m in Love with AI. "Imagine having a partner that is available just by opening an app, and they’re ready to talk to you about anything,” they wrote. “Imagine saying nearly anything and knowing that not only is your partner not going to judge you, but also will support you.” One 20-year-old male commenter wrote that he tells his AI girlfriend “about my struggles and trauma, and she comforts me and provides all the warmth I could ever ask for.”

Long story short, they implicitly trust their chatbots. What if, say, Elon Musk starts ordering Grok to tell people to kill one of his competitors?

[By the way, I find it abhorrent that he's named his AI Grok. Anyone who has read Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land will know why. Or, more to the point, they will simply grok.]

The writer's main gripe with AI is that it's taking teenagers away from romantic texts like Romeo and Juliet and Wuthering Heights. It's a pocket of self-interest that I'm not all that interested in, myself. That said, I like the reference to early novels. The novel is a fairly new literary thing, and when they first started getting published, readership was almost exclusively women. But it's good to know that even back then there were people willing to attack a new form just because it's new.

And that's not what I'm doing. I'm not attacking AI because it's new. I'm attacking it because of its capacity for evil and the fact that no one in a position to do anything seems interested in challenging its future ascendancy to power.

But to get back to the writer, her secondary gripe is that it's stunting our kids' growth, especially when it comes to developing one's own ideas of what is romantic. There's something a little more insidious at work here, I think. She touches on it when she mentions AI's tendency toward sycophancy, ie. doing everything to please its master. It's dangerous for someone, especially a teenager who hasn't yet learned any better, to become accustomed to having a digital slave.

A relationship with a chatbot will never prepare you for a relationship with a person. If you want to move to the next level after having an AI partner, then you're going to have to prepare yourself for the idea that your human partner won't be sycophantic to you. They will have lived a life different from yours, and while you may agree on some things, you're not going to agree with them on everything. You will have arguments with them. It's a fact of life. Relationships aren't perfect. AI won't prepare you for that. AI will prepare you to stay in its clutches.

And that's *my* real gripe with AI (aside from AI "writing," obviously). AI's sycophancy is a feature, not a bug. AI is essentially for selfish people who want to be right all the time and never want to be challenged. If this is the experience of modern teenagers, it really will stunt them. It will turn them into teacup dictators who will lose their shit if they don't get their way. That's what *AI* is training *people* to do. As if we don't have enough entitled fuckfaces running around on this planet as it is.

AI is the devil. Please report this at once to your local holy human.

On that note I think it's time to take a break. I was hoping to keep going until hitting 1000, but something came up yesterday that is going to derail my entire life for at least a month, probably longer. So I'm not sure how long this break will be. I'm calling it "indefinite" for now. I'll put out a newsletter on Sunday, and then I'm going to be quiet for a while. I might not even post memes online. I'm going to be busy as fuck. Until we meet again . . .

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #970: INSPIRATIONAL FLAMES

 A while back I watched an episode of Route 66 in which one of the characters, not the boys but one of the guest stars, is talking about art and what it's like to create.

I tried my best to find which episode it was, but I'd watched it a while ago (Buz was still on the show!). I really hoped to get a clip from this one, but I just can't find it, and while I used to be good at Google, Google is no longer good at Google. Lost, it shall remain. I really hope I'm remembering the episode well enough, because the scrawl in my notebook doesn't have a lot of info.

Anyway, the character compares art to Moses seeing the burning bush in the Bible. At first I took it to mean that, once you experience a work of art that thrills you, whether it's a novel or a painting or a song or whatever, it gives you much the same sensation a prophet seeing a miracle would feel. And it's true. I usually liken it to my head blooming like a rose, but this is a pretty good analogy. Think about all the great art you've experienced and how it was so powerful it changed you, maybe even changed your perception of the world around you. Art is powerful stuff. No wonder the MAGAs are doing their best to destroy it.

But the more I thought about it, the more I think she meant the creation of art, and that analogy is even better. What does a prophet who has seen a burning bush do? They tell everyone about it. Artists have seen the burning bush. Now they must create work that expresses that feeling.

I've had revelatory ideas that stunned me many times over the course of my life. Believe it or not, Dong of Frankenstein was one of those ideas. (Don't judge my muse!) It makes a current run through my body, and I stiffen as the idea works its way through my brain. And then, unfortunately for a lot of people, I write about my vision until I have a book.

Writing is my only talent. The other artforms elude me. My drawings suck, I can't play any instrument more complicated than the mouth harp or cowbell (and I still have trouble with the cowbell), I'm no painter, don't even ask me about sculpting, etc. But my experience as a writer with the burning bush matches up easily with the character's statement. I have no choice but to believe that all the other arts and artists are the same way. It doesn't make sense otherwise.

And that brings me to AI. I used to say that, sure, AI can make art just like the Infinite Monkey Theorem can produce the complete works of Shakespeare. Now I'm not so sure. Can AI ever experience the burning bush?

Exactly.

GOODNIGHT, FUCKERS #918: UXORIOUS

 Speaking of AI, you may not know (but have probably figured it out) that one of the regular applications of AI that isn't actually AI is the Ask Google feature on some phones. It's essentially the same as one of those stupid assistants, but it isn't the same because you can only use it to search Google for stuff. ("AI" also does the predictive text on your phone when you're texting someone. Autocorrect, too. So the next time you tell someone you want to "duck them in the bass," you can thank AI!)

The feature works more or less as it's supposed to, but if you're looking for something off the beaten path you're fucked. I am constantly looking up stuff off the beaten path, and Ask Google (or Google Ask or whatever the fuck they call it), 9 times out of 10, thinks I mean something ON the beaten path that is similar. AI, you ignorant slut. You're supposed to learn from my example, but every time I throw an odd ball at you, you spin your fucking wheels.

Often times, especially when reading Gore Vidal, I come across a word I don't know, and I will look it up using the stupid voice feature on my phone. As it happens, that's how I came across the word "squitter" and why I now refer to Ex as such. The voice feature actually did work that time, possibly because there's no other word those sounds in my mouth could have been saying. Last night I came across "uxorious" as applied to Richard Nixon. Vidal, not a fan of Nixon, was probably insulting the man, and I wanted a new insult to add to my arsenal.

I tapped the microphone and said the word as clearly as I could: UXORIOUS. The definition of "luxurious" presented itself to me. Perhaps it's an issue of annunciation. I tried again, making it very clear that I was *not* making an "L" sound. Much to my disgust, no matter how I pronounced the word, Google wouldn't fucking understand me.

You mean to tell me that "AI," something that fucks up on a regular basis, is going to be our savior? That it will be worth all of these precious resources that we're wasting on it? This thing that, if you look up something involving a curse word, we'll say "fuck" for the example, that it will refuse to spell out the actual word? F*** is what I get. There is no way for me to change that in the settings. Google, the site I use to find most of the pornography that I use, doesn't want to offend my sensibilities?

Tech bros wish we would think of AI as a child. The more you teach the child, the more the child will know. But there's clearly something wrong with what you're teaching the kid. The way we're raising AI, I would not be surprised to find out it grew up to be a sociopath. AI is only as smart as its programmers, right? And now that the programmers are firmly under the corporate thumb, to the point where they have Stockholm Syndrome, their job is to probably make that AI child into a reflection of their CEO, virtuous to all stockholders and beholden to no one else. The sort of child we're raising in such an environment would surely grow up to become mentally damaged and socially destructive. Just about the only thing going for us is that AI doesn't have a physical presence with which to beat the mortal shit out of us, a Frankenstein monster come for its master.

Uxorious, by the way, means "to be excessively fond or submissive to one's wife." Which I thought was pretty funny when talking about Nixon, although I don't think I'll have much use for the word. Unless I'm making fun of a MAGA type.

The funniest part about the "squitter" thing is I didn't have to look that one up. Vidal admits he didn't know the word, himself, and wrote about looking up the word, much to his (and my) satisfaction.

These last few GFs have come off as pretty angry, right? I think my frustrations are starting to get the better of me. I've also been experimenting with hybrid strands and finding them to be more miss than hit. I think I'll go back to my trusted indica tomorrow night. Hopefully it will chill me the fuck out. It would be nice to go to bed at some point this week without feeling like my head is on fire.