878 - You Will NEVER Regret Listening to this Episode feat. Max Read (10/21/24)

If you really want information search help, go to your local public library. We are TRAINED to help you!

digital copying hinted at the promise of unlimited perfect distribution... remember when copying a magnetic mix tape or VHS over and over would create garbage over time? ahhh, the mp3 can free us from this waste!! and here we are 30-40 years later, with AI incestuously mating with itself, like a .jpg opened & re-saved w/compression artifacts over and over and over and over and overanedaeovnearjeklarjklawrjavnuqoa87hf3akjh....

Oh yeah duh… ehhh

One use for ai is as a functional search engine now that all of the legacy search engines only provide sponsored results.

Thanks for the episode on this. The Animation Guild (L839) is currently in contract negotiations and AI protections are a huge part of our negotiations asks.

I know the guys hate current "AI", but how about they have someone on that can speak to the actual benefits that are currently happening in research with the assistance of LLMs? This guy was at least more knowledgeable than that British dude that didn't know what AGI stood for, but someone from the tech world who could actually layout what is going on and the potential for advancement would be a nice change of pace from stuff like this being shoved out every couple of months.

Hate how much I don't dislike that Driveway song

homer singing sounds so good to me. I can't get enough.

The USA farm woman looking for. Man AI adverts on FB were gold

People should check out the movie Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)

Non-PKD relevant book rec: Starfish by Peter watts

Tbh, the driveway song wasn’t that bad and sounds like all other modern country music to me.

Felix twitching in his seat when Max calls it the “wheel” of the plane

so true. dick is everywhere these days

It’s a good thought. I’ve thought about ditching it all but haven’t been able to yet.

Evangeliroll

I don't know at my job it's pretty usual and I with say is definitely save me at least 30 minutes each Day helping me with the huge PDF documents I have to deal with. Also it's a far better way to search for things online than doing a basic Google search

That “Baby when it rains I drink” AI country song is definitively not slop

One interesting thing is that my friend whos a proffessor at wayne state and cancdr researcher was telling me how they use a more advanced gen ai to improve legders and imputting informatio into datasets lol

Cccc

The people who create this shit don’t understand people, and therefore do not understand human intelligence, so cannot actually model or generate anything that represents a step forward.

It’s interesting that he mentions Russian being prominent in weird AI books. I’ve noticed that sites which specialize in being databases for mostly books are generally in Russian. Differences in copyright law is probably part of it, but that doesn’t necessarily explain the AI part.

The best use of AI is that Girlie Girl Productions music, it’s this super upbeat stock-sounding pop music about cocaine and smoking your best friend’s vape and the man I accidentally killed on purpose.

I like my slop the old fashioned way, served to us piggies by our favourite dirtbag left podcasters.

Writing prompt: grindset guy realizes, upon seeing an eldritch AI generated fractal cat meme that such a creature has been following him his whole life, and until now he had no cognitive framework to conceive of it.

Even this guy knows that United’s fans don’t live in England. Manchester is Blue

I had a profoundly emotional reaction to that ai generated country music song. My brain didn’t know whether to laugh hysterically or burst into tears. What a surreal experience.

general AI is useless. AI agents are what everyone will be using. very specific ai bots you use instead of co-workers.

Dead internet theory is just the premise of Breakfast of Champions

I understand Max’s generalized hopelessness vis à vis the future, but I wonder if the enshittification of every web app and platform will eventually drive people off their devices and machines. What if the web experience becomes so devoid of meaning, so diabolically surveilled, so hostile and impossible to trust, so difficult to use for work or school that we (humanity) undergo an analog Renaissance? A second Enlightenment in which our compulsive addiction to digital novelty is overridden by the impenetrable misery of being online? We’d reject digital communications in favor of interacting with people and information in person, so we can parse with intuition and reason in a slop-free environment. Just a thought!

He’s right about generative AI images being useful for leisure purposes. I only ever use it for throwaway NPC portaits for my Roll20 rpg group but I still always feel a little guilty even though I have paid multiple commissions in the past.

I don’t completely agree with the idea that it’s a toothpaste-out-of-tube problem. For one thing, AI requires huge amounts of compute, requiring huge datacentres that use enormous amounts of energy and water. Tech Won’t Save Us—another great podcast—is doing a really interesting series about how people have started pushing back against those.

Anybody have a link to the Mandarin live show clip?

Idk A.I. video seems to be our best bet for getting Chapo and E1's movie Sodas to into a reality.

Love this, bold new topic! Hurray

Quit whining about Matt’s book price. Either buy it or don’t either way shut up. It will be out for less $ in digital format or even used at some point in the near future. Printing small runs of books isn’t cheap. Get your bread up or wait patiently. It costs less than a single xbox game ffs.

If you’re complaining about the cost of Matt Christman’s book here you are too stupid to be able to read it anyway.

i live in the fuking Balkans so i also can not afford it.it will be too much. maybe doing ebook?

What kind of monks listen to Chapo? Trappist.

AI for programmers is just a much better autocomplete. It's usually wrong and has to be fixed but at least I don't have to type as much.

It’s funny, given the NIMBYism pervasive in the area, how the drive across the San Francisco Bay bridge into the city is plastered with billboards. Something funny about them is how they’ve gone from mostly crypto to now weird AI cybersecurity and other AI tech shit. Makes sense given it’s the source of this shit.

she Yub on my Nub until Ewok (no, I don't like it either)

God that image is cursed

I think at some point AI, overwhelmed by having to search the AI-swollen internet, is going to turn into Bartleby the Scrivener and just tell users it can't make an image or prompt or answer their dumbass question. "Google it," it's going to say, "That information is already out there. I'd rather not generate any more." It's already lying and making up answers; the next logical step is saying no.

That google dipshit saying that AI will fix climate change is either the stupidest thing I have ever heard or the most cynical. For the raw cynicism, a lot of this is opaque, but the publicly available information indicates is that what we call AI is just natural language processors trained on enormous data sets culled from the internet (and consuming enormous amounts of energy btw) and deployed to predict conversations/images/etc (auto-predict on steroids). In no world could this possibly be utilized to "fix" climate change. There are scientific advances that come from NLP's (the same underlying prediction model can predict protein structure for example), but there is a clear training set (known protein structures) and a limited problem. So these men (generally) know that they are deploying a very limited technology that predicts what a humanish response to a given query could be and, since this resembles conversing with a living person, they call it AI and then write a million op-eds about how they invented god and how it will kill us all (humblebrag) while their coffers fill with investment money to pay for the enormous power consumption that fuels this illusion. So if he actually believes that there is a process by which an NLP can be trained to save us from climate change (again, auto-complete on steroids) then he is an idiot that does not have a rudimentary understanding of his own product. If he knows this, then he is somehow the most cynical of all of these horrible men who have enriched themselves by exploiting an utterly credulous tech media. I do not know which is worse.

*Crysis Suit Voice* MAXIMUM READ

[guy who's currently on page 1823 of Infinite Jest] maybe social media is like InterLace and AI is The Entertainment

Why did you cuck me out of a "yub nub"?

Alternate Title: Neon Genesis Evan-Jelly Roll

My unified field theory about AI is that Big Data has hoovered up exponentially far more data than any existing processing/parsing technology can handle; thus the market for buying, selling, collecting, whatevering data is going to experience a subsidence, it won't be very nice, and the whole AI circus is a way for "disruptors" and tech promisers and other self-appointed gurus to prolong the inevitable. Some may even believe it - that some monstrously self-sustaining, swelling AI application will be able to manage the unmanageable. That maybe we should just put Tetsuo in charge of Kaneda and it'll all be jake.

A.I. pictures just give me the heebeegeebees. I just feel like there’s worms in my pants whenever I see them. My brain just has that instinctive uncanny valley reaction to it. Like how cavemen are programmed to react to a monkeys face emerging from the darkness. Immediately recognizing it as not human and your fight or flight activating is important for survival

Uberdashmenchen

Tom Clancy's Matt Christman's Spain's Civil War

You talk Philip k dick but my reflexive response was to think of that ray Bradbury story where the dude is running around an empty town on mars trying to find whoever is on the other end of the telephone line

Mandarin Chapo and AI Homer are legit so good, unfortunately everything else is so bad

Dead internet theory + state funded misinfo bot armies + infinite jest hypermemes = personalized slop echo chamber that doesnt look fake to you but does to other people

Darmok

I find it strange that Sinwar's death hasn't been mentioned yet on the show.

Listening to TF2 mercs sing songs with AI is funny. We just have to ban boomers from using it on pain of death. We can use Israel’s drone bombing AI network to enforce this.

Chapo Slop House

Also, on the utility of the ai, I’m programming a video game solo and it is extremely useful for iterative tasks and debugging….of course you gotta know how to code to interface with it and know what it is doing but it is really helpful.

I work as a high school counselor (ready for the jokes, fire away) and multiple times a week I get referrals that my students are using A.I. to do their homework

Hey Chris, why no mention of Central Time? It's Midwest erasure & I'm sure our large son from Wisconsin doesn't approve either

Wait, is the outro Hank Hill singing "Fast Car?"

The Chapo in Chinese segment reminded me- has anyone else had a dream where Matt was back on the podcast again?

That Mandarin thing is incredible. The pronunciation is 95% there, but feels unnatural because it lacks any discernible dialect. Next time someone should make you guys speak in a Changsha dialect like Chairman Mao

I've used Chatgpt to write cover letters for jobs that never called me back, and to make a cool picture of JCVD doing the splits over the twin towers

Love a literary moment

At first I was disappointed that the Homer cover wasn't Born Slippy, but the outro was 10/10

Highly recommend looking into Yanis Varoufakis’ book/videos on technofeudalism as a way to frame the AI slop economy He does a beautiful job laying out how tech companies have essentially brought us into a new phase of capitalism - it’s no longer just our labor that’s extracted for profit, but our “free time” now too (as these platforms increasingly function as our dominant modes of communication/sources of leisure), with the owners of the platforms generating profit from every second we spend on them looking at ads and slop

I can suggest an equation that has the potential to impact the future: E = mc2 + Al This equation combines Einstein's famous equation E=mc', which relates energy (E) to mass (m) and the speed of light (c), with the addition of Al (Artificial Intelligence). By including Al in the equation, it symbolizes the increasing role of artificial intelligence in shaping and transforming our future. This equation highlights the potential for Al to unlock new forms of energy, enhance scientific discoveries, and revolutionize various fields such as healthcare, transportation, and technology.

I'm a pro translator. Unfortunately, Mr. Read is incorrect. The translation quality of generative AI is superficially impressive and collapses upon any in-depth analysis. And the biggest problem with AI translation is that the people using it for output have no clue of what the output they're getting actually says. The job of the pro translator is NOT to efficiently transfer words from one language to another. It's to take responsibility for the output and guarantee that it's an effective reproduction of what you wanted to express. We are not going to end up with a world where everyone around the world communicates effectively. We're going to end up with a world where everything is polished and surface-level comprehensible but completely lacking in any depth or context. ANd it won't be because depth and context don't exist. Rather, it will be because we destroyed our only method of engaging with those things across cultural lines.

Will sounds like he stuffed his cheeks with Zyn. Funny ep tho.

The important use-case for "AI" or iterative computer algorithms is unprecedented mass surveillance and maybe "threat" identification (black box tells powers that be who to bomb)

Butlerian Jihad time

I want a running bet on how many times more Will calls the book "Matt Christman's Civil War"

Fantastic episode, Mr. Chapo. Mr. Read is a smart, funny guest, and he seems far more creative in his approach to examining this stupid fucking phenomenon than most. Really looking forward to reading his article after the show. Oh, and thanks for dropping “Pay for the Printer”, Mr. Menaker. I had no idea it existed. Just permanently borrowed my copy.

The idea "dead internet theory" being about cranks thinking they're the last people on the internet and everyone else is a robot hologram is just the most extreme example. The more nuanced take on it is basically true-- yeah there are still real people on the internet but it's been so diluted by the influx of AI slop that it's pushed people further and further away from being able to authentically engage with others while breaking a lot of its functionality. Just try image searching *anything* and you'll see that current search engines have become entirely unusable. At the same time specific areas for online discourse have been sort of forcibly distilled onto platforms that are fully captured by corporate / government interests that we *know* use bots and deceitful moderation tools to maintain a stagnant, sterile web ecosystem. Like I get really freaked out when I start thinking about how every private web forum that used to be managed by one guy about someone's special interest with its own community ecosystem has been entirely subsumed by Reddit. If you grew up on Web2 forums, you can't avoid this very real feeling that the Internet you used in the 2000s is well and truly passed if not intentionally strangled. Combine web consolidation with AI, and it really does feel like Metal Gear Solid 2's apocalyptic vision of a deluge of meaningless, unparsable information smothering out all other digital information that isn't explicitly fed to you by the media has come to pass.

God i love hoopify

Max is right: we CAN make 9/11 memes ourselves

If you already purchased a non-signed version because the signed ones ran out is there a way to upgrade your purchase or do you just have to order a new signed copy?

Felix begins speaking at 2 minutes and 56 seconds today

ai produced media has a disturbing tension. it's like staring at the alien from The Thing mimmicked as my dog and we both are aware what's going on but there's a moment of silence where we're both pretending nothing is wrong and it hasn't killed my friend.

Thanks for doing this. I'm a new sci-fi author with one novel published and it means so much that you're putting a spotlight on the "Entrepreneurs" trying to wallhack prose fiction. They're [in]selling us out. i wrote an article myself on how to naviagate generative AI products effectively for a publication called Swordfights and Spaceflights if it is of any interest. :) https://swordfightsandspaceflights.com/2023/06/06/intelligenc-ai/

27th Comment!!!

I gotta tell Will, his New York Liberty earned a Mickey Mouse title over the weekend

Is AI goy slop

No sweat, Sarge. Those fuckin' Krauts barely knicked you. We'll be back in the 6ix before you know it.

I will never recover from Matt speaking Mandarin. It's like the language he was born to speak.

I got Matt's book on October 1 cuz I ain't no b****

oof that thumbnail

Don't worry, all the governments will combat AI porn and AI child porn to pretend to be doing something, but allow the internet to flooded with stable diffuse trash.

Slopdrop subject: SLOP!!!!

will first says the word slop at 4:26. carry on

AI could actually be a new way to analyze our collective unconscious. It has no mind of its own, so whatever we get out of it is created by the detritus of what we put out into the world.

True Anon sloppy seconds

Chapo go on slop

Yeah, the death of the internet!

Eats the slop Born to slop

AI go on Chapo

I love chapo so fucking much

Huh

a pox on ai and its proponents (in minecraft)

Boo ya

Love my slop