Sheri

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Writer of word both truth and tale. Video producer, editor, artist, still human. Hire me?

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Slowly making a visual novel called We Will Not See Heaven, demo is free. Sometimes I stream, or post adult things. Boys' love novel enthusiast. Take care, yeah?

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here's a wonderful story about my wonderful fiancรฉ, austin. he wrote a paper in college and had to give a defense of it. his topic of choice? how we don't have artificial intelligence, yet

he instead chose the term virtual intelligence, openly borrowing it from mass effect, as a turn of phrase to describe technologies of the time ala Siri and other "early AI"

honestly, it was an apt comparison given the core differences here between self-determining intelligence (sometimes called Strong AI) versus narrow AI (Weak AI)

to be honest though? all this nomenclature sucks. calling these things AI, weak or strong, masks the true problem underlying it, which my partner did a great job highlighting

We do not have Artificial Intelligence yet!

the concept of AI is being used as a blanket marketing term that is closer to a cultural understanding of what this technology is, in theory, purported to do

because it was funded by venture capitalists and billionaires who ALSO don't understand how any of this works and just want robots to do menial labor for them.

(creativity is also menial labor to the superrich who could buy all the world's paint and have enough leftover for canvas)

so, if this isn't AI...

a) what IS it? 2) what should we call it?

different versions of so-called "AI" are different functional things. generative programs that can write text in a variety of styles and reply to input like chatGPT, for instance. its creators scoured the internet (more specifically reddit links in the case of v2) for written language, english in particular, filtered out broad concepts to get rid of some porn (blue-penciling a lot of LGBT literature in the process), and then poured that truly stupid amount of data into a large language model

further reading here, highly recommended or if you'd prefer a podcast that's cool too

essentially, when you talk to these bots you're being parroted back strings of text that sound like sentences humans would make. but the "AI" doesn't understand what it's saying beyond basic pattern recognition. something something Chinese room something

if you ask to correct parameters, it uses your input to contextualize what data to pull from and which sentences will get closer to the desired output, but at no point does this "AI" actually consider what these sentences mean. therefor it is not intelligent.

it's a cat sleeping on a keyboard hooked up to a printer and tech bros are worshipping it as the future of labor. built on the present of labor.

image generators are doing a comparable thing but for imagery, in case you're wondering, though the "rules" of "art" are far more subjective and many argue sacred

"AI" sucks. what should we call it instead?

i've seen lots of options thrown around including: machine intelligence, algorithmic learning, complex information processing. but all of these feel like scientific terms which are are more specified version of "AI"

there needs to be an even-more catch-all term for everything purporting to be AI until computers are actually self-determining (and thus will deserve rights but we'll be back to talk about that in 35 years or so)

"machine learning" is alright, but tech-bros are always quick to coopt a term once they realize it's being used to denude their hype. and "learning" still implies "agency" to many people, so i feel it's not the best

it needs to be simple, unambiguous, and catchy

how about: "machine-recycling?"

see an article written by "AI", populated by "AI" generated images? that's "machine-recycled content" right there. not adding anything new, just remixing existing information

and it works because just like recycling in real life, it's not nearly as good for the world as promised.


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