monotony
Last updated 3 months ago
I obviously wrote my /ai page assuming that would be the last of my thoughts on the rise and rise of large language models, but apparently they were not!
v1's agentic agents post reminded me of the assembled dreams of big tech's greatest movers and shakers. sam's hope for universal basic compute. bill's world where humans won't be needed for "most things". mark's future where only three of your fifteen closest friends are human.
v's post reminded me that when given power, money and the supposed greatest minds of our generation at their disposal, what our unelected leaders have done is mindnumbingly, sickeningly, excruiatingly boring.
i don't want ai in my note-taking app, or ai video editing, or ai email summaries, or ai note summaries, or ai writing help, or any of the other dozen examples i could list off just from looking through a few tabs.
what the fuck are humans meant to be doing if not party planning for their loved ones, sending emails to broker arcane schemes or find someone to love, or hell, making art? are we meant to become bundles of desires, with the scope of desire restricted by what's possible or profitable because of LLMs?
i'm not even particularly anti-boredom compared to some points in my life. it has abundant applications. infrastructure (water, electricity, things of that ilk), anything that involves day to day safety and security... i'd even say things like taxes should straightforward and boring too!
i would argue that "boring" in these cases just means there are no unexpected surprises to the majority of people who use them, that public opinion is largely in favour, that the machine grinds on, as usual or slightly improved. they become as invisible a part of your life as possible without completely disappearing so long as they continue to work and you aren't in charge of tending them.
"boring" and "dream" should rarely co-exist, even if all you want to do is laundry and taxes. they took "a dream for humanity as a whole" and downgraded it to a second quarter outcome, and it shows.
i think that's what's disappointed me the most about the explosion of ai art and video editing. i am with hayao's early ai thoughts. i don't judge the individual user of generative ai, as i can see it rammed into every application i like and dislike in almost equal measure.
the relentless of it is beyond belief. what do you dream of? so long as it's not electric sheep, i'd love to hear.
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This piece is part of my attempt at Alphabet Superset, a “6-month” creative challenge (I passed a year in September 2024 — with a long break! — and the creator of the challenge hasn’t finished yet either). Other posts so far: abolition, bump, boost, culture, discussion, english, formulaic, gone, home, immortality, jargon, knowledge and leaving.
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used v's first name and then realised i was swapping back to surnames for all the big wigs, and i don't like that. it amuses me GREATLY to use first names regardless of how well i know them though, so maybe i'll do this from now.↩