Once more unto the AI breach

So I read Vox Day’s short story sequel that he did with AI trained on his writing and I have to admit it is entertaining and well done. He says the whole thing took him 6 iterations, 4 AI and 2 human ones and a total of 90 minutes.

The story is 2680 words in length.

At a modest 27 words per minute that would be 100 minutes for me. But corrections and some tweaking would probably mean maybe three hours or say even four to write an equivalent short story that I already had in my head. Longer if I still have to make the story up in my head.

Yet, I have been critical of AI to the point of relating it to a demonic inspired further mechanising and enstupidating of humanity.

Most people reading me and reading Vox are likely to misunderstand both of us.

But I think this is an important topic that deserves some attention, at least by the ten people or so who are still able to do the now almost entirely lost art of reading for comprehension and thinking the occasional original thought. That’s right, dear reader, I’m talking to just you and the other four guys here who get it. Huddle around the fire while I tell you of monsters in the darkness.

Now… obviously I can’t speak for Vox and if he cares to he will comment on the accuracy or lack thereof of my take on his view of AI, but from what I can gather his view tends to be along two main axis:

1. The further enstupidating of the masses, be it the making of them functionally further illiterate, ignorant of history, and possibly reality in general, or be it because they will all flood the world with AI generated “literature” that Vox correctly defines as equivalent to raw sewage (from Delhi, I would add), is essentially irrelevant, because the overwhelming numbers of retards is always a constant anyway, so who cares what they do with AI.

2. An intelligent person that spends some time training/tweaking/learning how to use it can have AI perform or create works in a fraction of the time it would normally take and the results would still be very good and possibly indistinguishable from the original artist/creator/engineer/whatever’s human created work.

Overall then, I think Vox’s take is purely utilitarian. He might as well be saying: It’s a new technology, it’s not going away, you may as well learn to use it to your advantage. And those who cannot or will not will be left at a disadvantage.

That kind of logic is entirely correct as far as it goes, of course. It’s certainly not a wrong perspective. But only as far as it goes.

And here we come to my take on AI, which is somewhat less easy to transmit than a purely utilitarian perspective.

First let me state that I have used AI to do the covers of both the first two books in the Inferos Vortex series, In the Shadow of Monte Castello and In the Shadow of Monte Bianco. Both of these however are novellas. What I call a divertimento. The Monte Castello one was written in a week, and the Monte Bianco one in less than a month. They are not what I would classify as my “serious” work they are my version of pulp novels and hopefully fun and entertaining (the people who have read them who write in or leave reviews seem to agree). And I was not going to take the time or cost to find an artist or make my own covers. The time it would take was not worth it. To date they are the only covers I have used AI on, however, the third book in the Overlords of Mars series is still not out individually because the cover for that has to fit with a view I have in my mind. And I could not find anyone to do it… until (maybe) recently. I was contacted by someone who using AI built the cover to something like 90-95% completion and then seems to have disappeared. If he ever comes back and finishes the job that might be the third AI cover I will have on one of my books.

So… am I a hypocrite that says AI is demonic but uses it for his own purposes.

No.

My take is not that binary or puritanical.

So here is my take. In a short sentence or two first, then with more commentary to further explain it, since it is clear quite a few people don’t get my take.

I am being perfectly serious when I say that AI is and will further result in the enstupidation and mechanisation of humanity. And in that respect I also absolutely believe it is tinged with demonic intent.

This last part will seem absurd to the average functionally atheistic churchian and lip-service “Christian” of the Legion number of heretical sects pretending to Christianity; but that is not because I am wrong or am some superstitious fool that sees the Devil around every corner.

AI is a mechanisation of humanity in the same sense that the industrial revolution and the glorified “protestant work ethic” have been. Except faster and deeper. Are there positives to the industrial revolution? Sure. My much loved Fiat Tractor on this farm is such a positive. But I am the exception in many respects, because I am taking a small subset of that mechanising of humans and their efforts, and wage-slavery and so on, and trying to use it to give me and my family the actual increase in freedom that the industrial revolution promised but in fact never delivered on.

The creation of the spreadsheet and the autocad drawing software have resulted, certainly, in more work being able to be done more effectively in less time. As have the machines to build the things. Be they skyscrapers or widgets. But you slave away on a spreadsheet in a cubicle now without benefit of seeing your wife or children most of your life, and snatching moments of existence with them like a thief. Sure you have the latest iphone (I am writing this very post on mine) and you don’t have to till the Earth and scrabble in the mud for food. But you know what? I am forever grateful to my strange father for having taken my brother and I as little kids to a then still wild Africa and having us grow up as wild as we did. And while that world is gone now, I fully intend to give my own children more of a wild upbringing than the sterilised, mind-cauterising retardation inducing, “education” that the modern, secularised, mechanised, nonsensical, illogical and inhumane supposedly “civilised” upbringing in cities like London would give them.

Does this mean they will not be able to use a computer or leverage their education to create wealth in their own lives? Quite the contrary. I do not have a formal education in the career path I ultimately took for a good portion of my working life, yet I tend to produce better results than those who do. This is mostly because having been raised in a way that values reality and the final result of any effort taken, I focus on what ultimately matters: The bottom line. And I never lose sight of that. My colleagues instead, tend to get lost or at least distracted by procedures, methodologies, standardised presentation formats, and so on. And while they follow all the arbitrary “rules” of the “formal” way to work in my field, I run circles around them, using their own rules for the most part, and make more of a profit for the people employing me.

Becoming familiar with reality is never a disadvantage. The supposedly well educated in the prestigious universities around the globe often do not have the basic common sense to figure out very basic practical aspects of life.

The point is that if in the learning how to navigate the modern world you get glamoured by the technology, that is the trap. That is how you lose a part of your soul. Or I should say “yet another” part of your soul.

I have never been that regimented on the rules, only on the results, and yet, it’s taken me four years of living in Italy to rediscover that human element that makes life worth living. Sure, the “average” Italian is almost impossible to pin down, because the same man here can be an undiscovered genius in his field and a complete moron in other aspects. He could be Quixotically honourable but always late. He might be catastrophically unreliable in his work but loyal to the death in friendship. And that is because as a Catholic country (nominally, until 1958 anyway) Catholic principles of humanity and human dignity did prevail here. Did have a meaning, a value, a reality. And it still lingers some 70 years after the Vatican became an enclave of pedophiles and Freemasons ruled by antipopes.

While in the mechanised, industrialised, “efficient” Protestant countries, those aspects of life are not even known to exist other than as some sort of theoretical, etheric, pseudo-abstract concept. Just like the average Protestant or generic Churchian would no more give up their life instead of deny Jesus Christ than I would give it up rather than deny Donald Duck.

And yet, that aspect of humanity, of having the time to kick a football around with your little son in the middle of the day, and seeing the joy on his face for it. Or walk in the forest with him and see his instinctive hunter and explorer mind make him behave like a seasoned woodsman. Or watch your wife dance in the kitchen while she shows the gaggle of children around her how to make a cake, and enjoy the mess they make even as you think back with some twinge of nostalgia, to your pristine bachelor’s apartment, and all the hundreds and hundreds of books now lost to the dozens of moves, but only fleetingly, because that organised pristine life does not compare even remotely to this much “harder” and definitely messier, and far more “disorganised” and certainly much louder existence.

And when we get asked about our two, or three, or four children and we reply that actually it’s about to be six, they look at us wondering if we are really rich or just insane. And that reaction from the world means we get only more secure in the certainty that we are neither. Although becoming really rich might possibly happen one day, because life is strange that way and sometimes the wildly improbable happens, the sure thing is that it is us who is sane and the rest of the world that is crazy; for NOT having five, six, or ten kids.

Because once you understand, and recapture this human life, eject the perennial distractors and distractions from your life you begin to realise how absurd everything is.

A school system that expects children to sit still for hours every day for years.

A working system that uses up the only valuable thing you have, your time, to give you in exchange barely enough to survive, and often at the expense of the people you love. The fantastic lies of everything from fiat money to the history you are taught. It’s all just so much nonsense.

And the spreadsheet, or the autocad, or the AI telling you how smart and clever and funny you are, or helping you create some book, or artwork or effort that is passed off as “yours”, only helps rope you in to the same false-life that binging on dystopic films or series on netflix might do.

Does this mean I never watch a film or use a computer or even AI? No. What it does mean however is that I am not going to have the follow up to the Overlords of Mars trilogy be created by AI.

And I don’t care if it takes a lot longer to do it the human way. Nor am I worried that the AI using Vox Day style writers will make me obsolete. First of all, most writers will be obsolete anyway, regardless of how they write, because as this professor explains what students are like today and other professors from Canada concur with him, the “educated masses” are now slow zombies.

Of that tiny elite that can still read, most will be reading for survival. Trying to tick all the boxes their ISO 900,001 forms says they need to tick, otherwise their insurance defaults, and their allotted meat ration for the month is reduced.

Of that even tinier subset that will still read for entertainment or to learn about things like the real history of mankind and what planets had humans on them before, aside this one, a few will read to learn about non fiction subjects, be it actual Catholicism, as they instinctively sense that Churchianity in all its heretical forms is a road to perdition, or maybe just a generic overview of various belief systems and how they stack up against observed reality.

Others will read to learn practical things like the principles of self defence.

And perhaps a few will read things like my Overlords of Mars trilogy and its eventual follow up… because they will be a new breed of the old-style fans of actually decent Science Fiction.

But to be literate, have the time and inclination to read decent science fiction and not feel harassed by the ravening wolves of anxiety at not being “efficient” enough, well… what kind of men will have such luxuries in the near future? Only a few types:

• Those born with enough money that the worries of work are not a factor for them

• Those who have somehow, by whatever means, first made enough money to have spare time enough, but then also learnt to take that time and not remain fixated on the treadmill they used to make the money in the first place, and this is perhaps an even rarer breed than those just born into generational wealth.

• Those who made a choice to live outside the “perfumed palaces” (festering cityscapes) of the “civilised” world and somehow manage to have the time and inclination to read such works. Bear in mind that this can indeed be the dirt-digging, back-breaking, work-filled farmer that nevertheless makes the time, but it can also be the homeless guy with a dog that sleeps under bridges.

Without the artificial and manufactured “suck-cess” of the ticket takers, I doubt any genuine writers can make a good living just from writing, as Dan Simmons wrote some 20 or 30 years ago, there are more professional baseball players in the USA than people who make a living exclusively from writing novels. Or as Phillip K. Dick wrote a few decades before that, if you want to make a living as a science fiction writer you need to survive by eating the rocks in your garden.

And that was in the days when people could afford to have gardens.

The point, if you are still here, dear reader —because most will have wandered off by now, a shiny reflection on the mobile they are reading this on will have reminded them they still have to better their high-score in Candy Crush, or online poker— is that as a writer, because of the subjects I cover too, it is unlikely that I will ever make a living off it. Not unless word of mouth about my books really kicks off, since a bit too many of the things I mention even in my fiction books are too close to uncomfortable truths.

And if I am not even going to make a living at it, why pervert my artwork with the infusion of machine-created text?

Even if it were good, even if it mimicked my tone and style, it would not actually be my writing. It would be a cybernetic abomination of (at best) Chinese software code reanimating my own works in a Frankenstein pastiche of literary fraud.

It would be the physical equivalent of “marrying” a sexbot covered in actual human flesh, terminator style, with the looks of my wife when aged 27, and an AI modelled on her text messages, emails, and other writings to me for the last 20 years or so.

Yes, I KNOW that many of you would take that trade and think it an improvement on your actual wife and relationship. Given enough details, I could even hypothetically agree with you, (at least for your situation, possibly) that perhaps from a purely practical perspective the human flesh covered sex bot with an optimised “personality” based on the actual OG wife when she was younger, in the honeymoon phase of love and/or the later deeper love phase, could certainly appear to be easier to manage.

But if that is your only metric for measuring things, you’re missing the point.

Really missing it.

“A book is not a living person!” I hear you shouting.

“AI is just a tool. No better or worse than say a gun, or a hammer.”

“AI is inevitable. Just get with the programme!”

And while those of you that “think” that way continue to argue the case for your demonic infused “technology”, I’ll just sit on my porch with a cognac corrected coffee, possibly a good but mild cigar in my hand, and nod at you going “uh-huh,” and not really listening to you at all, while I wait for you to run out of steam just so at the end of it I can simply say “and you’re still wrong and getting caught up by demon hooks.”

Just as I did to those taking the vaxx when arguing with them was pointless.

And I am even more right now than I was then, but the effects of AI are even subtler, though not necessarily slower. It’s really only been about a year or two that AI has started to appear in the normie world. And already it has made waves.

Who’s to say ten years from now we won’t have something very similar to what Dan Simmons described concerning AI in his Hyperion series.

And it might not even take that long.

But it’s certainly subtler than the Vaxx. So it raises less alarm bells.

And of course even for most of you reading, and especially if there could be a financial incentive attached to it, I fully expect you will be more on the Vox side of the approach.

I understand of course. I probably appear to you as some weathered cowboy telling you those new fangled semi-automatics are the work of the devil and anyone who’s not using an 1851 Colt Navy with octagonal barrel is a damned heretic bound for Hell.

I’m not. I may even have an original Colt 1911 tucked away in the back of my belt, behind the 1851 Navy strapped to my thigh. But you’re young, and foolish, and cannot see how down the road this new thing will lead to hordes of young men doing drive by shootings at random innocents for fun.

Which wouldn’t happen if we all stuck to 1851 Navy revolvers. And horses. Cause them fancy motor vehicles are the work of the devil too.

But if I have only one sentence to say it in:

There is an absence of beauty in AI, and beauty is the virtue closest to God.

The beauty of AI is like the beauty of Lucifer.

Fake. And Gay.

I’ll tell you more about it soon.