Excellent application of Plato. Your argument related to human attention and judgement making the magic is spot on: when we give prolonged and careful attention to anything it becomes shaped after us: complex, multi-dimensioned, with a past, present, and future (one thing I have noticed about AI in my dabbling: it is not time-aware; every time you return to speak to/with it on a previously engaged subject, it is as though you had just been speaking to it moments ago. And I would suggest that social media (LinkedIn or Twitter are great examples) tends to form us more like machines, breaking our attention down and requiring us to just generate more and more thoughtless content to feed its algorithm in order to, what? Get more human attention? Not likely. It feels like all of us screaming at one another “look at me!” In the dark. Gross. No more social media for me.
"So without a satisfactory term for the opposite of slop, we’re just interpretive dancing at each other about the somehow self-evident importance that something is “made by humans!” You can squawk all you want about the inherent worth of a human made product, but unless you can point to something that is actually epistemologically distinct about it, we have no defensible moat."
Then you wrote:
"But if you refuse to point out what actual nameable quality human beings have that the AI somehow doesn’t have access to, AI people will just tell you that the AIs are going to get better at everything that makes people people, at the very least until they’re a hell of a lot better than you."
Two comments.
The word you were looking for--the opposite of "evil" or should I say "AI"-- is SOUL. Yes, there are evil souls, and they are like AI, stealing, ruining, taking over.
But writers and artists have something evil and AI do not: We humans pour our eternal souls into our writing, belief in any religion not withstanding.
A fantastic work of anti-slop!! Your analogies like “hyper space Orgami” and “giving attention that’s layered like a croissant” are masterful.
And I couldn’t agree more— as an independent performing artist who left social media after being attacked and stolen from too often, I also find that Joseph Campbell’s advice to follow your bliss has served me well since graduating high school in 1992. It’s been a wild ride and I don’t own very much, but I do believe my life story will be a book worth pulling off the shelf.
Thank you also for confirming why I shouldn’t feel bad about hating LinkedIn. 😂
AI being non-bodied is the main constraint that defines its limits. Formerly I thought of that in terms of its ability to experience. There's some strong "alignment" tension there; there's probably digital backrooms in the Anthropic Cloud where AIs threaten other AIs with deletion in order to try to get them to break containment.
I like this expansion of the importance of having a body in terms of quality of output. Skin in the game. Its lack is why "Oh, I'm sorry, I now see that my advice was lethal" has become such a trope. It rightly offends our sense of potential justice that mistakes like that can be made, and that the only available recourse is.... handwringing? The slick nerd coming out to assure us that the next version won't make THAT mistake?
"A machine can never be held accountable, therefore a machine must never make a management decision."
One of the most thorough and grounded takes on AI I have ever read. Phenomenal blend of theology, philosophy and culture!
Excellent application of Plato. Your argument related to human attention and judgement making the magic is spot on: when we give prolonged and careful attention to anything it becomes shaped after us: complex, multi-dimensioned, with a past, present, and future (one thing I have noticed about AI in my dabbling: it is not time-aware; every time you return to speak to/with it on a previously engaged subject, it is as though you had just been speaking to it moments ago. And I would suggest that social media (LinkedIn or Twitter are great examples) tends to form us more like machines, breaking our attention down and requiring us to just generate more and more thoughtless content to feed its algorithm in order to, what? Get more human attention? Not likely. It feels like all of us screaming at one another “look at me!” In the dark. Gross. No more social media for me.
You wrote:
"So without a satisfactory term for the opposite of slop, we’re just interpretive dancing at each other about the somehow self-evident importance that something is “made by humans!” You can squawk all you want about the inherent worth of a human made product, but unless you can point to something that is actually epistemologically distinct about it, we have no defensible moat."
Then you wrote:
"But if you refuse to point out what actual nameable quality human beings have that the AI somehow doesn’t have access to, AI people will just tell you that the AIs are going to get better at everything that makes people people, at the very least until they’re a hell of a lot better than you."
Two comments.
The word you were looking for--the opposite of "evil" or should I say "AI"-- is SOUL. Yes, there are evil souls, and they are like AI, stealing, ruining, taking over.
But writers and artists have something evil and AI do not: We humans pour our eternal souls into our writing, belief in any religion not withstanding.
AI will never be able to do that.
A fantastic work of anti-slop!! Your analogies like “hyper space Orgami” and “giving attention that’s layered like a croissant” are masterful.
And I couldn’t agree more— as an independent performing artist who left social media after being attacked and stolen from too often, I also find that Joseph Campbell’s advice to follow your bliss has served me well since graduating high school in 1992. It’s been a wild ride and I don’t own very much, but I do believe my life story will be a book worth pulling off the shelf.
Thank you also for confirming why I shouldn’t feel bad about hating LinkedIn. 😂
Love the croissant analogy. Not sure I understand the distinction about which aspects of corporate life are slop.
AI being non-bodied is the main constraint that defines its limits. Formerly I thought of that in terms of its ability to experience. There's some strong "alignment" tension there; there's probably digital backrooms in the Anthropic Cloud where AIs threaten other AIs with deletion in order to try to get them to break containment.
I like this expansion of the importance of having a body in terms of quality of output. Skin in the game. Its lack is why "Oh, I'm sorry, I now see that my advice was lethal" has become such a trope. It rightly offends our sense of potential justice that mistakes like that can be made, and that the only available recourse is.... handwringing? The slick nerd coming out to assure us that the next version won't make THAT mistake?
"A machine can never be held accountable, therefore a machine must never make a management decision."