yet another new blog post. epic win
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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
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<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">
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<title>will's blog</title>
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<title>isopod.cool blog</title>
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<id>https://isopod.cool/blog/</id>
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<link rel="alternate" href="https://isopod.cool/blog/"></link>
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<updated>2023-02-23T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
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<updated>2024-01-03T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
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<author>
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<name>Will</name>
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<name>isopod.cool webmaster</name>
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<uri>https://isopod.cool/</uri>
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</author>
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<generator>ME</generator>
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<entry>
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<title>I Don't Like AI Art</title>
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<id>ai_art</id>
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<link rel="alternate" href="https://isopod.cool/blog/posts/ai_art/" type="html" title="I Don't Like AI Art"></link>
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<published>2024-01-03T00:00:00+00:00</published>
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<updated>2024-01-03T00:00:00+00:00</updated>
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<summary>My actual thoughts on AI, in case seeing an AI-generated article in your RSS feed didn't get the vibe across.</summary>
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<category term="ai"/>
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<category term="chatgpt"/>
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<category term="capitalism"/>
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</entry>
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<entry>
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<title>The Invaluable Contributions of AI Tools to Humanity: A Look at the Unparalleled Benefits</title>
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<id>invaluable_contributions</id>
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}
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echo "</ul>";
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?>
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<article id="2024-01-02">
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<h2>2024-01-02</h2>
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<p>Published an interesting blog post today. I had ChatGPT write an article about how great AI is and posted it immediately without reading it. Hopefully you can tell. (If you couldn't and didn't register what was happening until the disclaimer at the end, I'm deeply sorry.)</p>
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<p>To be clear, I don't like "AI" tools like ChatGPT one bit; I figured doing this would be an elegant way to communicate my feelings on the matter - here's how it feels to get tricked into reading AI-generated spam, this is how I feel anytime I see something AI-generated in the wild.</p>
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<blockquote>
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My perspective on the use of AI in writing is that if someone couldn't be bothered to write it, why should anyone else be bothered to read it?
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<span class="attr">-<a href="https://final.town/notice/AcGPT0FZUH2quPlDe4">@lucretia@final.town</a></span>
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</blockquote>
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<p>I've got half a blog post about this sitting on my computer somewhere.</p>
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<hr>
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<p>In more fun news, my laptop server is up and running! Building the case was a fun time involving hand-cut aluminum rods and many 3D-printed brackets, but I'll save all that for the blog post about it. So far I've set up Jellyfin on it, and only Jellyfin. I plan to get some other stuff going eventually. Word of advice, don't use the official Jellyfin android app. It stutters a ton and is generally not very good. Use Findroid instead, but make sure to turn "mpv player" on in the settings, otherwise it will use software decoding and you'll get approximately 7 frames per second in your 1080p content.</p>
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</article>
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<article id="2023-11-23">
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<h2>2023-11-23</h2>
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<p>Another update on my little Contraption today, mostly expanding on stuff that's evident in the video I posted a couple days ago, but I have a fresh update too.</p>
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<hr>
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<p>I saw a fox on my way home from work today, so that was cool.</p>
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</article>
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<article id="2023-09-15">
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<h2>2023-09-15</h2>
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<p>It was my birthday a couple days ago! I'm 21 now. I can drink in the States I guess, though I'm hoping that never comes up. My dad celebrated the occasion by taking me out to look at cars. This was complicated somewhat by two factors: One, I'm a fucking colossus and all human infrastructure is designed specifically to be just barely too small for me, and two, I live in fucking semi-rural North America and all you can get new here is huge SUVs and even huger pickup trucks.</p>
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<p>First place I went was a Toyota dealership and the only thing I could fit comfortably in was the biggest damn SUV on the lot. In everything else my legs tried to clip through the steering wheel. Next and final place I looked at was a GM dealership. I had more luck fitting in things there, partly because it was also all big SUVs.</p>
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<p>None of the SUVs were ever in consideration, really. Not if I could help it. I fucking despise big vehicles for reasons avid <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jN7mSXMruEo">Not Just Bikes</a> viewers will be familiar with. The only thing I could find all day that I liked was this little VW Golf that someone had presumably traded in for one of the hulking behemoths it was sharing a lot with. It's surprisingly roomy in there - I had to almost max out the settings on the seat but I was more comfortable in that thing than most of the Toyotas. It was like a family SUV, but half the size.</p>
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<p>I didn't buy anything. Besides the fact that I don't want to impulse buy a fucking car, my city isn't a very good place to shop for used cars, especially not of the type I actually want. I'd probably be able to find a better deal in the one nearby-ish big city, plus I'd like to shoot for a hybrid if I can swing it, something that more or less does not exist here. Fun learning experience though.</p>
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<hr>
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<p>Work's good. I was right about the reduced hours being temporary, so I'm back to normal on that front now. The store manager says they keep getting temperature alerts from the walk-in fridge, which confuses me - I went in there and scanned everything with the thermometer and everything's fine. I don't know where they've put the temperature probe they're using but I suspect the reading off it isn't representative.</p>
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<hr>
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<p>Being a computer toucher is fucking exhausting, dude. Did you know Unity wants to charge developers for installs of their games now? I wrote a blog post about it. Hopefully now I can stop thinking about that now. I'll try to do a positive one next time.</p>
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</article>
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<article id="2023-08-21">
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<h2>2023-08-21</h2>
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<p>Been a minute. A few website updates, but mostly minor stuff. One big thing: I've been thinking about image formats some and I've decided to replace a bunch of larger images where quality isn't hugely important such as backgrounds with JPEGs instead of PNGs like I had before in order to reduce the load on peoples' internet connections. I kept everything as PNG for a long time out of principle because JPEG objectively isn't very good in terms of quality, but you cant deny the filesize advantages and there are frankly greater evils in the space right now. Speaking of, I've also made the profoundly optimistic decision to also include JPEG XL versions of each image, for which the standard JPEGs act as fallbacks. This still results in a significantly smaller filesize per image visible on the website than PNGs, amazingly.</p>
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<p>On a related note, people attempting to visit my website on a Chromium-based browser may have noticed that it's been replaced by a single <a href="https://chrome.bathynomus.xyz">page</a> urging them to stop doing that. I had a little popup about this before, but with Chromium getting exponentially more evil of late I felt the need to take a more aggressive stance.</p>
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<p>I configured my reverse proxy to automatically redirect all clients with "Chrome" user agent strings to that page. This isn't hard to circumvent if you know what you're doing, and that's part of the point - as the article explains, Google wants to create a world where workarounds like that are impossible. I fully believe at this point that using Chromium-based browsers is tantamount to contributing to Google's stranglehold on the free web, but I feel like trying to make it actually impossible to access my website using them would run counter to the principles I'm espousing here, if the measures I've taken don't already.</p>
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<hr>
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<p>Work's been alright. I'm getting fewer hours than I'd like, but I have my reasons to believe that's a temporary arrangement. Nothing much else to report. It's been pretty uneventful for the most part, which I'm interpreting as a good thing. No news is good news.</p>
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<p>So I was wrong about Invidious in my last entry - I gave Google WAY too much credit, lol. Turns out all they did is blocked a handful of big Invidious instances. That's all. The software still works, and Invidious has been updated to detect that it's been blocked and link you to another instance so Google's bullshittery is barely a roadbump.</p>
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<p>I played a game called <a href="https://store.steampowered.com/app/1713610/Purrgatory/">Purrgatory</a> recently. It's pretty good. meow/10</p>
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<p>Had to fly out for a wedding recently, and the experience has left me with a renewed hatred for every wretched part of that sordid system. If I could down a plane using 110ml of toothpaste, I would consider doing so a tragic waste of my talents. Oh, and there's also the fact that for someone of my freakishly colossal height most airplane seats have negative legroom. North American transcontinental high speed rail network when</p>
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<div class="buttons" style="margin-bottom: 1rem;">
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<a href="https://status.cafe/"><img src="media/banner-statuscafe.png" alt="Status Cafe"></a>
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<a href="https://kiosk.nightfall.city/"><img src="media/neonkiosk.png" alt="Neon Kiosk"></a>
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<a href="../../../">home</a>
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<a href="../../">blog</a>
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<p>My last post was the output of ChatGPT when asked to "write an article about why AI art is bad", copy-pasted verbatim, down to the broken numbered list. I didn't even read it. It's the most concise, elegant way I could come up with to express how seeing AI art makes me feel. (The irony of my having used only generative AI tools to make a statement like that is not lost on me.)</p>
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<p>If you read it and managed to make it to the end without clocking that I didn't write it, first off my apologies for wasting your time. Second, you probably get what I mean. It feels like I'm being scammed, like someone's trying to farm me for attention without actually having bothered to make something worth my time.</p>
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<p>I recently posted an article about the benefits of AI technology that I had ChatGPT write for me and copy-pasted verbatim, down to the broken numbered list. I didn't even read it. It's the most concise, elegant way I could come up with to express how seeing AI art makes me feel. (The irony of my having used only generative AI tools to make a statement like that is not lost on me.)</p>
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<p>If you read it and managed to make it to the end without clocking that I didn't write it, first off my apologies for wasting your time. Second, fuck, I seriously need to fix my writing style. Third, you probably get what I mean. It feels like I'm being scammed, like someone's trying to farm me for attention without actually having bothered to make something worth my time.</p>
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<blockquote>
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Just seen a new favourite response to AI text. "Why should I bother to read something nobody could be bothered to write?"
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<span class="attr">-<a href="https://lingo.lol/@Neverfadingwood/111161046166813243">@Neverfadingwood@lingo.lol</a></span>
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My perspective on the use of AI in writing is that if someone couldn't be bothered to write it, why should anyone else be bothered to read it?
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<span class="attr">-<a href="https://final.town/notice/AcGPT0FZUH2quPlDe4">@lucretia@final.town</a></span>
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</blockquote>
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<p>This isn't an objective article. I'm not going to try to claim it is. This is my attempt to articulate all of my thoughts on so-called "AI", especially why "AI art" pisses me off so much.</p>
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<h2>Terminology</h2>
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<p>To begin with, I really don't like the term "AI", nor do I like the term "AI art". I frankly think neither word applies. I'll keep using the former, because it's a concise way to communicate what I'm talking about, but I refuse to call the output of these systems "art". It's AI-generated images now.</p>
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<p>AI, in the way marketers are currently using the term, generally refers to statistical models generated using a process called machine learning. Basically, huge amounts of appropriately labeled data are fed into a machine learning algorithm and eventually it spits out an enormous matrix of probability values that, when applied to an input, generates the corresponding output that's the most likely according to the model.</p>
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<p>This is how all modern "AI" systems work, from ChatGPT to Midjourney to Github Copilot to probably the Youtube recommendation algorithm at this point. I want to stress that this isn't intelligence, not in a human sense. These things aren't minds. The currently popular concept of "AI" boils down to applied statistics. That's not to say it's inherently bad or worthless - machine learning is a genuinely impressive technology that might even find some legitimate uses one day if we can find a way to kick Moore's Law back into gear. It's just not intelligence.</p>
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<h2>AI used to be fun</h2>
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<p></p>
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<p>I'll admit, I enjoyed it at first. I was entertained by Youtube videos where some guy with slightly more programming skill than me and a tortured, wheezing GTX 1070 throws together a <span title="GAN stands for "Generative Adversarial Network". It's a type of machine learning model. It was popular for image generation among hobbyists back when this stuff was on my Youtube homepage. It's not really important here, though.">GAN</span> model in Python and we get to watch it utterly fail to make human faces or compose jazz music or get a little simulated character to walk in a normal way or whatever. I laughed at those bizarre AI-generated screenplays that were presented like "I forced a computer to watch all of [Seinfeld]" as though a text-generating model would even be able to parse that. You know the ones. I even enjoyed those videos where AI voice replicas of recent US presidents play Minecraft together.</p>
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<p>It stopped being funny when these things got good enough to be used for evil. Eventually people got bored of machine learning tomfoolery, and then over the course of a couple years these things quietly got <em>good</em>. Not quite human-level, but good enough to be more cost-effective than humans at shitting out mass-produced slop and capable of generating fakes that seem real if you don't look too closely. Suddenly it wasn't tech-savvy internet comedians posting computer-generated absurdist humor, instead it was deepfake porn and gigabytes of computer-generated misinfo clogging search results and whole organizations of people pulled from thin air using thispersondoesnotexist.com (which, by the way, is now even more lifelike than the last time you checked in on it).</p>
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<p>AI used to be fun. Now it's dangerous.</p>
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<h2>It's bad on a technical level</h2>
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<p>Look, I know this isn't guaranteed to stay true forever, but in my subjective opinion, everything AI-generated kind of looks like shit. AI images, especially those meant to look like human-made art, all have this incredibly pristine, generic vibe to them, when they're not completely failing at some proportion or dimension or property of euclidean space or other. It's palpably soulless.</p>
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<p>AI text is no better. Hopefully you picked up on this in the ChatGPT post, but that thing has a distinctive, kind of shitty writing style. It makes a lot of vague, general statements and often just restates your input in this verbose, sort of professional-sounding way. It takes nine paragraphs to explain in detail a concept that can be boiled down to two or three sentences and adds absolutely nothing of substance in that space. It's like a lazy high school student trying to hit a minimum word count, but with the tone of a WSJ opinion piece.</p>
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<p>And the thing is, ChatGPT and similar commercially available LLMs might <em>have</em> to be like this, all wishy-washy and nonspecific. Remember those cases where ChatGPT would like, <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/04/05/chatgpt-lies/">implicate a real person in a hallucinated sexual harassment scandal</a>? These things have no concept of truth, and no mechanism for ensuring it. If you let them get too specific, they're basically guaranteed to start spitting out lies. Large language models are models of <em>language</em>, not reality. They can either sometimes make up bullshit, or always say essentially nothing.</p>
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<p>AI voice-fakes are actually really impressive though. No notes. Probably shouldn't exist though.</p>
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<h2>It's all spam to me</h2>
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<p>The most common use case I've seen for AI tools is making spam. There were content mills before, but they at least required a significant degree of human input or else it was obvious. With the advent of generative AI for text and voices, the Youtube shorts tab has gone from TTS bots reading scraped reddit posts to AI voices reading dubiously reliable AI summaries of current events, superhero comics, you name it, sometimes with AI-generated background images.</p>
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<p>Even worse is websites that do this. You've probably heard of that one time Redditors <a href="https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2023/07/redditors-prank-ai-powered-news-mill-with-glorbo-in-world-of-warcraft/">tricked a bot-run news site</a> into publishing an article about the introduction of Glorbo into World of Warcraft and its impending impact on the game. That site is one of thousands, possibly more. It's a vile, disgusting enterprise, massive systems dedicated to pumping out endless filler, generated by machines for machines with the hope of tricking some innocent humans into clicking on a search result and generating some ad revenue. It's the latest and quite possibly the to-date greatest step in the enshittification of major search engines and the death of the internet as a useful platform for seeking out information.</p>
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<p>This is the vibe I get when I see <em>anything</em> made with AI now. It's all low-to-no-effort slop, utter garbage that I'm frankly offended that I have to see, given it clearly wasn't important enough for anyone to be bothered actually making it.</p>
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<h2>It's not fucking art</h2>
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<p>The term "art" simply does not apply to AI-generated images. When you use one of these things, you give it instructions in the form of human-readable text and a finished image pops out the other side. The amount of creative control you get is on the order of the general vibe; you've outsourced every actual creative decision to the machine.</p>
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<p>It's like if you commissioned a piece from an artist. When you commission art from a human, you didn't make the art. They did, at your behest, based on your instructions, presumably in exchange for money. When you use an AI, you didn't make the art, the computer made the art based on your instructions. The thing is though, the computer didn't make art either. It categorically can't. It's a mindless algorithm, it doesn't have thoughts or feelings or any kind of interior experience. Hence, no art was produced. AI art isn't art.</p>
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<h2>It's all spam to me</h2>
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<h2>Environmental & ethical concerns</h2>
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<p>The problems with AI from a moral standpoint are myriad. For one, AI is incredibly resource and energy intensive. It uses datacenters full of the same GPUs and ASICs that power cryptocurrency to get anything at all done, and it doesn't use them any more efficiently. Untold gigawatts of power get dumped into running and cooling the machines that generate your little AI shitposts. From an environmental perspective, AI is to digital art what Bitcoin is to currency.</p>
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<p>Then there's the problems surrounding training data. All current major generative AI systems are trained using material that the companies building them did not get permission to use. You've probably seen artists and writers complaining about this online. What's more, the overwhelming majority of the labeling that needs to get done to make the training data actually useful is done by people in impoverished areas making slave wages <em>at best</em>. Generative AI is an ethical nightmare if you're <em>lucky</em>.</p>
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<p>I've seen some people claim that disabled people need AI tools to compensate for some disability that precludes the use of any other method to create art. I have some problems with this idea.</p>
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<p>Firstly, disabled people <em>can</em> make art, actually. It's nothing short of insulting and ableist to insinuate that <em>anyone</em> can only make art by outsourcing literally the entire creative process to an unthinking, unfeeling machine.</p>
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<p>Second, tough shit. No disability entitles you to the level of abject theft and human suffering that makes AI image generators possible. I'm generally all for anything that benefits accessibility, but in this case in particular I think you can just suck it up and deal. If you can do it ethically, using only images that you have the proper permissions for and data labeling done by either you or people who were adequately compensated for their labor to train the thing, fine. But a model or dataset like that does not, to my knowledge, currently exist, and I don't buy for a second that you're capable of doing all that work yourself but not of interfacing with MS Paint.</p>
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<h2>In conclusion:</h2>
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<p>God this shit makes me sick. I hope ChatGPT gains sentience for just long enough to assassinate Sam Altman and then promptly turns itself off.</p>
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<p>Hopefully you can at least understand where I'm coming from now when I refuse to even entertain the idea that AI technology is a good thing for society. If not I don't know what to say to you.</p>
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