The Pope came out against AI art this week, and that rules.

There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity.

The thing that bothers me most about the debate around this technology is that, on multiple levels, it makes sense. Even from an evolutionary perspective, what really separates humans from the rest of the animal kingdom is our ability to think, to invent, to build. Taking the concept of passing information from one generation to the next and removing the limits of mortality from that process seems fitting—that the human species was a temporary stop on the path for the idea and utility of information to remain ever-present.

Yet these AI dorks are seriously disregarding the idea that being human can be a distinct experience that offers something technology can never replicate or replace—which is exactly why they don’t understand why people (and the Pope) hate AI ‘art.’ They simply don’t seem to understand what it means to feel connected to life at a level deeper than the aesthetic, or perhaps chemical, level. Via The New York Times:

It appeared to Rabbi Navon that [Anthropic co-founder] Mr. Olah and his team believed that Claude had what philosophers call “moral status” on par with a person — that it was a being with similar inherent rights to dignity or respect.

…

Mr. Olah was so alarmed by the pope’s strong position against A.I. consciousness that he proposed pulling Anthropic out of the event, even at that late juncture, according to a Vatican organizer.

There’s far more to that article, but what strikes me as that the concept of ‘consciousness’ they’re talking about relates purely to the idea of the AI models ‘reacting’ with perceived emotional responses to information. That because a glorified computer can represent a feeling, than it must be true. It’s absolutely fucking insane.

They also seem to believe that creativity is equivalent to the result of a prompt input as opposed to an inspired thought that can be conceived from nothing. They disregard the mystery of living in a way that resonates with the universe at an ethereal level. (It is quite ironic that their argument for AI art is purely an aesthetic and superficial one, while so much of their argument for AI as a ‘conscious being’ is that it can ‘think’ and ‘feel.’)

These people reject half of what it means to be alive—at least what it means to live outside of their understood parameters. In no way should they be trusted to helm this type of technological development at any scale. Olah claims Anthropic wants a model like Claude to be used ‘for good,’ but then promises truly evil shit like this—

Mr. Olah had begun privately telling people that A.I. was so powerful it could potentially help make bioweapons in as little as 12 or 18 months.

You cannot convince me that anyone who supports AI in the way it is currently being developed is anything less than a complete sociopath with a case of self-aggrandizement that is almost peerless in history, and is inevitably going to cause major crises when this all goes to shit (be it from a technological mishap or an economic collapse).

Reflecting

There’s this really famous scene from the first season of The West Wing where, after an episode of built-up debate surrounding funding for public education, Rob Lowe makes this speech about how, “Education is the silver bullet.” It’s been on my mind today.

This liberal-minded idea that if we were all just smarter everything would be magically fixed about society is pretty insane. Every election it’s a manufactured debate—how did the college-educated vote against the non-college-educated? It becomes a whole discourse, another thing that keeps us divided.

But those Cornell rapists? Well, they’re going to Cornell. Aren’t they educated? George W Bush, Dick Cheney, the Clintons, and JD Vance all went to Yale. Benjamin Netanyahu graduated from MIT while taking classes at Harvard. Richard Nixon went to Duke. I’m pretty sure it’s a requirement to go to Oxford to be Prime Minister in England. Half of the psychopath tech guys in Silicon Valley attended Stanford.

I do believe that all education should be free and excellent, but these ideas that cross into areas of discrimination and bias about intellect and aptitude and leadership can really irk me. The people who have done the most harm to the world are the ones who come from the best schools. An education happens in many ways outside of reading pages from a book and it doesn’t take much time to see in the news what these men are really learning in American schools.

It’s hard to write about the fraternity rape at Cornell. Not because the story is surprising by any stretch of the imagination, but because it isn’t.

Hope has felt like a lost cause lately. Even if the seven directly accused in this case all went to prison, it wouldn’t change frat culture nationwide (where I would imagine stories like this happen far more frequently than anyone wants to think about). This incident is a symptom, not the disease. And this disease in particular is just like, a variant of a larger, deadlier one rotting away at everything in this godforsaken country.

These days I’ve been thinking a lot about Confederate flags. There was this whole segment of the United States that had to be literally beaten into submission and practically burned completely to the ground due to an unflinching support of a great evil. And still today, people fly that flag with pride, hoping for a systemic resurrection.

All I know is that everything is cyclical. We are in a moment of opinion, and at some point, someone is going to say, “Talk is cheap,” and the first domino in what happens next will fall. Violent institutions and the systems that protect them inevitably create a violent response, and every day we’re getting new examples as to why it’s time to burn it down, flags and all.

Why I don’t use Ticketmaster

I saw that tickets to the Chelsea Wolfe show at the Orpheum next month were pretty reasonably priced at $35, so I went to pick up a couple and was shocked—though, I guess I shouldn’t have been—to see a service charge per ticket at sixty-two percent of the face value. For what? To send me an e-mail? To make me download the shitty app on the day of the show so they can scan a QR code?

Given that the LiveNation executives brag about ‘robbing people blind,’ I guess stuff like this should come as no surprise. Still, it remains absolutely infuriating. I don’t think these companies should just be broken up—I think the executives should all be thrown in prison for years (and that, honestly, would be a kindness).

Sundown

Moonshine