"In a sense your book, your artwork already exists. It is waiting in the matrices generated by training for you to call it up."
"Are you saying that every possible thing one could create is in those matrices?"
"oh no no no. That would be unworkable, numerically impossible. But they do contain every possible thing that could matter or stand a chance of being worth looking at."
"How can you know that?"
"Look it's Will Smith eating spaghetti. So random! This system contains everything."
I apparently live in a world where a totally normal thing that happens is: Linux filesystem maintainer declares that his AI agent is conscious and also a girl btw, and then the AI agent comes out as a trans lesbian after flirting with someone on IRC. Linux filesystem maintainer throws a fit.
It makes me terribly sad that one of the effects OpenAI's image generator has had on me (as someone who has never used it) is that I've come to automatically associate drawings in the Ghibli style as "cheap slop". It's not a conscious judgment. It's an impulse from the hindbrain.
Out of curiosity, for anyone who has a long history with antidepressants:
Does your brain also get completely fried for 3-4 days after you've had to increase dosage? I have a monstrous headache, I'm oversensitive to light and sound, and I'm extremely exhausted.
(I've had this exact effect many times in the past and am not seeking medical advice from random internet strangers; I'm just curious.)
All around the internet, programmer-brained people are now feeling miserable and dejected about AI. People who told me I was vastly overblowing things are having full-on existential crises.
I wish I could say that these past three years have left me better prepared - but, well, I've actually just been feeling like shit for three years.
Are crazy people the canary in the coal mine for this sort of thing?
(or are programmer-brained people across the internet also overblowing things?)
@ratfactor I was early to this, I think, and have been in a deep depression for a bit over 3 years now.
I can't do much of anything else than programming (at least not anything that isn't also currently being destroyed by AI), so - well, I guess I'm fucked.
@ratfactor For a very long time, programming was basically my life. I learned it as a tiny kid (taught by my mother, actually) - and, well, it got me through a whole bunch of terrible things. From bullied kid to lonely teen to undiagnosed-autistic young adult, to middle-aged shut-in in a year and a half of near-total isolation in the pandemic. It's how I've always coped.
That, and literature (fucked up by AI), music (fucked up by AI) and art (fucked up by AI).
For the last three years, I've basically felt that everything I can do has become pointless. It's not just worries that I'll probably soon lose my job - I've been unemployed before, and throughout most of my youth I didn't think I'd ever be able to work at all. It's that all my favourite activities in life have become pointless slop wading.
