But bullshit hallucinogenic output and fakery at colossal scales doesn't just pollute the pool of static information available on the web. It also warps the minds of the humans you're relying on to verify reality on the next training loop. Not only that, but we can also see the emergent breed of humans who believe that writing is similar to arithmetic - an unnecessary skill that can be handed off to a calculator. Or that making a movie shouldn't require knowing anything besides asking for what you want to see. How is someone like that - someone who wants to rely on bots - going to tell a bot what is or isn't true? How can
they even have a pre-pollution baseline understanding of reality?
I just finished rereading Do Androids Dream for the first time in 20 years or so, and was astonished at how similar his andys really are to LLMs in the polluted / destroyed reality there. How confusing and corrupting they are to organic life. PKD describes the androif brains as neural networks with thousands of layered pathways and trillions of weighted parameters, and it's as if he was able to accurately conceive of what linguistic and "emotional" strengths and weaknesses those constructs would actually have, decades before LLMs existed. And there's this one amazing line where Deckard calls them "Life thieves". What else should we call what Sam Altman and others are building - but theft of human ingenuity, creativity, and basic reason for living, and the utter annihilation and suppression of people like this 16 year old kid who dare to hope they can contribute something more original in life than being a servant of a tech company building this shit, or a tiktok influencer who writes prompts?
What should that kid hope: That their work becomes noticeable enough to be immediately stolen and their name turned into a prompt?
Life thieves.
Just as a further aside, I had dinner tonight with a friend who's a fairly famous animator in the commercial realm, and I brought up this post. He's just sure the kid's screwed and the genie is out and creative is basically over. He's turning to building wooden clocks.
But his reaction, and the reactions I see here every time this comes up, remind me of something else. They remind me of how people react when someone is robbed. Everyone has some reason why it's bad but not that bad, it was inevitable, it'll be okay, etc. Or they go around wondering what they're going to do now. Or they paper it over with optimism. Surprisingly few people get robbed and are willing to realize they were robbed, and become wildly pissed off about it. Most people have some sort of flight reaction, as evidenced by e.g. the promotion of "prompt writing" or learning to use a paid API to do what was formerly your own creative job that now spits your own work back at you.
I say sue the shit out of all these content thieves.