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George Orwell Predicted the Rise of "AI Slop" in Nineteen Eighty-Four

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Re: George Orwell Predicted the Rise of "AI Slop" in Nineteen Eighty-Four

#51

Post by piekvorst »

crooked-v wrote: post #49
piekvorst wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is a good thing and it absolutely can function, but not as a society. Ayn Rand explicitly rejected this idea [1]: Q: Why is the lack of government in Galt’s Gulch (in Atlas Shrugged) any different from anarchy, which you object to? A: Galt’s Gulch is not a society; it’s a private estate. It’s owned by one man who carefully selected the people admitted. Even then, they had a judge as an arbitrator, if anything came…

That's a real circular answer there, "it's not a society because it's not a society". Claiming that a place specifically set up as a self-contained community hiding from the government, and hiding from government authority, is 'just a private estate' is rhetorical nonsense.

I never said that it’s not society because it’s not a society. If you want me to derive the whole meaning from concepts, that’s a rationalist school’s method, not mine. I derive the meaning from the content: an example of (“optimistically”) one thousand people sharing the same philosophy does not endorse a government-less society.

I do agree that a private estate cannot exist in a society without government. But it is private estate in the sense that the members recognize it as such, and that it can exist in this very narrow context.

Re: George Orwell Predicted the Rise of "AI Slop" in Nineteen Eighty-Four

#52

Post by Noumenon72 »

windowshopping wrote: post #6

It's amazing to me how nobody seems to know about the short story "The great automatic grammatizator" by Roald Dahl. Nobody got closer than him. I feel like I should be reading about it all the time and no one seems to have ever heard of it.

“There are many other little refinements too, Mr Bohlen. You’ll see them all when you study the plans carefully. For example, there’s a trick that nearly every writer uses, of inserting at least one long, obscure word into each story. This makes the reader think that the man is very wise and clever. So I have the machine do the same thing. There’ll be a whole stack of long words stored away just for this purpose.”

“Where?”

“In the ‘word-memory’ section,” he said, epexegetically.

https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1953-dahl-theg...

Re: George Orwell Predicted the Rise of "AI Slop" in Nineteen Eighty-Four

#53

Post by bicepjai »

raincole wrote: post #36

I'd like to share the most prophetical quote I've read about generative AI: > Typewriters and printing presses take away some, but your robot would deprive us of all. Your robot takes over the galleys. Soon it, or other robots, would take over the original writing, the searching of the sources, the checking and crosschecking of passages, perhaps even the deduction of conclusions. What would that leave the scholar? On…

Inspired to come up with these original ideas

Re: George Orwell Predicted the Rise of "AI Slop" in Nineteen Eighty-Four

#54

Post by thrance »

mrexcess wrote: post #46
thrance wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave New World warns against the dangers of consumerism, hedonism and complacency. 1984 warns against fascist modes of governance, the dehumanization of individuals under totalitarian regimes. Animal Farm warns against the danger of revolutionism, and the way ideals can be led astray. Atlas Shrugged warns against... The way poor people steal from the rich? How rich people are the only productive members of society?…

Atlas Shrugged, more charitably perhaps despite its manifest flaws, seemed to me to be about the dangers of putting “the needs of the many” over individual rights, and how it can ultimately be self defeating for the whole.

Ehhh, is this really what the world is suffering from though? Too much equality?

Re: George Orwell Predicted the Rise of "AI Slop" in Nineteen Eighty-Four

#55

Post by thrance »

tracerbulletx wrote: post #22
thrance wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Brave New World warns against the dangers of consumerism, hedonism and complacency. 1984 warns against fascist modes of governance, the dehumanization of individuals under totalitarian regimes. Animal Farm warns against the danger of revolutionism, and the way ideals can be led astray. Atlas Shrugged warns against... The way poor people steal from the rich? How rich people are the only productive members of society?…

The villains in Atlas Shrugged are other rich people who achieved their power with corruption and mysticism. I do not want to enact the morality of Atlas Shrugged, but its also wildly misunderstood by almost everyone for some reason. Its mostly just supposed to be competency porn.

Hmm, the book in its whole is basically a manifesto for Rand's Objectivism. I think I'm mostly correct in painting it as a "rich people good, poor people bad". As I understand it, the villains in her book are the hordes of "looters" (aka proletariat) that is too lazy to create their own wealth and instead just steals from our cool class of Übermensches, that is solely responsible for the entire world's productivity, through the government. I find Rand's worldview a bit silly, but it's an understandable reaction to where she came from.

Re: George Orwell Predicted the Rise of "AI Slop" in Nineteen Eighty-Four

#56

Post by mercer »

refulgentis wrote: post #16

I'm old enough to feel "get off my lawn" about this: a constant for every invention is my lifetime is "everyone else is only interested in puerile sex and entertainment, $LATEST_MEDIA is ruining us, 1984" - heard this about TV, internet, iPhone in my lifetime. It's odd to hear that applied here, it's sort of torturous to apply to LLMs. They engender sloppy creation (giving us the titular AI slop), not puerile consump…

A lifetime is not that long though, and I'd argue that TV was the start of a chapter that internet, iphones, etc. are just ever-increasingly addictive and immediate iterations on.

I'm not saying that we didn't have anything like that before tv, or that specific individuals or groups throughout history might not have had something similar, but I do feel TV, and especially its audio-visual nature, really changed something in a way that, say, the printing press never quite did.

EDIT: and to add, my feeling on how many people seem to use LLM's is that in a way it's extra insidious because it's /tailored/, often 'puerile' interaction.

Re: George Orwell Predicted the Rise of "AI Slop" in Nineteen Eighty-Four

#57

Post by Eddy_Viscosity2 »

yongjik wrote: post #50
tracerbulletx wrote: post #25

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” - Dune "What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking—there's the real danger." - God Emperor of Dune

That's great, but I think Herbert had a vision of this incredible galaxy teeming with truthsayers, human computers, and space travel, and just needed a convenient excuse to explain away the total lack of computing devices.

It was a convenient choice because its so obviously a foreseeable problem with thinking machines. see 'torment nexus'

Re: George Orwell Predicted the Rise of "AI Slop" in Nineteen Eighty-Four

#58

Post by stvltvs »

mrexcess wrote: post #41
tracerbulletx wrote: post #25

“Once men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.” - Dune "What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking—there's the real danger." - God Emperor of Dune

Hard times don’t create hard people, they create scarred people. I’ll take the robot farmers, undoing of wage slavery, and time to maintain participatory democracy over my favorite author’s romanticized suffering.

We could have undone wage slavery a long time ago if automation of work was a sufficient condition.

Re: George Orwell Predicted the Rise of "AI Slop" in Nineteen Eighty-Four

#59

Post by chistev »

windowshopping wrote: post #6

It's amazing to me how nobody seems to know about the short story "The great automatic grammatizator" by Roald Dahl. Nobody got closer than him. I feel like I should be reading about it all the time and no one seems to have ever heard of it.

I just read this. Thanks for bringing it up.

Re: George Orwell Predicted the Rise of "AI Slop" in Nineteen Eighty-Four

#60

Post by tracerbulletx »

thrance wrote: post #55
tracerbulletx wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The villains in Atlas Shrugged are other rich people who achieved their power with corruption and mysticism. I do not want to enact the morality of Atlas Shrugged, but its also wildly misunderstood by almost everyone for some reason. Its mostly just supposed to be competency porn.

Hmm, the book in its whole is basically a manifesto for Rand's Objectivism. I think I'm mostly correct in painting it as a "rich people good, poor people bad". As I understand it, the villains in her book are the hordes of "looters" (aka proletariat) that is too lazy to create their own wealth and instead just steals from our cool class of Übermensches, that is solely responsible for the entire world's productivity,…

The main antagonists are James Rearden who is running the railroad and Lillian Rearden the rich wife and a socialite. Then high ranking professors, lobbyists, and generally the military and religious institutions. She thinks that rich people who get rich by scheming and lying are the villains. The titular character is working as a poor railroad hand for most of the book and that is seen as heroic.
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