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Sam Ursu's avatar

Oh dear. As much as I appreciate the *romantic* take in this piece, ultimately, it's foolish and even somewhat masturbatory, to wit:

1) The phrase is "a ways away." The reason there's no apostrophe is because it derives from the genitive version of the word "way" kind of like how we don't write "her's" with an apostrophe. Old English never dies, baby!!

2) I will fully admit that I love some of the poetry that was produced by the (original) Romantics. But if you look at the lives these people led, it's one disaster after another. I mean, yeah, it's cool that Shelley used to put copies of his poems in balloons and launch them into the air, but on the other hand, he was a pedophile, a mooch, a shit father, and basically a lazy bum his entire life.

3) No need to invent "Singslang" or any other such nonsense. First, just use the word "nigger" in any English-language text, and you'll automatically prove you're human. Second, AI only understands and speaks a tiny fraction of the world's languages. Good luck finding an AI that can speak and read Kannada, for instance, which approximately 60 million human beings speak every day, etc, etc.

3b) I should add here that I speak and write in a language that even Google cannot understand, and it probably never will, which is (Cyrillic) Moldovan. You don't have to be some isolated indigenous tribe to exist outside the purview of these idiotic Silicon Valley morons. You just have to get past the ones they use at the United Nations (which is how all these translator apps/AIs were trained).

3c) Speaking of which, take a gander at the languages they speak in Togo. Um... even people in Togo can barely tell where one begins and the other ends :)

4) Yah, you can "smell" it when an AI wrote a text or tell when an AI generated a photo-type image. But can you distinguish an AI piece of artwork from human-created piece of modern art hanging in some gallery in Soho right now? LMFAO no, you cannot. Because that's where "Romanticism" gets you in the long run, blobs and dots of color that you can interpret any way you want to (aka a Rorschach test).

5) AI is a cheap joke. Saying AI will "take over" anything is like someone saying that the Mechanical Turk from the 18th century is going to take over the world of competitive chess. Give me a break. The only people who fear AI are those creating or consuming something that they know has no inherent worth or value.

6) There is literally not a single system or process or control of anything that is being done 100% by AI right now because it is fundamentally unreliable and cuckoo crazy. AI is just the literal embodiment of the infinite monkey theorem, which proposes that an infinite number of monkeys banging on some typewriters will one day replicate Shakespeare. Well, AI is just super fast digital monkeys cranking out billions of pages per second. We gasp in amazement at the "hits" and immediately forget all the "misses."

7) Hate to get all Saint Augustine here on you for my last comment (primum movens), but even flesh and blood people do not create anything de novo. All those things we call "creations" are lovely and wonderful and sometimes even cherished, but they're ALWAYS reinterpretations (or "reboots" or "reimaginings") of original IP, to put it into modern lingo. And I'm saying this as an artist myself :)

Other than that, another great read! I truly mean that.

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Vivian Evans's avatar

Firstly, I'm viscerally against this proclaimed dichotomy between 'reason' (cold, 'AI'-prone) and 'emotion' (neo-romanticism). It promotes the lazy view that scientists have to be cold and unfeeling while the non-scientists have a deep connection to warmth and life.

We can see where this leads to, or rather: has already led to. It's the basis on which feminists descry 'white old men' (Disclaimer: I'm a white old woman). It's the basis on which western education has promoted verbose 'me and my feelz' outpourings as more valid than having to study 'hard' things like maths, physics and other MINT subjects.

The truly insidious result of this emphasis on emotion is that generations of pupils have never been taught how to see, how to look at what is around them in the natural world. That is what leads to the lack of wonder, of enthusiasm for finding out you rightly and sadly notice.

One final note: the original Romantic movement led to the high time of inventions and capitalist growth. One might regard this as societal answer to an overwhelming emotionalism. Perhaps AI is such an answer in our age, a time where all 'feelz', expressed in the facile terms of fridge magnets, are valid. Worse: perhaps too many have become incapable of discerning what is AI's 'deep fakes' and what isn't because too many have never learned to look and listen and to trust their own judgement.

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