AIDungeon was such a hilarious shitshow, for all that it was an entertaining toy for a while. Honestly I feel a baffling sort of nostalgia for the GPT-2 era of chatbots where it was new and good enough to be interesting but bad enough to be incredibly funny. It was so much better than the bland slop modern chatbots are where they’re bad enough to be useless and good enough to be boring. It’s like schlocky grindhouse B-movie slop vs modern overcooked Hollywood slop.
I feel the same way. The older models were quirky and erratic and disturbing, but so was the early internet in a lot of ways.
Now it’s going to be increasingly (pay)walled gardens of slop burning ever more acres of forest at a time and gobbling up all the creative input of what’s left of human civilization to regurgitate it back as a Joss Whedon like paste of pop culture references and quirky imitation wit.
I hate proprietary AI models so much. They’re all the material and social problems of open source ones, but entirely in the hands of the dullest and most ontologically evil corporate suits alive. Trying to make a machine that’s the sum of decades or centuries of human culture and which extrudes a fine paste somewhat resembling the same, that’s obviously a very mixed bag at best, but when that paste is just going straight into a selection of corporate injection molds there are no possible positives left, only the complete enclosure of human culture and its replacement with injection molded slop.
There are already consequences that we can’t even fully fathom for having so much of the creative process delegated to treat printers, and it’s likely to get worse before it (maybe) gets better. Capitalism has already narrowed down the concept of “fantasy” with presumptive elements that became less fantastical over time and more boilerplate with more standardized cliches (oh look there are elves and they are pretty and live a long time and look down on you, and they happen to look like League of Legends characters too), and that process will likely intensify with machines saying to the prompters “oh? You want a fairy tale setting? This is what a fairy tale looks like” while effectively erasing folklore from around the world that strayed too far from the slurry’s consistency.
AIDungeon was such a hilarious shitshow, for all that it was an entertaining toy for a while. Honestly I feel a baffling sort of nostalgia for the GPT-2 era of chatbots where it was new and good enough to be interesting but bad enough to be incredibly funny. It was so much better than the bland slop modern chatbots are where they’re bad enough to be useless and good enough to be boring. It’s like schlocky grindhouse B-movie slop vs modern overcooked Hollywood slop.
I feel the same way. The older models were quirky and erratic and disturbing, but so was the early internet in a lot of ways.
Now it’s going to be increasingly (pay)walled gardens of slop burning ever more acres of forest at a time and gobbling up all the creative input of what’s left of human civilization to regurgitate it back as a Joss Whedon like paste of pop culture references and quirky imitation wit.
I hate proprietary AI models so much. They’re all the material and social problems of open source ones, but entirely in the hands of the dullest and most ontologically evil corporate suits alive. Trying to make a machine that’s the sum of decades or centuries of human culture and which extrudes a fine paste somewhat resembling the same, that’s obviously a very mixed bag at best, but when that paste is just going straight into a selection of corporate injection molds there are no possible positives left, only the complete enclosure of human culture and its replacement with injection molded slop.
There are already consequences that we can’t even fully fathom for having so much of the creative process delegated to treat printers, and it’s likely to get worse before it (maybe) gets better. Capitalism has already narrowed down the concept of “fantasy” with presumptive elements that became less fantastical over time and more boilerplate with more standardized cliches (oh look there are elves and they are pretty and live a long time and look down on you, and they happen to look like League of Legends characters too), and that process will likely intensify with machines saying to the prompters “oh? You want a fairy tale setting? This is what a fairy tale looks like” while effectively erasing folklore from around the world that strayed too far from the slurry’s consistency.