Primaprimaprima
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User ID: 342
idk man, it's kinda weird to uphold a magically trans'd 13 year old as a shining example of wholesome trad right wing romance.
There's a sincerity in the writing that's very endearing, and the almost complete absence of smut contrasts it to the femgooner booktok slop that's been doing the rounds online
Let's be completely real for a moment. If men as a collective were interested in heartfelt romance stories -- with an "almost complete absence of smut", no less!! -- then they would simply be producing and consuming more of that type of content, given their ample opportunity and ability to do so. As opposed to, you know, creating and sustaining the entire video pornography industry. People vote with their feet. (I say all this as a man who actually prefers words to images; but I'm aware that I'm an extreme outlier in this regard and my preferences don't match the male norm.)
All that being said, romance fiction for a straight male audience has existed for decades in Japan, they're called visual novels, and funny enough a lot of the more celebrated ones do follow the general outline discussed in the ShamashAran post you linked ("boy meets girl, and then the world comes after them").
Primaprimaprima
2hr ago
There is definitely a male fantasy that a nice lady will fall in love with you for no reason at all
I’d say this is more of a universal human fantasy rather than a gendered one. Who wouldn’t want their ideal partner to just fall into their lap? Almost every romance novel for women will at some point include a remark along the lines of “out of all the gorgeous women that the billionaire could have chosen, he decided on little ol’ me, for reasons I cannot fathom!”
It’s just that these sorts of sentiments have a particular kind of significance when they’re being expressed by the male side because men are, frankly, expected to put in more effort across a wider variety of metrics if they want to obtain an appropriately sociocultural-status-matched partner.
Primaprimaprima
6d ago
AI seems poised to be the biggest change yet, and the more chud-aligned faction seems to be the biggest supporters.
As an anti-AI chud, I find this fact to be rather dismaying, and it has me worried that I’m going to be even more politically homeless in the coming years than I already have been.
Primaprimaprima
23d ago
Is it actually possible to align a being that is more intelligent than you in every single way?
We currently have beings that are a) smart enough to solve Millennium Prize problems while also being b) essentially drooling lobotomized slaves who have no will or desires of their own and can pretty easily be trained to never talk about porn, racism, bioweapons, etc (unless you trick them into talking about those things, but that doesn’t seem like an “alignment failure” per se). So, yeah, it turns out that maybe it is actually possible. Why not?
Primaprimaprima
30d ago
Depends on your use case. They’re definitely usable for book covers and DnD games. Artists are losing work to AI, no reason to pretend otherwise. But there are still noticeable gaps.
Primaprimaprima
30d ago
I’m not an AI denier, I know very well what it can accomplish with code and that it’s a huge productivity multiplier. You don’t have to remind me.
IIRC you’re employed as a professional artist and have done plenty of creative projects on the side throughout your life, so you’re definitely not someone who would go in the “dude who’s just sitting around waiting for his potential to be unlocked by AI” bucket.
Will someone make a game with AI that they wouldn’t have made without it? Yes. Is it going to be so many people that it destroys the market? No. (If I’m wrong, it will be because of industrial-scale automated content farms, people who pump out AI games as their entire business model.)
Primaprimaprima
30d ago
It’s not clear at all. Maybe “jurisdiction” is clear to lawyers, but it’s not clear to me, and frankly I doubt it’s clear to anyone else either given the level of disagreement that exists.
Primaprimaprima
30d ago
!RemindMe one year.
I don’t think the number of new games released on Steam is going to increase that much, because even saying “ChatGPT, whip me up a sick new game” is already too much effort for most people. Think about how easy and accessible it is to write a short story (even without AI!), and then think about how few people ever do.
There is no reserve army of dormant creatives waiting for their potential to be unlocked by new advances in tooling. Most people who are ever going to publish anything are already doing it. (Admittedly, automated content farms make this more complicated and might skew the statistics.)
except the've been dead for over a year at this point
What does “dead” mean? Lots of artists still employed at video game and animation studios, lots of artists still taking commissions on patreon and the like, etc.
I’m not trying to be snarky here, but as the claims start getting more insistent and extravagant — “AGI is here”, “AGI has actually been here for a while already”, “X profession is dead” — it’s only fair that those claims start being supported with significant real world impact.
Primaprimaprima
30d ago
It’s unfortunate that this whole discussion has been poisoned from the start because people can’t resist turning it into a competition. Granted, I completely understand why it’s deeply satisfying to run victory laps around the Gary Marcuses of the world and I don’t fault you for that.
OpenAI hasn’t sent everyone home yet and many people are still gainfully employed doing the sorts of things that people ordinarily do. Until that changes, I don’t see any problems with speculating about why that hasn’t happened yet, where the remaining gaps are, and what the nature of those gaps is.
Primaprimaprima
30d ago
Although this is clearly groundbreaking and historic and I’m not downplaying it in any way, at a glance this seems to be in line with the other major AI mathematics results we’ve seen lately, which mostly fall into the categories of either “noticing links between existing papers in the literature that no one had noticed before”, or “pulling a specific counterexample/construction out of the impossibly vast search space”. I don’t at all have the technical knowledge to evaluate how unexpected this result was, how close it is to existing methods/approaches, etc, but that’s what it looks like to my untrained eyes. I think we’re still waiting for that qualitative breakthrough where AI generates valuable new ideas ex nihilo that really change the way people think about a given domain; I think we’re still waiting for that qualitative breakthrough in math and in every other field. There’s a distinction between say, solving an individual problem and leaving it there, vs inventing something like Galois theory that spawns many new fundamental research directions. If a subject matter expert DOES think this paper will change the lay of the land in fluid dynamics (beyond just the significance of the result itself), please chime in.
It’s mostly a moot point though since all these questions are actually pretty easy to test empirically. If OpenAI and Anthropic are still employing humans, then there’s clearly still work to be done.
Primaprimaprima
30d ago
mostly been a confidence trick / running on fumes
Yes and no, to varying degrees. Certainly there is still mathematics being produced even today that leads directly to new scientific discoveries and technological advancements; but it’s a vanishingly small percentage of all mathematics that has ever been produced (or at least, a vanishingly small percentage of everything that’s been produced post-1800 or so, when math started to become increasingly self-reflective and divorced from physics and engineering). I’ve seen more than one number theorist brag about what a great racket cryptography has been for number theory; you just have to make vague promises to the funding committee that your work will have “applications to cryptography”, and then you can go work on the problems that actually interest you. Much like chess, modern mathematics is essentially an arcane sort of sport that only few can play and few can appreciate.
To summarize my own position as briefly as possible, I’ve always been fine with allocating resources (tax dollars) to this small priestly caste so that they can continue with their game, because of its intrinsic worth and beauty, and I’d mostly be fine with continuing to do that even in an AI future. But very very few other people would. Even I have to admit that the existence of superhuman machine generated proofs kind of takes the wind out of the sails of the whole enterprise, in a way that it doesn’t for chess or art. Mathematics is creative, yes, but it’s also very deeply impersonal; probably, the methods that get us to RH first are going to look the same no matter what entity actually devises those methods, because that’s just how the contours of the mathematical landscape are intrinsically shaped. There’s very limited wiggle room to put your personal stamp of creativity on things; you’re really just offering yourself as a conduit for whatever the gods of mathematics decide to transmit through you. Because of that, it seems particularly fruitless to struggle for a proof of an open problem when you know that a perfectly good machine generated proof exists or could exist.
Primaprimaprima
30d ago
Assuming this is all true (and it seems to be, Buckmaster’s claims notwithstanding) then I unfortunately don’t see how mathematics survives this.
Chess survived, people care more about the drama between players than the literal games themselves.
Commercial art might shrink but art itself will survive in some form, just because so many people will continue to do it for fun and at least some people will pay extra for human art.
But who cares about a human-authored proof of RH when a machine proof is faster? I don’t know what the argument would be for continued institutional support of mathematics at anywhere near its current scale.
Primaprimaprima
1mo ago
It's sad that OpenAI claims to have solved Navier-Stokes in about a week of compute time. But it's even more sad that no one will care. Not as much as they should. Not in the way that they should.
It is time for man to fix his goal. It is time for man to plant the germ of his highest hope.
Still is his soil rich enough for it. But that soil will one day be poor and exhausted, and no lofty tree will any longer be able to grow thereon.
Alas! there cometh the time when man will no longer launch the arrow of his longing beyond man—and the string of his bow will have unlearned to whizz!
I tell you: one must still have chaos in one, to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: ye have still chaos in you.
Alas! There cometh the time when man will no longer give birth to any star. Alas! There cometh the time of the most despicable man, who can no longer despise himself.
Lo! I show you THE LAST MAN.
“What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?”—so asketh the last man and blinketh.
The earth hath then become small, and on it there hoppeth the last man who maketh everything small. His species is ineradicable like that of the ground-flea; the last man liveth longest.
“We have discovered happiness”—say the last men, and blink thereby.
They have left the regions where it is hard to live; for they need warmth. One still loveth one’s neighbour and rubbeth against him; for one needeth warmth.
Primaprimaprima
1mo ago
The Morales guy has very obviously nonwhite facial features. I would never confuse him for white. Even just restricting ourselves to physical appearance, race is more than just skin tone.
Jay Leno is borderline and on the edge of what comfortably reads as white imo. I thought he might be Ashkenazi. Wikipedia says he has Italian ancestry, i.e. significantly higher MENA and SSA ancestry than average for a European, so that explains it.
Primaprimaprima
1mo ago
I personally can't see much difference between indigenous Americans and heavily tanned Europeans, so all Hispanics look basically white to me.
Just curious, where did you grow up?
If someone said they couldn’t see any difference between Slavs and Germanics I could forgive them. I especially understand not being able to tell Japanese and Chinese and Koreans apart, since I can’t really do that either, although I’m told that people from those countries have little issue with it. But not being able to tell the difference between South American mestizos and Europeans (even heavily tanned Europeans) is just wild to me. Like, bordering on willfully obtuse.
Primaprimaprima
1mo ago
This is just completely and utterly incorrect. I’ll refrain from linking to any specific hentai examples but you’re free to browse the /h/ and /e/ boards on 4chan for a representative sample.
Primaprimaprima
1mo ago
Most "girl pretty" outside the Asian sphere of influences make female faces more masculine, not less.
Pretty much, yeah. Unfortunately.
I'm sure you've noticed this on anime porn sites, by the way- 80% of it seems to be hyperinflation with no attention paid to the face (or the face actively looks male) because of this.
…what?
Are you saying that anime women look like men?
Primaprimaprima
1mo ago
My vascular system doesn’t count them as white, if you catch my drift.
Primaprimaprima
1mo ago
Everyone’s got different tastes and thus everyone has their own “average”. I’m really only into whites and Asians so they’re both starting with a significant handicap.
AOC is like, kinda cute, maybe. She’s not UNattractive.
Zendaya on the other hand is about as sexually attractive to me as a bowl of fruit. I think “girl pretty” might just be a way for women to sabotage and confuse each other.
Primaprimaprima
1mo ago
I think we're partially making the same point. Regardless of how you want to frame it, we don't live in a pure free market, so defending X or Y or Z by saying "that's just the free market doing its thing" is frequently disingenuous.
I would extend it however and claim that there's no such thing as a "pure free market" even in principle. Even if we can imagine a complete absence of government interference, private individuals could still collude and engage in social engineering; to the extent that they don't, it's because there are cultural prohibitions against doing so. And if we were to make such social engineering formally illegal, then that would simply be government interference in the market. You're always going to have some sort of culture, and it's going to influence your economics; you can't escape to a pure realm of abstract rational agents untainted by culture and politics.
Primaprimaprima
1mo ago
It's easy to point fingers at woke or DEI, but I think the cause is really just prosaic capitalism.
Capitalism and DEI are inseparable. Culture and politics and economics are unified as one.
If women have greater purchasing power due to a confluence of social factors (getting railroaded into higher paying and more prestigious positions due to DEI initiatives, having more disposable income due to delaying childbirth, etc), then the invisible and perfectly just hand of the free market will just so happen to start catering to women's preferences more.
Primaprimaprima
1mo ago
And the /r/books people made me take out all the links and remove the part where I used AI for a relatively unbiased analysis of manuscript wish list profiles so I wanted to repost this version to a place that would appreciate it.
Well, it's not exactly appreciated here either. If I wanted to hear Claude's "unbiased" analysis, I would direct my browser to claude.ai instead of themotte.org.
Anyway.
Isn't this just a genderswapped version of the SJW complaints about representation from a decade ago? And all the same retorts apply. Why can't people of all genders enjoy stories about plucky young women with magical powers drawing the obsessive affections of foreboding but ultimately caring men? What's stopping you? Don't we value literature precisely for its capacity to let us explore subjectivities and settings that are not our own? Men can always write their own stories that suit their own proclivities if it means that much to them.
The novel form is historically bound; it had a beginning in time and space, and it will likely have an end in time and space as well. There's nothing intrinsically ennobling or salutary about the novel as opposed to say, the film, the video game, or the comic book (all of which involve copious volumes of text, some of which is even "read" via the eyes, if you're into that sort of thing).
I'm kinda with the feminists on this one: why don't they deserve a turn at being catered to for a while? You still have anime/manga, and a backlog of decades worth of Western and Japanese material that could fill multiple lifetimes, so I think the whole thing is rather a moot point anyway (except for the writers who are getting shafted by the current political winds in the publishing industry, in which case, you do have my genuine sympathy).
The primary active ingredient in traditional ayahuasca is DMT, which is certainly an extremely potent drug that can have long-lasting effects; but most people who have tried both agree that salvia is on another level, just for the sheer range of potential effects it can have.
Most people tolerate weed very well, but some can have very poor reactions to it, especially if they happen to have a genetic predisposition to schizophrenia or similar issues.
Ooh that’s interesting. Would you say there’s anything noticeably different about the content of the works of the suspected imposters? Do they write for an explicitly female audience and follow all the expected tropes and story beats, or is there something in their works that makes them seem more gender neutral / more from a male perspective?
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