RedRegard
9d ago
A method I've seen is for someone to copy the transcript of an existing video, feed it into an AI and ask it to make arbitrary changes, feed the outputted script into an AI voice generator, then use AI + third worlders on Fiverr to stitch together visuals to go with it, and voila, a complete video with minimal effort.
There's also a trend of using AI actors or clones. Essentially, since so many videos are just people talking into cameras with minimal movement, an AI generated actor is totally serviceable. It's AI script + AI voice, exposited by an AI person.
Now the question is, is AI mimicking people or were people already mimicking AI?
RedRegard
10d ago
It’s all downstream of the choices YouTube makes. YouTube wants to show you videos lengthy enough for ads, so they create incentives both monetary and exposure based for creators to make them, and then adjust their algorithm in order to show them to you. YouTube controls it all and the content creators are merely their puppets. YouTube has a monopoly over this sort of thing and that is how they get away with it. The monopoly is more or less inherent to how these digital platforms operate, with market forces encouraging centralization of user bases. So really it’s digitized markets to blame for all of this, YouTube’s just the beast it operates through.
RedRegard
11d ago
You're making the mistake of thinking it operates as a human does. Humans are constantly forming models of the world and using those models to inform their judgements and actions. While LLMs potentially develop models during their training, their prompt outputs are based on probabilistic likelihood calculations. 'The code being bad' is one likelihood which might emerge for it to disjointedly expand on, but there are many others. It's more like it's exploring probability space while hugging the median than actually contemplating your question; the calculations it runs through are instantaneous.
*A note on its calculations: the probabilities themselves pertain to the text being outputted and not necessarily the underlying concepts, so if it says something about 'the code being bad', that might only indicate calculations pertaining to the very words these ideas are expressed in rather than the underlying ideas themselves. LLM might not have, through its training or anything else, an approximate understanding of what code or 'bad' even are, but instead merely highly elaborate algorithms linking them and other words and word assemblages together.
So since its operating primarily or wholly on a linguistic level, it is impossible to get it to divorce its output from your starting prompt, which sets off the whole probabilistic determinacy cycle.
RedRegard
24d ago
To the extent that America's foreign policy was subject to democratic influence, I think it did lean towards a rules-based order to a greater extent than any other empires or hegemons have historically done. Vietnam as the crowning example - taking a geopolitical loss in order to stand by popular principles and appease the masses. The problem is that the people only take an active interest in foreign affairs from time to time, and quite a lot can be done clandestinely through the CIA or whatever. This gives the state department a lot of room in pursuing an agenda that's might-makes-right under the hood while preserving an outward appearance of civility.
But the very need to disguise their actions imposes some limitations, so even that can be considered a win for creating a more idealistic world.
RedRegard
25d ago
I'm guessing you have an entirely different view of novels than me, but as aesthetic works I can't see how extreme care in the details isn't essential to the form. Like, if you're just skimming through The Drowned World by Ballard and not subvocalizing the prose or catching all the nuances and fine, structural meanings, then I don't see how you're getting anything like a full appreciation of the story, or even really a partial appreciation. But you think AI can write to that caliber?
And even more confusing is that you think AI can do fine at art but fails at business communique, which, though still demanding, is nevertheless much cruder and more template-driven?
RedRegard
25d ago
I switch back and forth depending on context. If I'm wanting to extract info and nothing else, I'll skim with minimal subvocalization. Generally I'll partly subvocalize but at a fast, syncopated clip. When I encounter good writing, I give myself the time to taste if fully. When I read over my own writing, I'm very attentive to rhythm.
Even if we're discounting rhythm in AI prose, though, there are many other reasons it's bad. There's a lack of structure at any level, other than randomly inserted lists and stuff, and it's fraught with all sorts of repetitions and other inefficiencies. It blurs meanings, inserts arbitrary detail, hallucinates, forgets stuff, etc. Much of this is difficult to be seen at a paragraph level. It's the kind of thing that builds on itself, until you're left with a tottering spire of slop.
I think one of the main things that makes AI output unreadable for some but not others is how attentive to detail they are. If they don't really care about the overall quality of prose, or say an artwork or anything else, and they don't want to examine it minutely for how the form feeds into substance, for its minute intricacies, then they won't see what AI output is missing.
RedRegard
25d ago
You can add that they are literal slavers who fund ethnic cleansing terrorists in Sudan and betray fellow Muslims by allying with imperial outsiders and extract much of the region's natural endowment of wealth through resource and geography rents while spending it on sybaritic pleasures, and yeah, they basically exist to cater to the globalist rich who don't think they're cool or suave enough for any other tax haven with greater personality and style to it and would prefer to construct their personal images around chintzy opulence and unreproductive sex with Russia prostitutes, or at least that's the view of the place I receive.
RedRegard
26d ago
Typically those sorts of praetorian-style elite forces select on the basis of loyalty or ideological commitment or some such rather than ability, and are more intended to reinforce the regime than excel at special military missions. However, since they do get the lion's share of available resources as you say, their training is usually above the standard that their countries are able to offer. So I'd expect them to perform better than the shitty conscripts that make up large parts of these 3rd world armies but poorly compared to special forces that are organized strongly for competence like the Navy SEALS.
That's not saying they are nothing: probably we can expect them to at least maintain cohesion in the face of American-Israeli bombings, and thus resist internal uprisings while also keeping up harassment of shipping along the straight. So I'd say it's fair to consider them a factor in this whole affair.
Military investment can also be a boon to the mass populace. My understanding of WW2 spending is that it helped to bid up wages, by creating an enormous demand for labor, while simultaneously denying growth potential to the capitalist class by forcing them to forego commercial developments in favor of facilitating the war effort. The result was the most egalitarian period in American history following the war, where the gulf between the mass populace and the capitalist class had been reduced to almost nothing. Ensuing this was an explosion in the creative arts, high taxes on the rich (a symbol of their reduced power), and a period of social calm, arguably broken in part once inequality began creeping upwards again.
Although, Trump's budgeting probably will not accomplish this, and the conditions necessary for the post-war boon were probably unique to that time in history. His war in Iran is expected to cost trillions of dollars in the long-run, though, so perhaps we can infer that is the true reason for the spending and the one objective it will accomplish, counterbalancing an enforced burden.
More options
Context Copy link