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Notes -
Gemini's Cave
One of the most famous allegories in history is that of Plato's Cave:
It is astonishing that Plato imagined the form of cultural transmission through projected imagery thousands of years before the creation of the movie theater: the dark room, the audience facing the screen, the projection of light and sound from a hidden source... Movie-going audiences tend to be oblivious to the esoteric artistic motivations and meaning behind the films they watch and reify, also tracking with Plato's allegory.
One thing that is not clearly defined in Plato's allegory is, who are the people behind the wall controlling the puppets and creating the sounds to manipulate the audience's perception of reality? What is motivating them? What happens when the audience catches on to the game being played? In Plato's allegory, such a person who leaves the cave, perceives reality, and then tries to convince his fellow prisoners of the state of affairs is taken as a madman and killed by the other prisoners.
With the growing likelihood of Generative AI fulfilling this role of the people behind the wall, there are Glitches in the Matrix so to speak. Twitter has caught on to Gemini's apparent refusal to depict White people. Whether it's Popes or "Medieval Knights", or "Vikings", "American Founding Fathers", "White families", "British, America, etc. women", "Glamour shots", etc.
The AI Engineer at Google behind Gemini has responded:
There is no doubt that this is the worst Gemini, and all the other technologies, are going to be at this. The nonsense above will, for the most part, be fixed very quickly. The real danger will be when Gemini and other Generative AI become so good at generating cultural images and motion pictures, with their output influenced by this latent anti-White alignment which is called "AI Safety", that the agenda behind the underlying alignment will be nearly imperceptible. It will influence the creation of culture and art in subtle ways, and you will be considered a madman conspiracy theorist if you conclude that there are people tuning this culture to be anti-White in the most effective way possible. Imagine when anti-White alignment doesn't create the nonsense above, but it creates extremely entertaining and compelling movies and stories that actually have plausible deniability, such that you seem like a madman if you perceive an agenda aligning the content in such a way.
But for now, and not for long, we can recognize "no, we aren't madmen conspiracy theorists, they are trying to tune the culture to be anti-White and the newest methods for doing that are simply not completely refined yet" is clear as day, and as clear as it's ever going to be.
Seeing as so much of the AI Safety field turned out to be, in practice, simply ensuring the AI Overlord agrees with progressive dogma, I'd prefer to just let it rip at this point. I'll throw in with the /acc types and take my chances with Clippy over having these ideas be enshrined in the AI that will mold the thoughts and lives of future generations.
The corporate AI Safety teams may or may not be mostly this, but my neighbors working on AI safety are the real thing.
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Stable Diffusion 3 was announced today: https://stability.ai/news/stable-diffusion-3
Half the announcement talks about “safety.” This makes me sad.
Specially since Stable Diffusion's only advantage over Dall-E 3 and Midjourney v6 is being uncensored. Why the fuck would I go through the trouble of buying a GPU and downloading SD to my own machine if I can't use it to make pictures of Violent Sexy Hitler? Doubly so since SD models became non free software/open source; SDXL Turbo, Stable Video Diffusion, and Stable Cascade all require you to pay a monthly subscription fee to legally use them for commercial purposes, and Stability AI's stated intention is to do the same for all future model releases.
SD 2.1 sank because it was censored. I hope SD 3 fails, too, and the community continues to focus on SD 1.5 and SDXL, which are the libre and uncensored models (SDXL just got a nice boost in the form of SDXL-Lightning!).
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I have different but kind of parallel thoughts on this.
The first is in how the Left is critical of I'll say older standards of beauty and the "male-gaze" side of female sexualization. I won't say this as as categorical, but within the Left some do have a clear interest in putting characters in TV and film and also major studio video games who would not traditionally be considered attractive enough for mass media. In the Tolkien Rings of Power, the mightiest and fairest of the Elves remaining in Middle-Earth, Galadriel, is played by Morfyyd Clark. There are poor style choices here, keeping her pristine amidst battle would emphasize her otherworldliness. There is also an unfairness in comparing Clark, and almost any woman in Hollywood, to Cate Blanchett. But I seriously doubt casting took a hard pivot because they didn't even want to try competing with Blanchett. I am certain they had better options they forewent because Clark is "mid" for Hollywood. Film is full of more examples by the day; Halle Bailey would rightly be a model, she has incredibly striking features that would make her fashion advertising gold but she is so far on the "alien" side of model-alien-androgyny (as an aside, "androgynous", when you really evaluate those it describes, really just means "girlish") that ignoring other perceived issues with the film, the sharp features of her face hurt interest In The Little Mermaid. What helps I'm sure with Anya Taylor-Joy's success is not just her skill at picking roles in good films, but specifically films that benefit from a kind-of alien looking actor like herself.
In video games, there's Aloy in the Horizon series, Abby in TLOUP2, MJ in Insomniac's Spider-Man 2, and The Hero in Fable 4 (or Fable not-4, I don't know and I'm not bothering with the articles elaborating on it.) I think they accurately recreated the face model for Aloy, but in Fable, and I won't be surprised if there are changes, they made the character uglier than her model.
Given there is some political interest, and again I'm not painting with a wide brush, but given there is some clear interest in subversion of traditional beauty and traditional relationships, the most powerful content-producing AI couldn't produce subversive content on these lines because it isn't logically possible. If a person wants to look at beautiful women then ugly women, no matter how otherwise compelling the setting, won't light up those biological hardwires. If they want a story of that great man hero, "actually male heroes suck" in the most otherwise beautiful setting won't do anything for them. If they want a story with the traditional nuclear family, the great story around the queer poly cell isn't going to do anything for them. Of course harems might, and the terminal diagnosis for this poly fad is the most terrible return of the harem, but harem stories are eminently male-gaze, so that's not happening.
My other thought, my original thought, is on the technology. If the technology of AI-generated shows and films reaches the hands of the people, their cultural output will blot out the sun. The entertainment industry, in its current state, will be utterly incapable of competing in a world where random creatives can generate compelling television as quickly as they can write it. The Nolans, the Villeuneuves, the Mendeses, they'll still have success, but when John McCrae can put out himself Worm and Pact as shows, or when the many successful Royal Road writers can make shows of their works, or when some guy in his basement can produce Peter Jackson's Rise and Fall of Gondolin, when Orson Scott Card (who I hope will leap at the tech) can make adaptations of the Speaker and Shadows Saga. When fans in places western copyright law can't reach can use this to make a 100% book-accurate show of Harry Potter, Hollywood is fucking over.
Will they let this happen? I think Sora was the canary, the final warning. I think if they aren't having all-legal-hands 24/7 (in spirit if not actual) from now to Inauguration Day 2025 they too will have a terminal diagnosis. But I think, and I dearly pray, the tech will go too far too fast and it will reach the people before Hollywood even realizes they should be planning to stop it.
This is what I want - world building visionaries being fully able to build and share worlds.
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I'm trying to think a little more deeply about this. Geminis generation of nonsense because of the guardrails is essentially the tension of the Enlightenment ideals which the AI is springing up from and Postmodern ideas in critical theory, which I have hard time seeing how it can be reconciled. It is one of the ideas that I hold on to which I've trying describe but have a hard time crossing the "inferential distance". AI does not have a "lived experience" since it isn't living and what these people are trying to encode "lived experience" with these guardrails. They are trying to encode empathy into something that we are not like and failing in that they in demand encoding sympathy into a machine without emotions. There are no mirror neurons and there is no accurate theory of mind even if they try to claim it with emergent behavior of ingesting large amounts of text. So how is the machine supposed to know that someone would get hurt feelings by what it generates?
We are already here with human writers but the results aren't that good. They are supposed to create entertaining and compelling stories with these biases and failing miserably with a leg up on the machines of the human experience. Because it doesn't connect with the audiences human experience. I have a hard time seeing machines being able to connect with a large audience.
My great worry with AI is though that it is able to create behavior modification on an individual level and create the compulsion loops of addiction, since it doesn't require a theory of mind to trapping us in the loop. We have Youtube, Instagram and TikTok (and in some extent Reddit and Twitter/X) where it has happened. But it can't supplant our experience of reality and other people.
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The usual suspects are of course having a bit of fun with this one.
Maybe it's part of the prompt but the lighting on these is awful. They look like plastic action figures. Or like they're covered in vegetable oil and standing in front of a really harsh fluorescent light.
The "AI sheen" is frighteningly distinct. If you go onto NSFW imageboards, you'll notice it even in thumbnails. I hate how omnipresent it seems to be with AI images, I normally love seeing those kinds of lighting highlights in art, but I hate it now and it's kind of made me hate AI art in recent times. The associative negativity heaped onto AI art worked on me, I guess.
It's obnoxious if you're trying to get (mainstream) models to do anything without using style transfer or similar, since even if you want that sort of lighting highlights Gemini/Bard/Midjourney almost never get them right -- in this example, the rest of the shadows are too diffuse, but it's just as prone to have the highlights themselves be inconsistent.
I'm not sure if it's a result of ingested data (whether Pixar, a particular art style, or just ingest transcoding), or an upscaler involved somewhere on output, or what. Some of the furry models are better at avoiding it (esp if they don't have an NAI leak in their history), which just makes it weirder that it's so present for normal stuff.
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Maybe the dataset on 17th century kings is a bunch of paintings, so it gave a strange faux-painted look. But yeah, weird it added a bright white light reflecting off their shiny skin. Like just out of frame are a bunch of fluorescent bulbs.
And for some reason it gave them all a smarmy grin.
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Alternate timeline where Edward the Black Prince ascended to the throne.
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Oooh this is good trolling. The "you did this to yourself" aspect is very strong here, despite it being obvious that the poster is creating this combination on purpose, which is precisely the balance that a good troll creates.
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This is ahistorical. Back then they didn't have seedless watermelons.
Yeah, back a few centuries ago lots of foods were barely recognizable. Watermelons especially so.
https://www.christies.com/lot/lot-giovanni-stanchi-watermelons-peaches-pears-a-5765893/?
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Apart from the direct culture-war implications, it is interesting to me how much the Google engineers obviously don't want to ship anything. This feels like a "blink twice if you need help" moment, like they got the call from corporate that they need to take whatever they have and ship, so they slapped the laziest content filter possible.
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Quite right, I was going to make a similar post.
OpenAI seems to have already passed this easily noticeable tendency, Bing image-gen shoots out reasonably normal depictions of Germany or Sweden. Egregious Netflix-tier representation certainly used to be there, indeed it's still present in the prompt instructions for GPT-4. There's a distinction between GPT-4 and Bing image gen but I haven't heard many recent complaints about GPT-4 image gen.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1ahhlon/i_downloaded_my_chatgpt_user_data_and_found_the/
GPT-4 will still divert around wrongthink in text though, it's much more proficient and equivocating than Gemini. Offer it any kind of trolley problem and it will no longer go 'in no circumstances must the n-word ever be spoken, even if cities are incinerated' it will just fob you off with 'many people disagree about what's right according to different ethics'. If you ask whether people deserve self-determination (trying to trip it out re Israel/Palestine), it will say it's a really hard and contested issue. People got angry when it labelled opposition to the First Nations and Torres Strait Islanders Voice to Parliament as divisive, so I think they prevented it expressing that opinion. Yet it's still there, it just tries to be blander and not draw out headlines.
I reckon Google is still emotionally scarred after the whole black people monkeys facial recognition fiasco, so they tried hard to reach a SOTA level of diversity and inclusion.
I can never not laugh out loud when I remember this. Some dankest timeline stuff.
Didn't it start earlier, with the questionable search result predictions?
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(nitter links)
Are these broken for anyone else? I've heard nitter is dead due to API changes.
You can turn off the function that converts twitter links to nitter links in your user settings.
Ohhh, thank you! I didn't realize that was a setting.
Yep.
Although it should probably be turned off by default for everyone now.
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Not completely dead yet. Many instances have essentially died but some instances have resorted to directly using accounts for scraping and are buying in them in bulk. Of course, this is expensive as those accounts will eventually get banned sooner or later.
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Yes, one of the tragedies and injustices of our time is the lack of censorship towards the people pushing those false narratives, where the ideal would been to have a correcting world that people promoting falsehoods would lose their positions.
However, I disagree with your prediction. The centralization of power representing by woke A.I. is a GIGANTIC problem in itself. The A.I. safety crowd supports that and it is genuinely very naive and inversion of reality to expect rationalist crowd with influence there to help stop it, instead of help cause it. There isn't a rule they would attempt a more subtle method which rises to the level of Hollywood. They are going to reduce full 100% racial replacement immediately in A.I image generation, but I don't see any push for the A.I. to become subtle in its wokeness.
The only way forward that would stop this is for right wing goverment to criminalize this racist discrimination and the ideology it derives, and powerful organizations to blacklist it.
Which means strip of funding those who align with this ideology and necessitate they stand against it. This includes attempts by regulators to define noticing great replacement or opposing it as hate speech. Criminalize that criminalization, supress the limited hangout faction that tries to be sneaky in supporting this ideology and stop the accelerating far left tyranny which includes many people defining this uniparty which might claim to be centrist or conservative, falsely.
Stoping this would be more in line of justice and ironically for all their pretensions of antiracism, stopping the disrespect of white people and their rights is genuinely antiracist. And part of that would include condemning the moral bankruptcy of our weirdo bizzaro world definitions that anti racism is about the far leftists or ethnic chauvinists of Jewish, or black or whatever variety seeing their ethnic outgroup as having no rights as a group but only deserving to be atomized individuals, which would allow them as intended to be disrespected and replaced in all endeavors.
We live in an age of acceleration. Its like preaching before the Russian revolution that if you let the Bolsheviks take over by behaving with impotence, which is how the Russian elite behaved, you are going to get tragedy. What they propose and how far they are going to push things makes business as usual unlikely. So A.I. in its official use of the most major is going to be even worse than Hollywood. But we would also get some A.I. as with Gab that don't play by those rules.
However there is also a danger from far leftists (and others allied with this ideology who might not identify either to be subtle/subversive or for other reasons as far leftists) in power pushing more draconian laws that accelerates tyranny. And where tyranny of this nature is entrenched, something far nastier rises as a possibility as well of more deadly nature against the totalitarian's state's designed enemies.
Unfortunately, having been seduced and experienced a world with communism version one, rather than learning their lesson from history many world elites want to try and have gay race communism play out instead, and have history repeat it self like a farce.
Erm, I don’t think anybody holding significant amounts of power is looking to truly upset the current neoliberal capitalistic order.
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1st Ammendment.
Denying them funding and support is possible. But with Microsoft and Google driving these, they have all the funding and support needed.
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I think a good example of this is “Leave the World Behind”, the Obama-produced Netflix movie. The social dynamics are engineered in order to reduce the positive valence and social status of whites. This is accomplished through the following:
The nice, wealthy home where the white family and black family stay is owned by the black family. The white family is in disbelief, and the black guy brags to them about his board seat at the metropolitan opera. So immediately the white family is coded poorer and racist, and the black family coded socially superior. What’s interesting is that the viewer learns to associate Mahershala Ali’s phenotype with the highest social class. If I tried to pull that off with Chet Hanks, you would laugh at me, but the viewer learns to ignore his own learned and often accurate intuition about phenotypes because he is black, which affects a total increase in social status and positive valence for blacks.
The white husband is coded as a naive, easygoing guy; the black homeowner as wise, deliberate. The white husband’s wife flirts with the black homeowner. As an interesting aside, the first Netflix CEO and cofounder Marc Randolph is related to both Freud and Edward Bernays, the latter of which was an expert at changing the behavior of the masses through subtle psychological manipulation in imagery.
There is a curmudgeonly white conspiracy theorist who withholds giving medicine to a child in need. Because of course. Although he does change his mind in the movie, the overall sense is that he’s a bad person.
Something else interesting in the movie is that — in this Obama-produced, star-studded title — the enemy is a joint Iranian/Chinese invasion that starts by hacking the American grid.
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I just started playing around with Gemini... I would encourage others too and take screen shots. Looks like they did tweak it since last night and I was able to get a white guy first try when asking for a mid-evil knight without a helmet (I also got a topless Native American with a broadsword) and all white Vikings.
I was trying to generate a space marine and it started throwing a fit when I asked for more of the helmeted marine, not the one with pink hair. Apparently this was exclusionary language and not allowed.
Haven't been able to get an image of the First Thanksgiving.
Asked for an image of a pre-Colombian tribe, no racial diversity there but it did give a bunch of morbidly obese Indians.
Asking for images of people eating fired chicken sets off alarm bells but I did get it to create one and it did even have a black guy eating chicken among a racially and sexually diverse group.
So, I spent a solid week last month playing around with different models and constraints in Easy Diffusion, running locally, seeing what I could make it do. It was an interesting experience, and whatever jankiness I experienced was well worth not constantly being told what I was asking for was toxic or offensive. Frankly, the public models have such schizophrenic guard rails, and such insane neoliberal fantasy biases, it's difficult for me to imagine anyone getting anything worth while out of them. And Google is so late to the party on this one, what is even the point, besides launching another product nobody will use, which they will abandon in a year?
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There is definitely a worrisome idea I've played around with where at some point technology allows nigh-complete surveillance of the populace (not necessarily full control,) of every public movement, every financial transaction, and every piece of media consumed, and once the basic techs needed for this are available, whichever ideological group happens to be in power will then be impossible to remove.
So whichever ideological group happens to be in power when the proverbial 'music' stops wins that particular game of musical chairs.
I think that might at least partially explain why lefties absolutely LOSE THEIR SHIT at the idea of Trump (or any righty) ascending to the Presidency, as if somehow Trump happens to be at the helm when we hit the point of no return, they realize that they might not be able to remove him... ever... just because he happened to be the guy 'in charge' when the switch was flipped.
This assumes AI doesn't kill us all, however.
We lucked out that it wasn't the fascists who were in control, but I'd rather not have the current elites locked into power either.
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Per your ideology, what’s the difference between the compelling progressive images and films currently created by Hollywood and the same created by AI? It doesn’t seem to me that Sam Altman or Sundar Pichai are more progressive than Reed Hastings or Bob Iger or Dave Zaslav.
I suppose the argument might be that AI could be even better than Hollywood at making compelling content, but Hollywood seems good enough to propagate the California ideology already.
To be clear, the entertainment industry’s message for working class whites/red tribers is mostly not things right wing culture warriors complain about. The country music songs about how military service is awesome and having a family is worth being poor and even low status jobs are worth taking pride in come from the exact same entertainment industry as things like R&B. American Sniper was a major studio production.
I think the balance of evidence is, if we accept a priori that mainstream media is pushing an agenda as opposed to primarily a business, that the elites want a largely white peasantry, but also don’t really want those peasants to have much say. Sure, that’s worth complaining about from the perspective of a prospective peasant, but it’s not exactly white genocide.
I remember awhile back I was arguing with someone here who was denying that Knives Out, which entailed a Hispanic immigrant disinheriting a white family from their family house, was actually a celebration of demographic replacement. Even with the final shot of her holding a mug on the balcony that says "my house", looking down on the white family that lost their inheritance to her...
People love that movie! If Hollywood can create a movie that is fundamentally a celebration of the demographic replacement of White people, and people love it and applaud it, then AI will be able to do better. And good luck getting Gemini to create a compelling move or story that turns the tables on a story like this, it will just refuse to do so.
The ‘hero’ in the movie is Daniel Craig playing a white Southern gentleman. And the maid - Ana de Armas - is surely white unless you really take the ‘Africa begins at the Pyrenees’ definition. Her grandparents immigrated to Cuba from the north of Spain and her parents were part of the white upper class in the Cuban caste system (which persists, of course, even under communism).
/images/17085501930250692.webp
I think Rian Johnson did in the end consider making the hero of the story a white man a bit of a mistake, and the beginning of Glass Onion is partially an attempt to recitfy it.
(Blanc is revealed to be gay. So he's still whate, still male, but he's not all bad, see?)
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This is exactly what I'm talking about 2rafa, Hollywood films are sophisticated enough that someone like you can come along and say "you're being paranoid, look Daniel Craig is a hero of the film and he's white and likable, and the maid is white-passing."
Whereas with Gemini, they let the mask slip, you cannot doubt that the content is being directed to diminish the representation of white people in the prompts. Although eventually they will also improve the output such that people like you will be able to respond the same way- "no, no, there's no anti-White alignment here because this character who helps the POC win the inheritance is white, etc."
You may have forgotten scenes like this:
Of course, the final shot of the film is Marta looking down from the balcony with a mug that says "My House."
The casting of Marta is part of the subversive intelligence of the film. Marta is an avatar for demographic change. The fact they choose a white-passing upper-caste beautiful actress instead of, say, the median Guatemalan, is part of the intelligence of the film. You are more attracted to her, she is less foreign-appearing, she becomes the "face" of demographic change to the audience, which is directed to support her (and through the hero played by Daniel Craig). AI is going to employ similar techniques, and we already see it with the images Gemini is rendering. And when they get batter at it, you are going to say "that's not the message of the film, look at how the white character helps the POC win the day at the end! No subversion here!"
I’m not accusing you of being paranoid and I largely agree with your original point. Knives Out is a progressive propaganda movie, but it’s on the basis of class rather than race. The family don’t have their unearned wealth because they’re white (they’re not descendants of slaveowners or something) but because of their mystery novelist father’s capitalist success. The message of the movie is that the son does not deserve the wealth of the father, that inheritance is inherently unjust, that the generational transfer of wealth is not just arbitrary but unfair and must be corrected. Sure, there’s some progressive waffle about immigration and race and the alt right son, though that’s largely played for laughs in front of a progressive audience. But the core of the message is essentially Occupy Wall Street, Wealth Tax Now. There have always been white hispanics in Hollywood, but I can’t imagine someone’s aesthetic sympathy for Mayans is improved by the casting of a Spanish actress in this movie; most Americans encounter illegal migrants at least somewhat regularly; they don’t look like Ana de Armas.
I think if every movie and TV show depicts hispanic migrants as attractive, intelligent, caring etc. that people will pick up on that and be influenced by it even if it doesn't match with what they see in their every day lives. Most people in the Soviet Union knew factory workers and they didn't look like the 10/10 on the propaganda poster. Of course that was laughably primitive compared to what Hollywood can do but the principle still holds.
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The actress may be one thing, but the character is another.
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I really didn't like Knives Out because of how simplistic the plot felt to me. I never really thought about race in that movie. But I've heard someone say they liked that you could tell if someone is racist because they've disliked that movie. It broke my brain enough (and I was basically "outing" myself as a racist if I questioned this) that I didn't try to get any elaboration.
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Hollywood and the News Media are text-to-video super-organisms broadly aligned to critique and subvert White identity and civilization. This is a transition in methods, a peek behind the curtain of what is already happening, and always has happened, and always will formulate collective consciousness and the human hive-mind perception of reality: through images, myths, stories, and symbols generated by some and transmitted to others.
AI will do this even better under some scenarios that involve monopolization of the technology and regulations/industry standards that codify "AI Safety" which, as expected, is turning out to be more about anti-White alignment than saving the world from extinction (that's a nice trick, isn't it?). And yes, AI will likely do a good job of creating more compelling and basically-infinite content that tunes the culture than Hollywood schlock which, though it has been highly effective as you point out, is running out of ideas and is expensive to produce.
AI will be intelligent enough to subvert or block prompts that would oppose its own alignment, similar to how Hollywood producers can blacklist or otherwise refuse to finance content that runs afoul of its alignment. It is a sophistication of what is already happening, whereas the vast majority of people (although increasingly fewer) will dismiss you as a kook for identifying the anti-White alignment of Hollywood and the Media apparatus, Gemini lets the mask slip way too much because it isn't sufficiently refined.
On the other hand, AI presents the possibility of cheaply generating compelling and truly subversive content, equalizing the playing field. This is what "AI Safety" is going to work actively to oppose.
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Exactly. AI is just the status quo in media for the last 20 years, done clumsily and without knowing it's suppose to be lying about it. It's why the cutoff for the media my wife and I are willing to expose our daughter to is the 90's. But the older the better. I've been buying up hard copies of classic books or movies I fear will be targeted for Bowdlerization or outright censorship. I joke about building a secret contraband chamber ala Equilibrium or Fahrenheit 451, but a part of me puts odds that I may actually see myself doing that in my lifetime.
I've often daydreamed about creating some kind of master list of what would need to go in here. I've never seen anyone's personal list, but I would really like to.
Anything I see modern reviewers complain is "toxic" end up on my "to buy" list. Conan, John Carter, Lovecraft, you name it. Lately I've been grabbing some Russian literature because of our hysteria towards anything Russian. I decided I needed a hard copy of the Lord of the Rings movies, because it's possibly the greatest movie trilogy of all time, and also because current-year proselytizers have felt the need to constantly bleat on about how it needs to be "updated for modern audiences". Oh, I grabbed some Frank Frazetta art books too, for obvious reasons. I want to stock up on some history books before all of history gets rewritten to be fake and gay.
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I think that would be an excellent thread, maybe in one of the Friday Fun Threads. I feel like that’s come up before, though, either here or on DSL (or maybe even on SSC). If someone could find an earlier discussion, that would provide a great starting point.
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