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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   15952 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 5, 2025

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I recognize this is a bit pithy, but "If only there were a genre of fiction regarding how humans interact with technology to consider the moral and ethical implications of current-year AI as applied to human civilization, specifically how it impacts creators and consumers in these sorts of cases." Sci-Fi a weird genre to have effectively adopted neo-Luddite tendencies.

I think there are probably some interesting ideas to explore. "The dialog for the ship's computer was generated entirely by ChatGPT, which is why it uses 'delve' and em-dashes (verbally!) and won't shut up. At some point the characters end up on a different, older vessel whose computer is hellishly inspired by Clippy: 'It looks like you're trying to land this thing!' at only peripherally appropriate times." Show how these tools are helpful -- or not helpful -- to the broader human condition. Does viable alignment even exist? Have a congenitally blind person talk to an AI about what color means to two different things with vastly different exposure to the concept.

I've noticed that all the "real" AI/robot characters in fiction very explicitly DON'T talk like LLMs or clippy. They use fewer words, not more, and come off as cryptic, sarcastic, or earnest. "Johnny5 alive!" "I am not a gun." "I know now why you cry." "Just something from a movie I like." "I'm coming with you too. Cassian said I had to."

Sci-Fi a weird genre to have effectively adopted neo-Luddite tendencies.

Surely this has been a powerful theme in science fiction for well over half a century?

Science fiction authors, or at least classic science fiction authors, have been asking "What if AI are bad?" for a very long time, and while I could easily make a list of classic SF stories with pro-AI or pro-robot messages, the list with anti-AI or anti-robot messages is very long too.

As such I would intuitively expect SF fans to be more likely to have strong feelings in both directions, both strongly pro and strongly anti.

(Disclaimer: I do feel some hesitation in describing WorldCon attendees and the current crop of Hugo voters as 'SF fans'.)

I think there are probably some interesting ideas to explore. "The dialog for the ship's computer was generated entirely by ChatGPT, which is why it uses 'delve' and em-dashes (verbally!) and won't shut up. At some point the characters end up on a different, older vessel whose computer is hellishly inspired by Clippy: 'It looks like you're trying to land this thing!' at only peripherally appropriate times."

Douglas Adams’ GPP robots from the Sirius cybernetics corporation and Marvin the paranoid android surely qualify.

And interestingly, one of Douglas Adams' last projects was Starship Titanic, which was arguably the first game to have "chatbot" NPCs - in 1998! Obviously they didn't work very well, but the game's ambition was very ahead of its time.

em-dashes

This is not relevant to the larger discussion here, but I truly hate that em dashes have become a potential signifier of AI slop. I love em dashes! They’re not a mere substitute for parentheses or commas or semicolons, they’re a useful punctuation mark in their own right — they break up a sentence in a unique way, creating a certain flow that other punctuation doesn’t replicate. I used them all the time for essays in school and college, and I still use them in reports for work.

It galls me that a piece of my personal writing style has been co-opted years later by a robot, and now the robot gets all the credit for it.

Wait, I've not heard this one - does ChatGPT garbage use dashes the way I just did?

Are LLMs using my own writing style?

Fuck, I love using those, too. I hate that AI's co-opted it.

You may not be old enough to pull this off, but you can always claim "I'm a Mac user, not a robot dammit" -- the ability to insert em dashes (along with other typographical flourishes) was kind of a big cleavage point between the creative different-thinkers and the sweaty geeks/corporate drones going back to the 80s.

This claim will be more credible if you format everything in Garamond Narrow.

I believe LibreOffice/OpenOffice's Word equivalent can do em-dashes, too, if you type -- and another word right after it.

Yeah I'm a little too young to sell that one, lol. Although, funny enough, my family computer growing up was a Mac...

It helps if you have a bookshelf like this:

https://preview.redd.it/5w31lki43nt41.jpg?width=737&auto=webp&s=38428adb02ff5e5520e194cb18248c1f9d64dce1

(@MadMonzer as well -- the corporate drudges graphic designers were probably big Mac Users too!)

I've only came across Garamond in the context of soulless corporate drudgery (specifically, it was the official serif font of the old Shell before it got caught in a reserves mis-representation scandal in 2004 and was forced to become a more normal company).

Apple used to use a bespoke variant called "Apple Garamond" in all their marketing material. It's not quite the same as ITC Garamond Narrow but close enough.

Sci-Fi a weird genre to have effectively adopted neo-Luddite tendencies.

And yet SF has always had a notable technophobic element. It's less weird when you consider that a 'cautionary tale' is necessarily going to be SF even if the author thinks everything after the typewriter was a mistake.

Sci-Fi a weird genre to have effectively adopted neo-Luddite tendencies.

Not all of sci-fi, just the part taken over by white leftist yanks and their copycats in other parts of the world. The anti-AI rhetoric is due to the ideology of the people involved, not the nature of the genre of which they are a small part, at best a plurality.

The entire mil-SF genre is I believe completely unaffected by it and so are most people publishing outside of the well-defended legacy ghetto.

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