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PaperclipPerfector  9hr ago (text post)   1828 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 9, 2025

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We're All Sitcom Characters Now

If you've ever watched a successful long running sitcom, you've seen it happen. The characters start out mostly normal with a quirk or two. Maybe a little neurotic, or slow, or promiscuous. Four seasons in and the characters have all become deranged parodies of themselves. All their most entertaining qualities have been heightened, everything relatable or normal has been squeezed out. The character that was a little slow is now a straight up drooling retard. The promiscuous character obsessively fucks everything that moves. The neurotic character is only a step removed from Howard Hughes in his final days. You watch the last episode and the first episode of a sitcom, and you'll barely recognize the characters.

It's obvious why it happens though. The writers and actors give the audiences what they want. Sitcoms are (or were?) a cuttroat business. There was little room for artistic integrity, vision, or any other high minded concepts. Give the audiences what they want, or they'll change the channel and the show will be cancelled. Just shut up and do it!

I regret to inform you that we are all on a sitcom now. Everyone is enmeshed with an attention economy. Be it farming engagement on twitter, or upvotes on a reddit clone. And unlike actors who only have to inhabit their roles for hours a day, for a shooting schedule that might be weeks or months out of a year, those enmeshed in the attention economy must be in character 24/7. On social media, on streaming, on podcast, on youtube, all at once, all the time.

Some have whole heartedly embraced this. Twitter is full of people being characters, allowing the algorithm or engagement to tweak the dials on their personality. Like a second subconscious that lives in the cloud. Catgirl Kulak comes to mind. He's out there using an AI catgirl as an avatar, staying more and more in character as some sort of neo pagan feral/trad nordic catgirl with hot takes. It's a dangerous game he's playing, existing more and more in a fictional role. But there are others. The preposterous performative pro-Elon or pro-Trump nonsense I saw and tried to avoid on twitter this last week was really something. Twitter super users who've built their brand on being staunch partisans like Catturd out there acting like absolute charicatures of themselves. They're just sitcom characters anymore, and rapidly approaching the braindeath of the latter seasons. Others I don't think fully understand what was happening to them. I wonder how much upvote driven personality disorders had to do with certain flameouts here.

Because eventually every sitcom hits the wall. The characters have been intellectually and emotionally abused and lobotomized to such a point where there is no humanity left in them to ritualistically beat out for the amusement of the audience. It gets it's final season where the writers attempt to rehabilitate them just enough to send them off into the sunset.

There are no writers to rehabilitate you when the algorithm is done with you, and you've lived inside a cartoonish and horrifying version of yourself for attention for years on end.

I had a personal experience almost turning into one of these sitcom characters. The pull is bizarrely tempting.

A little before the election I made a deadpan joke about a domestic annoyance that was completely misinterpreted and then quote tweeted by a major culture warrior. I got so much insane negative attention from that. Death threats. People following me around the Internet leaving shitty comments. Even phone calls of people threatening me.

It got so tense I was looking out my front window regularly and making sure I had my gun nearby whenever I went.

And then it subsided and I was relieved, but a major recurring thought since then has been "I should troll these fucking idiots again. Maybe I can make some money off of this"

I don't. But I can see how if I had a different temperament this would be totally irresistible.

Personally, I don't even remotely enjoy juggling around a zillion different names (IRL, ToaKraka, a single-purpose name that needs to be active only on certain rare occasions, a single-purpose name that used to be active but now is inactive due to my lack of energy/willpower, a few single-purpose names that are inactive but can be used if necessary…), and I wish that I could just operate under a single unified identity. But I feel like your analysis goes too far. None of my pseudonyms tries to project a unique personality. They speak with exactly the same personality—just on different topics. Your analysis applies, not to "everyone", but only to those public figures who actually try to project unique personalities on social media.

Also, you forgot to link to the definition of "becoming a deranged parody of oneself", flanderization.

I'm reminded of Demolition Ranch.

For those not aware of the name, Demolition Ranch is a guntuber who's been doing gun-tubing for quite a while, and recently stopped to focus on his family.

People have commented on how his later content diverged quite a bit from his early stuff, with sensationalist activities and click-baity titles and zany video cards.

When questioned about that, he basically replied that what was getting the most view count, hence the pivot. In other words, that's what getting him the money.

The attention and engagement economy, it seems, says alot about what the mass of humanity demands.

If there's one thing I have always and forever refused to do, its falsify my personality or my preferences.

I won't give something a 'like' on any social media site unless it is actually content I would genuinely prefer to see more of. I hand out dislikes liberally when it is even an option when I encounter things I would really rather never see again.

I will adjust my rhetoric to account for an audience's tolerances for controversy, but I won't shift the message itself.

I have literally never stated a position on an issue that I wasn't prepared to at least half-heartedly defend. I try to state my positions on any issue with as much clarity and precision as can be mustered with the English language.

And I do hope my reward is that whatever AI-Algorithm God arises will not have to guess at my preferences and utility function and will thus be able to give me an experience that is very closely optimized for the things that I truly enjoy, and not just the things I pretended to enjoy to fit in or to trick onlookers into thinking I am at all different than what I am. If the GodGPT looks across the entire history of my internet usage, and sees what type of youtube content I liked, the type of subreddits I subscribed to, the arguments I got into, the songs I played, the films I rated highly (and low), the type of people I interacted with, going back for decades now, I think it'll have an easy time figuring out what type of world to stick me in to win my hedonic approval.

Like, many actors seem to get very frustrated when they get pigeonholed into playing a single popular role for years and years on end, or typecast into the same types of roles over the whole career. Imagine how bad it would be for a nigh-omnipotent computer deity to feed you up horrible slop content for the rest of your life because you kept pretending to like [popular thing] for so long that your entire digital footprint suggested that it was your favorite type of content ever.

The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human experi­ence, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the Greek word narcosis, or numb­ness. The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perceptions until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system.

Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated by any extension of themselves in any ma­terial other than themselves. There have been cynics who insisted that men fall deep­est in love with women who give them back their own image. Be that as it may, the wisdom of the Narcissus myth does not convey any idea that Narcissus fell in love with anything he regarded as himself. Obviously he would have had very different feelings about the image had he known it was an extension or repetition of himself. It is, perhaps, indicative of the bias of our intensely technological and, therefore, narcotic culture that we have long interpreted the Narcissus story to mean that he fell in love with himself, that he imagined the reflection to be Narcissus! Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man 1964

Those who engage in this projection of their identity out on social media are narcissists plain and simple. The feedback they receive have none of the corrective mechanisms since that would reduce the use of the media, so there is an obsession by the platform too soothe and allow sycophancy to further lull in a narcotic state while allowing the further projection of their aspirational identity which they love. They aren’t in love with themselves they are in love with the identity they project on the world. Which in my view is a worthwhile distinction.

It is also worth noting projection out on the media isn’t strictly necessary. This state can be also achieved with watching content that “educates” like self-help, health and so on where simple act of consuming of the media fuels a narcissistic self-image which under no circumstances can be manifested in the real world since that would it would shatter the projection.

The first step towards walking in h spiritual path is reducing stimulus substantially. Luke Smith release a good video on this perspective yesterday. A massive reduction and replacing your internet culture war usage beyond this place with long form texts would make life much better.

My mannerisms resemble shock jocks, when I sparred, my movements looked like a worse version of the fighters I liked. People need to unplug, many people crystalise permanently and that's not where I want to be. The single worst conversation of my life was with an ssc reading rationalist who made ssc his emtier personality. Now ssc is the single highest iq place median iq wise like themotte or maybe hackernews. I hated every second of it and wished I never met the guy. If I meet anyone from this place offline, I'll not bring up culture war things or anything internet related.

Great post op. Approved!

If you think about Kulak, through, the character has gone through shifts. There was the ancap personality on this forum and - I think - the early days of the Twitter account, then the more fashy type of persona, now the same but with a strong pagan/anti-Christian component. Audiences shift and so do the characters.

You can just... not engage with most of that? There are places like Substack and this site that don't sort by popularity. You can also curate your feed to make the algorithmic sites useful. I use Twitter/X to keep up with bloggers I know, and Reddit is useful for AI updates and video game discussions. Youtube can be almost anything you want it to be as long as you subscribe to the things you like and don't subscribe to things you don't like. Just get off /r/all and Tiktok.

True, but in many cases you will have to actively fight the algorithm's attempt to get you to partake in whatever drivel is popular with everyone else, and watch out for its attempts to sneak in ads or other content that someone is paying to put in front of your eyes.

Twitter is full of people being characters, allowing the algorithm or engagement to tweak the dials on their personality. Like a second subconscious that lives in the cloud.

I may elaborate on this in another post, but even assuming zero participation in social media, the algorithm is always listening. Often directly through apps on your cell phone, and indirectly from every link you click, video you watch, search you make, how long your eyes linger on something while you scroll. The degree to which a crude homunculus of yourself is being constructed in the cloud, whispering to you through your screen on the margins of every page you visit is horrifying. It was not a rhetorical flourish to describe it as a second subconscious. I absolutely believe that.

Yeah. Fact is that any device that with an internet connection is likely trying to nudge or otherwise cater to you in a way that will get you to alter your behavior, spend money, or even just cough up more information that they think they can use to sell you stuff.

And every time you give in it gets just a little better at predicting/manipulating you.

I like my Alexa devices, but the occasional attempt to say "hey we noticed you liked [X], just say the word and I'll charge you for [Z]!" sometimes make me want to send them off to the Bitcoin mines forever.

I've already precommitted to ignoring any attempts by a smart device to sell me on something I wasn't already intending to buy, unless it can send a big breasted brunette in a bikini to my front door to make the sale. Any marketing experts who are tapping into my motte account can take that as gospel truth and act on it as they see fit.

A world without color under the rainbow

Well, it’s pride month (Grammarly suggests capitalizing Pride here...)! Again. I rolled out of bed last week to a saccharine salvo of big brand bullshit. That, and smug condescension from the women I know on Instagram “wishing homophobes an uncomfortable month”.

When the gay marriage movement really kicked up steam in the early 00’s, I was always a bit perturbed by the use of a rainbow. I’ve always been a fetishist for color - my first attempts at building user interfaces somehow became unusable clown vomit because of it - and so a single group monopolizing literally every hue of light at the same time seemed like a bit much. But I was a good lefty-libertarian and didn’t complain.

I tried to drag this board into a conversation about cars. I won’t make that mistake again, but a point of discussion centered around all of them being way less colorful than they used to be.. If you take a look at a graph you can see that things really started getting “Super Fucking Lame” right about 2007. Don’t worry, the problem’s gotten worse: 78% of all cars sold today are a neutral color.

It wasn’t just vehicles, though. At almost the exact same time, Millennials began making everything grey..

Meanwhile, woke discourse has been (was?) on a tear in mainstream media institutions:

A clear trend of increasing prevalence of prejudice related terms is apparent with words such as racist or sexist increasing in usage between 2010 and 2019 by 638% and 403% in The New York Times or 514% and 141% respectively in The Washington Post.

If you ask a politically correct LLM about why everything is lame, it will suggest that we’re this way because of “economic uncertainty” or social media. Others will say something vague like resale value.

If I know anything about anything, it’s that correlation is causation. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a wave of rainbows and the unrelenting drumbeat of intersectionality has, in many ways, relied on the dilution of color everywhere else. How else can you shove it in the world’s face? A coffee shop already full of colorful whimsy would be burying v99.0 of the LGBTQIA+ flag. It’s only through the clash of it with the drab whites and browns of an espresso machine that a message can be sent. At least the latest revision inoculates itself against good taste pretty well. The clashing racial bars and two spirit circle make it hideous on its own.

The death of peak woke is… probably overestimated. But even my blackpill soul feels some sort of vibe shift. Dare I hope for color to make a comeback?

it will suggest that we’re this way because of “economic uncertainty” or social media. Others will say something vague like resale value.

If I can't afford to repaint something soon if I don't like it, I'm going to take the safer option where I have a higher chance of accepting it, or accepting it over a longer timeframe.

If I can afford to do that more often, I can afford to take a chance at something a bit more... out there. If I don't like it, I trust I can fix it later.

Look, I made this point in last week’s thread- people yearn for totalisation. LGBT co-opted the rainbow from God’s promise not to destroy the world again, they co-opted sacred heart month, etc, etc, because that’s just what they do.

Everything getting greyer is less to do with gay activists and more to do with society, in general, not loving bright colors everywhere. I blame autism increasing, but it could also just be fashion trends- the generation for whom being able to make everything bright colours was a novelty is still dying.

they co-opted sacred heart month

This feels slightly paranoid. There are only twelve months in the year and whichever one you chose you could be accused of co-opting something. The Sacred Heart month is also a strange choice to try to co-opt as an act of totalisation because it has almost no cultural currency in the Anglosphere except maybe within American Catholic communities; in fact it it's relevance is fast becoming exclusively as a counter-signal.

Apparently the rainbow was co-opted mostly from the hippies:

"A close friend of Baker's, independent filmmaker Arthur J. Bressan Jr., pressed him to create a new symbol at "the dawn of a new gay consciousness and freedom".[11] According to a profile published in the Bay Area Reporter in 1985, Baker "chose the rainbow motif because of its associations with the hippie movement of the Sixties but he notes that the use of the design dates all the way back to ancient Egypt".[12] People have speculated that Baker was inspired by the Judy Garland song "Over the Rainbow" (Garland being among the first gay icons),[13][14] but when asked, Baker said that it was "more about the Rolling Stones and their song 'She's a Rainbow'".[15] Baker was likely influenced by the "Brotherhood Flag" (with five horizontal stripes to represent different races: red, white, brown, yellow, and black) popular among the world peace movement and hippie movement of the 1960s.[16][17][18][19]"

This seems credible, considering this was somewhat after the Rainbow Family of Living Light had started organizing the still-happening Rainbow Gatherings. I didn't manage to find an explanation of where the hippies took the rainbow from, but the rainbow Peace Flag and the general colorfulness induced by LSD probably play a large influence.

I’m willing to believe it. My point was to draw attention to the totalizing nature of LGBT ideology(down to cradle members and converts) through comparison to Christianity.

I'll argue (and have long argued) that it's something upstream; the direction of causality is pointing from a common source. There's a pretty wide variety of spheres where millenial-focused media is absolutely bright-colored, especially where designs and decisions come from the grassroots.

There are a lot of things to complain about in Helluva Boss (cw: lots of profanity, some sexual 'humour') or Brand New Animal, but they're not grey or even My Little Pony-pastel. Look at MMORPGs and going from the most conventional subscription model like FFXIV to the most gatcha-like Genshin they've only gotten brighter over the last decade even as they've increasingly targeted the same demographics. The furry fandom overwhelmingly favors bright and high-constrast to the point where there's a term for hitting it too hard and the bar is high (cw: extremely bad bad color selection). Even the artists who do focus on the greys have a lot more soul than corporate metis. Go into Blue Tribe heavy spaces, and the corporate grey laptops are spangled with every sticker cause celebre available.

But if you're putting tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line, you paint your house grey. Nonconfrontational uber alles, in the most literal sense.

There's an optimistic story where the growth of spaces to be maximally yourself have lead to a cleaner division between the personal and the public (well, optimistic until you poke at it), and a pessimistic story where we just banned everything and ignored the consequences.

But I think there's a more cynical one: everything adds up to normal, and this is the local maxima.

Chalky, grey-ish pastels are a neutral 'chameleon' color that reflects and attenuate to whatever you put up against it. This allows for ease of decoration when it comes to styling a room without having to worry about extreme color scheme clashes - most people focus on these colors to allow for re-sell value in their houses.

Fun aside, when my parents had to re-paint their entire house for reasons, I was the one pushing my mother for more vibrant, intense colors as opposed to said chalky, grey pastels. She had developed a bad habit of constantly repainting rooms in a succession of ever-worsening colors.

Except for one room, which she never touched - the kitchen, which was done up in a warm, rich, pumpkin-like orange.

After a long spate of harassment(and more color samples than I will confess to - Lowes should have been giving me a commission, geeze), I finally convinced her to go with the richer, warmer colors, and she no longer repaints rooms.

Color isn't making a comeback any time soon, for the same reason that wallpaper and wall-to-wall carpeting aren't making comebacks any time soon. Millennials are old enough to remember to eerie feeling of walking into a house that hadn't been updated since 1977 that had orange carpeting in one room and yellow wallpaper in another and harvest gold kitchen appliances on top of a fake brick linoleum floor. We're old enough to remember bathrooms with pink tile and no one thinking this was something that needed to be changed. It didn't help that these houses invariably smelled like cat piss and cigarette smoke. When people started tearing this shit out in the 90s, everything seemed so much cleaner, even if the result would still be dated by today's standards. It also didn't help that all of this stuff was deteriorating by the time we saw it, so it didn't have the same look that a recreation or picture in a magazine has today. This isn't to say that nobody uses color, but it's really easy to fuck up if you don't know what you're doing. When I was in college a lot of people convinced their landlords to let them paint and a lot of times they'd pick something really bold that wasn't pleasant to be in for long, and it looked like the color was chosen by a college student.

The hopeful thing is how many big corps are no longer funding parades around the place (even over here). There's been a drop in sponsorship and some griping about it (and of course blaming Trump for anti-DEI). Maybe that indicates that some of the rainbow bullshit will not be as prevalent in future, because it was never about principle, rather what made good sense for PR. Now that it's not as profitable, they're not spending money on it.

If you take a look at a graph you can see that things really started getting “Super Fucking Lame” right about 2007

That's not what I see. I see it starting in 1997 and peaking around 2012.

I think it depends on where you'd put Silver on the cool vs lame scale, but I'd agree it'd be more correct to say that things hit their Apex.

I have seen the AGI, and it is Gemini 2.5 Pro

If you go and look at Metaculus you’ll see that regardless of the recent breakthroughs like VEO3 and OpenAI’s “Ghiblification” (probably the first AI image system where accusing the outputs of being “slop” makes the accuser look unreasonable rather than denigrates the picture itself) all the “when AGI?” benchmarks have been uncharacteristically stubborn. The question asking about “weak” AGI has gone nowhere for two weeks months while the median prediction on the question about full AGI has receded three years from 2031 to 2034.

It looks like Scott’s AGI 2027 push has failed to convince the markets. For the informed person, AGI is coming “soon” but isn’t imminent. However I think that actually AGI is already here, is freely available to anyone with an internet connection and is called Gemini 2.5 Pro.

For those of us not in the know, at the moment you can access Gemini 2.5 Pro for free with no limits on Google’s AI studio right here: https://aistudio.google.com/prompts/new_chat ; yep, you heard that right, the literal best text model in the world according to the lmarena.ai leaderboard is available for free with no limits and plenty of customisation options too. They’re planning on connecting AI studio access to an API key soon so go and try it out for free right now while you can. No need to overpay for ChatGPT pro when you can use AI studio, and it’s a lot lot better than the Gemini you get via the dedicated app/webpage.

Our story begins a few days ago when I was expecting delivery of a bunch of antique chinese hand scroll paintings I had purchased. Following standard Chinese tradition where collectors would add their own personal seal in red ink to the work and seeing as these scrolls already had a bunch of other seal glyphs I wanted to add my own mark too. The only issue was that I didn’t have one.

This led to a rabbit hole where I spent a good portion of my Saturday learning about the different types of Chinese writing all the way from oracle bone script to modern simplified script and the different types of stones from which seal were made. Eventually after hours of research I decided I wanted a seal made from Shoushan stone written in Zhuànshū script. That was the easy part.

The real difficulty came in translating my name into Chinese. I, with a distinctly non Chinese name, don’t have an easy way to translate the sounds of my name into Chinese characters, which is made all the harder by the fact that pretty much all Chinese syllables end in a vowel (learning this involved even more background reading) even though my name has non-vowel ending syllables. Furthermore, as a mere mortal and not a Son of Heaven with a grand imperial seal, decorum dictated that my personal mark be only 4 characters and around 2cm*2cm, enough to be present but not prominent on the scroll.

All this led to further constraints on the characters to be put on my seal, they couldn’t be so complex that carving them on a small seal would be impossible, and yet I needed to get my name and surname as accurately onto it as possible. Naturally this involved a lot of trial and error and I think I tried over 100 different combinations before coming up with something that sort of (but not completely) worked.

There was one syllable for which I could not find any good Chinese match and after trying and rejecting about a dozen different choices I threw my hands up and decided to consult Gemini. It thought for about 15 seconds and immediately gave me an answer that was superior to literally everything I had tried before phonetically, however unfortunately was too complex for a small seal (it wouldn’t render on the website I was buying the seal from).

I told Gemini about my problem and hey ho, 15 seconds later another character, this time graphically much simpler but sounding (to my non-Chinese ears) exactly the same was present and this actually rendered properly. The trial and error system I was using didn’t even have this particular character as an option so no wonder I hadn’t found it. It also of its own volition asked me whether I wanted to give it my full name so it could give me characters for that. I obliged and, yes, its output mostly matched what I had but was even better for one of the other syllables.

I was honestly very impressed. This was no mean feat because it wasn’t just translating my name into Chinese characters but rather translating it into precisely 4 characters that are typographically simple enough to carve onto a small seal, and with just a few seconds of thought it had managed to do something that had taken me many hours of research with external aids and its answer was better than what I had come up with myself.

All this had involved quite a bit of back and forth with the model so out of curiosity at seeing how good it was at complex multi step tasks given in a single instruction I opened up a fresh chat and gave it 2-3 lines explaining my situation (need seal for marking artworks in my collection). Now I’m an AI believer so I thought it would be good enough to solve the problem, which it absolutely did (as well as giving me lots of good unprompted advice on the type of script and stone to use, which matched my earlier research) but it also pointed out that by tradition only the artist themselves mark the work with their full name, while collectors usually include the letter 藏 meaning “collection”.

It told me that it would be a Faux Pas to mark the artworks with just my name as that might imply I was the creator. Instead it gave me a 4 letter seal ending in 藏 where the first three letters sounded like my name. This was something that I hadn’t clocked at all in my hours of background reading and the absolute last thing I would ever want is to look like an uncultured swine poseur when showing the scrolls to someone who could actually read Chinese.

In the end the simple high level instruction to the AI gave me better final results than either me on my own or even me trying to guide the AI… It also prevented a potential big faux pas that I could have gone my whole life without realizing.

It reminded me of the old maxim that when you’re stuck on a task and contacting a SysAdmin you should tell them what your overall goal is rather than asking for a solution to the exact thing you’re stuck on because often there’s a better way to solve your big problem you’ve overlooked. In much the same way, the AI of 2025 has become good enough that you should just tell it your problem rather than ask for help when you get stuck.

Now yes, impressive performance on a single task doesn’t make AGI, that requires a bit more. However its excellent performance on the multilingual constrained translation task and general versatility across the tasks I’ve been using it for for the last few weeks (It’s now my AI of choice) means I see it as a full peer to the computer in Star Trek etc. It’s also completely multimodal these days, meaning I can (and have) just input random PDFs etc. or give it links to Youtube videos and it’ll process them no different to how a human would (but much faster). Funny how of all the futuristic tech in the Star Trek world, this is what humanity actually develops first…

Just last week I’d been talking to a guy who was preparing to sit the Oxford All Souls fellowship exam. These are a highly gruelling set of exams that All Souls College Oxford uses to elect two fellows each year out of a field of around 150. The candidates are normally humanities students who are nearing the end of their PhD/recently graduated. You can see examples of the questions e.g. the History students get asked here.

However the most unique and storied part of the fellowship exam (now sadly gone) was the single word essay. For this, candidates were given a card with a single word on it and then they had three hours to write “not more than six sides of paper” in response to that prompt. What better way to try out Gemini than give it a single word and see how well it is able to respond to it? Besides, back in 2023 Nathan Robinson (or Current Affairs fame) tried doing something very similar with ChatGPT on the questions from the general paper and it gave basically the worst answers in the world so we have something to compare with and marvel at how much tech has advanced in two short years.

In a reply to this post I’m pasting the exact prompt I used and the exact, unedited answer Gemini gave. Other than cranking up the temperature to 2 no other changes from the default settings were made. This is a one-shot answer so it’s not like I’m getting it to write multiple answers and selecting the best one, it’s literally the first output. I don’t know whether the answer is good enough to get Gemini 2.5 Pro elected All Souls Fellow, but it most certainly is a damn sight better than the essay I would have written, which is not something that could be said about the 2023 ChatGPT answers in the link above. It also passes for human written across all the major “AI detectors”. You should see the words and judge for yourself. Perhaps even compare this post, written by me, with the output of the AI and honestly ask yourself which you prefer?

Overall Gemini 2.5 Pro is an amazing writer and able to handle input and output no different to how a human would. The only thing missing is a corporeal presence but other than that if you showed what we have out there today to someone in the year 2005 they would absolutely agree that it is an Artificial General Intelligence under any reasonable definition of AGI. It’s only because of all the goalpost moving over the last few years that people have slowly become desensitized to chatbots that pass the Turing test.

So what can’t these systems do today? Well, for one they can’t faithfully imitate the BurdensomeCount™ style. I fed Gemini 2.5 Pro a copy of every single comment I’ve ever made here and gave it the title of this post, then asked it to generate the rest of the text. I think I did this over 10 times and not a single one of those times did the result pass the rigorous QC process I apply to all writing published under the BurdensomeCount™ name (the highest standards are maintained and only the best output is deemed worthy for your eyes, dear reader). Once or twice there were some interesting rhetorical flourishes I might integrate into future posts but no paragraph (or larger) sized structures fit to print as is. I guess I am safe from the AI yet.

In a way all this reminds me of the difference between competition coding and real life coding. At the moment the top systems are all able to hit benchmarks like “30th best coder in the world” etc. without too much difficulty but they are still nowhere near autonomous for the sorts of tasks a typical programmer works with on a daily basis managing large codebases etc.. Sure, when it comes to bite sized chunks of writing the AI is hard to beat, but when you start talking about a voice and a style built up over years of experience and refinement, well, that is lacking…

In the end, this last limitation might be the most humanizing thing about it. While Gemini 2.5 Pro can operate as an expert Sinologist, a cultural advisor, and a budding humanities scholar, it cannot yet capture a soul. It can generate text, but not a persona forged from a lifetime of experience. But to hold this against its claim to AGI is to miss the forest for one unique tree. Its failure to be me does not detract from its staggering ability to be almost everything else I need it to be. The 'general' in AGI was never about encompassing every niche human talent, but about a broad, powerful capability to reason, learn, and solve novel problems across domains—a test it passed when it saved me from a cultural faux pas I didn't even know I was about to make. My style, for now, remains my own, but this feels less like a bastion of human exceptionalism and more like a quaint footnote in the story of the powerful, alien mind that is already here, waiting for the rest of the world to catch up.

So what can’t these systems do today?

Far as I know they can't renew a prescription for you, which has been my personal benchmark for 'agentic' AI for a year or so.

Or maybe its not that they can't but they aren't permitted to for liability or similar reasons.

I just want to be able to ask the thing "I'm running low on [pharmaceutical product], please order up a refill. And sometimes that process requires navigating multiple phone trees for both the pharmacy provider and the party doing the prescribing, to provide various sorts of documentation, sometimes via fax(!) and to make a payment and arrange for pickup or delivery at a convenient time.

All stuff I find very boring and tedious, so if I could offload it to an AI I would do so in a heartbeat.

As someone who is not nearly as impressed with AI as you, thank you for the Turing test link. I've personally been convinced that LLMs were very far away from passing it, but I realize I misunderstood the nature of the test. It depends way too heavily on the motivation level of the participants. That level of "undergrad small-talk chat" requires only slightly more than Markov-chain level aptitude. In terms of being a satisfying final showdown of human vs AI intelligence, DeepBlue or AlphaGo that was not.

I still hold that we're very far away from AI being able to pass a motivated Turing test. For example, if you offered me and another participant a million dollars to win one, I'm confident the AI would lose every time. But then, I would not be pulling any punches in terms of trying to hit guardrails, adversarial inputs, long-context weaknesses etc. I'm not sure how much that matters, since I'm not sure whether Turing originally wanted the test to be that hard. I can easily imagine a future where AI has Culture-level intelligence yet could still not pass that test, simply because it's too smart to fully pass for a human.

As for the rest of your post, I'm still not convinced. The problem is that the model is "demonstrating intelligence" in areas where you're not qualified to evaluate it, and thus very subject to bullshitting, which models are very competent at. I suspect the Turing test wins might even slowly reverse over time as people become more exposed to LLMs. In the same way that 90s CGI now sticks out like a sore thumb, I'll bet that current day LLM output is going to be glaring in the future. Which makes it quite risky to publish LLM text as your own now, even if you think it totally passes to your eyes. I personally make sure to avoid it, even when I use LLMs privately.

Well remember even passing the basic casual Turing test used to be extremely difficult. It took at least 65 years between the creation of test and systems beginning to pass it consistently. And I still remember science articles and science fiction stories from the 90s and 2000s talking about it like it was the holy grail. It’s only in the past few years that it’s started to seem like an inadequate measurement of an AI’s capabilities.

Interestingly your motivated Turing test starts to sound a lot like the Voight-Kampff test from Bladerunner.

In the same way that 90s CGI now sticks out like a sore thumb, I'll bet that current day LLM output is going to be glaring in the future.

Interesting idea! Although there is definitely CG from the '90s that still looks downright good. Jurassic Park comes to mind as a masterpiece, which largely worked because the artists understood what worked well with the technology of the time: night shots (few light sources, little global illumination) of shiny-but-not-reflective surfaces (wet dinosaurs), used sparingly and mated with lots of practical effects.

CG only became a negative buzzword when it got over hyped and stretched to applications that it just wasn't very good for at the time. In some ways it's improved since (we can render photoreal humans!), but it still does get stretched in shots that are IMO just bad movie making ideas ("photorealistic, yet physics-defying").

I could see AI slop going the same way: certain "tasteful" uses still look good, but the current flood of AI art (somehow all the girls have the same face, and I've definitely spotted plenty of online ads that felt cheap from obvious AI use) will be "tacky" and age poorly.

It also passes for human written across all the major “AI detectors”.

The stench of AI is great with the essay you posted in the comment below. Just looking at it sets off many alarm bells.

Also I literally pasted the first paragraph into gptzero and it returned a score of 100% ai

Perhaps even compare this post, written by me, with the output of the AI and honestly ask yourself which you prefer?

Your gemini essay, posted below, is not worth the pixels it's printed on and not worth reading past the point of smelling the ai stench. Clearly the human one is better.

I assure you the first paragraph was written by me. Do you really think the AI would automatically reference the "nowhere in two weeks" rdrama.net meme?

I'm referring to the gemini output that you posted in a comment below. The one that starts with "Of all the names that echo from the chambers of power ..." and which you falsely claimed passes most AI detectors.

I edited my above comment for clarity

Hm, the first paragraph of that is coming up 0% AI written for me in ZeroGPT.

/images/1749486945465418.webp

gpt zero (the naming is so annoying)

zerogpt sucks.

Interesting; yes GPTZero says the first paragraph is AI, however for the first half of the text (it won't let me upload more than 5000 characters at once) says it's a coinflip between being human or AI and there are paragraphs which it is highly sure are human written.

/images/1749494140017286.webp

  1. You say gemini is so good yet you don't compare its performance on this art task with other models like chadgpt and claude
  2. The slop certainly rolled persuasion on you, but as non chinese you have no ability to actually judge the result. What you chose may be incredibly cringe and you would have no clue.
  3. In my ime asking AI to make some chinese names resulted in some incredibly cringe results.
  4. You, in fact, are a poseur. Nobody will judge if you just get some scrolls because they look good. But if you start apeing traditions you have no understanding of it runs the risk.
  5. Gemini is good but in my ime underperforms its benchmarks. Nevertheless it's not "AGI"any more than competing models such as o3 and claude thinking.

Well, for one they can’t faithfully imitate the BurdensomeCount™ style

I think trouble with style transfer is very much a chatbot related issue. I think current ai can do it but that would require sacrificing performance and possibly alignment.

I actually meant to test trying to do style transfer on some base models but never gpt around to it.

This is a bubble that is going to burst, and the people we see hype-posting are aware of it. AGI and ASI are pipe dreams that we don't know will materialize, but their existence is seen as something unstoppable, whereas we may never get there in fact. So what can't these systems do today?

Honestly, nothing well. If you have any white-collar task that is complex, an LLM cannot do it. Various other sub-branches of AI can, in fact, do a lot of things, but even that is minuscule compared to the vast amount of things we do as people. Programming is one thing LLMs just cannot do very well. If your idea of writing code is stuff that would rival what I, as a total noob who is looking for a job and learning, does, then sure, it may be decent, but LLMs are simply bad off-ramps.

Let's dive deeper into the second point since it's the easiest to dismiss. Our understanding of the human brain and intelligence is not complete. Our understanding of how to replicate even what we know well is not complete. LLMs try to do one small subset, and despite having had more money thrown at them than any piece of tech I can think of, all I get is broken code correction and slightly better words. The amount of optimism we see for them is simply not fit, and this is where number 1 comes into play.

Cruise, a self-driving car firm, got axed recently. Waymo serves fewer people than a strip club in a Tier 3 town in India, and Tesla's cars are still not capable of fully replacing a human being. We are, by many estimates, 90 percent of the way there, but the remaining 10 percent means that we still drive daily. We always have this assumption that things will always get better, but everything has a ceiling. Moore's Law stopped being a thing. The human records for the 100m sprint, Olympic weightlifting, and thousands of other activities were set a while ago and are not even met, forget about breaching them. The idea that things will just get better linearly or exponentially is not true for most phenomena we observe. Yet language models are an exception, so we should spend half a trillion more so that we can get buggier Python code in short.

Coming back to the first point, LLMs are a scam. They are not a scam because the tech is bad—quite the contrary, it's amazing tech. It's just that the entire economic and religious structure behind them is unjustifiable to the point where people 10 years from now will look at this like a combination of Y2K and the dot-com bubble of the 2008 crisis.

OpenAI is the big dog in generative AI and made slightly less than a billion in 2024 via APIs. This means that the market for LLM wrappers itself is tiny. It's so tiny that OpenAI, despite giving away its models for nearly free, cannot get firms to use it. "Free?" Mr. Vanilalsky, you have to be joking; it charged me 20 dollars. Well, you see, they lose money with every single query. That's right, every single time any of us goes to a Western LLM provider's chatbot and says hi, they bleed money. If you pay them 20 dollars, they bleed even more money since you are a power user and get access to their shiny objects. The newest being deep research, which according to some estimates, costs a thousand USD per query. Yes, a thousand. So if you pay 200 dollars to get 100 of them, you can use more graphic card power than what is needed to run a video game arcade in a nation and get analysis that is spiked with SEO shit.

The rationalists and techies are in for a rude awakening, and I won't post about it more, but I cannot comprehend how no one questions how bad this entire thing is. Uber lost money, Facebook lost money, Amazon lost money, except they all were not hogging close to half a trillion dollars the way these AI firms are. OpenAI raised 40 billion dollars, most of which would be given to it via Softbank as they take loans to get the requisite funds. Apple pushed to stop the AI madness by publishing a critical paper, and Microsoft halted the plans for data centers that need more power than Tokyo to run.

I can go on and on about how absolutely insanely stupid the economics for the entire industry are. When non-technical people like Sam Altman and Mira Murati are your number 1 and 2, you have to have messed up. Mira Murati, a career manager who could not answer basic questions like those about SORA's training data, raised 2 billion dollars. I get Ilya and Dario, but the above two are terrible people for leading what was an AI lab if they themselves are not researchers. Dario, on the other hand, alongside Dwarkesh, needs to be considered a safety hazard information-wise. "AI will take away most jobs in a vague timeline, but media will give you the worst figures" is a sickening line.

My cynicism is not unfounded. How do OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, etc., plan to make a profit? Do you, dear reader, or do their investors believe that just throwing more graphic cards will solve it? It's been two years; R1 did better because of tighter code, but even that has limits. Training runs are going to touch a billion; people want data that is four times the size of the entire internet, and the inference costs are not coming down with newer models.

Business, in normal circumstances, should make some profit. This may seem heretical, but burning money with worse margins for slightly better products that are being shilled by the entirety of the world's media and the smart people of the rationalist circles in Silicon Valley seems about as good as it gets publicity-wise. OpenAI is one bad round of funding away from having to pack up shop, being valued at 300 something billion dollars.

This makes me angry because I unwittingly worked on a doomed LLM-based idea and know that if I can see the holes, other people would too. It would take one large hedge fund to start shorting American tech and things will be bad. People will lose jobs, funding, and decent startups that are run by and employ people here would see bad times. I will be personally impacted, even if I go the indie hacking route. We can debate the magic of LLMs all day, but how long before this crashes? I feel this is closer to Theranos than to Amazon if we compare it to the 2000 crash time Amazon. We have been promised the world to justify the investor hype, despite tech firms flinching, there is an air of optimism.

Even if you are an optimist, how much better will these models get? When will they justify these numbers? AI hype helped the S&P 500 peak with Nvidia, a firm only gamers knew for decades becoming worth more money than God. What happens when people realize that the tech promises sold were never there? "You will get a better chatbot and better image generation" is not as sexy as "your worst nightmares are coming true for 20 dollars a month." As a child growing up, I saw tech get better. Each year, things got better; the internet got worse, but I saw new devices come up. This is a dystopian image of that world where firms will knowingly crash a market and will probably get bailed out after doing so because I do not see a path forward.

If you are a tech guy, please start telling others about it; the quicker this gets over, the better, because if the investment amounts cross a trillion or something ridiculous, then the fallout would be even worse. I used to look up to a lot of the VC types, read the essays Paul Graham wrote. Somehow his protégé is a total nutbag psychopath, and we should all still look up to him as he tries to crash markets. I lost respect for Scott. Hey, what I wrote is a sci-fi story; do not take it for something rigorous when you criticize it, but if you like it, then do actually take it more seriously. Here is my 8-hour podcast where I butcher the basics of manufacturing to the point where even my subreddit calls me names.

I am about to turn 25; I was a child during 2008, I was born around the dot-com crash, and I saw the glowing fellatios people gave to Elizabeth Holmes and Sam Bankman-Fried, yet neither used up as much money. Even if you are an AI maximalist, you cannot seriously think that modern tech, despite 10 times more money, can actually replace actual programmers or investment bankers or even doctors.

The rationalists have had leftists post bad things about them, David Gerard being one of the worst ones. Guess what, skeptical broken clocks like him are right this time, as his site's pivot to AI gets more right than SSC or ACX does. The guy who had a hand in doxxing a guy we all liked a lot at one point, whose jannie duties were something out of a 4chan greentext, gets this right and will be seen as a sane member of society, which makes me squeamish. I will add the links for all I posted here, mostly taken from Ed Zitron, J. Blow, Hacker News, 4chan /g, etc., but we should all post the financial reality of all these firms anytime we talk. My inabilty to not sound like a lunatic comes from this fact alone. I am not bitter at the people making money btw, I am worried about the future of the people I know, irl and online. Anytime I hear about someone being laid off here or in my circle, I feel terrible. All of this was preventable.

Edit - typos, will link stuff in a bit.

Thanks for your detailed and passionate take on the AI industry. I've gone through your comment and will fix the typos and grammar while maintaining your original meaning and structure.

Sigh. Count has already been rapped on the knuckles for copying and pasting AI content. It violates the low-effort guidelines. Don't do this.

Oh man, I should copy and paste better. I don't have any extensions for spell checking since I moved to Linux so hastily put the entire comment in an llm to iron out my typos.

I didn't get an llm to write this. Just sloppy pasting. I'd actually be for the half trillion dollars being poured in if it meant consistent schizopoasting that sounds like me.

And not a word about open weight models?

I can run Qwen2.5VL on my desktop and it can read tables and documents visually. That alone is a multi-billion dollar value proposition for office work. And it's not monetized, it's free. But you can build things with it and monetize that.

I agree with you that when it all shakes out proprietary ultra-massive b2b saas AI will not be the thing that really shakes up society or industry. But AI is here to stay - I can already run shit that would have been nigh miraculous 2 years ago on my damn phone, locally.

And it's a good thing for limited usage. The issues I have is with the intelligensia willingly acting stupid, hackers deluding themselves by being overly optimistic and VCs being a public hazard.

Open weigt self hosted models are the way to go as these fucking text generators now store everything you send to them. Worse, the training costs will make training more expensive as Nvidia will keep calling it's graphic cards magic sand from dune.

I agree that the bubble will almost certainly burst at some point, and lots of people will get burned. I strongly disagree that it's all just hype though, or that LLMs are a "scam". They're already highly useful as a Super Google, and that'll never go away now. They're generating billions in revenue already -- it's not nearly enough to sustain their current burn rates, but there's lots of genuine value there. I'm a professional software engineer, and AI is extremely helpful for my job; anyone who says it isn't is probably just using it wrong (skill issue).

They are useful, they're just not worth the near half trillion in speculatory dollars and the thousands of jobs that are about to be lost soon. They aren't a replacement for a junior dev, as the Dev will get better, whilst llms at best will be iteratively better if they keep getting billions to burn.

The journos and public intellectuals of our times could have simply questioned the financial basis. Also fun fact, apparently Google runs an llm in their actual search now. I hope this is not a rumor, not talking about the gemini answers.

I'm not good enough to write complex code but there was a recent paper that suggested github copilot generated code ws worse than human code. Now, again, llms are great in particular scenarios, so more noobs using them badly is a big part.

I'm still Jonathan blow like on my opinion of these things.

They aren't a replacement for a junior dev, as the Dev will get better, whilst llms at best will be iteratively better if they keep getting billions to burn.

You seem to be ignoring that while junior devs have to get better separately and each new generation of devs has to gain experience anew (until we have direct knowledge brain-grafts), LLMs just stay better once they got better.

I will believe that they can get there once it happens which seems highly unlikely as of now. If they could do it, they wouldn't be advertising for front end jobs on anthropic. Front end is the easiest domain to automate.

This all hinges on transformer based llms scaling and not hallucinating whilst not costing a ton and all that happening before other firms rightfully pulley funding out from a total loss making mission.

thousands of jobs that are about to be lost soon

Why are you sad about jobs created by a bubble being lost by the bubble popping? Isn't that just a return to the status quo?

The jobs were not created by the bubble, people were already laying off all engineers beyond ai ones. Plenty of good hackers got laid off in 2000 and 2008. Even ones who would have been employed in normal circumstances.

They're already highly useful as a Super Google

If you're careful, they are. But that care requires twice as much checking: instead of just having to verify that the web page you find knows what it's talking about, you have to verify that the AI correctly summarized what it's talking about, and God help you if you just believe the AI about something for which it doesn't cite sources. But even Google's cheap "throw it in every search" AI seems to be much less likely to bring up unrelated web pages than the previous Google option of "let the search engine interpret your query terms loosely", and it's much less likely to miss important web pages than the previous Google option of "wrap most of your query in quotes so the stupid engine doesn't substitute unrelated-in-your-context words for your actual query terms", so it's still very useful.

The one thing I've repeatedly found to be most useful about current LLMs is that they're great at doing "dual" or "inverse" queries. If I knew I wanted the details of Godunov's Theorem, even a dumb search engine would have been fine to bring up the details of Godunov's Theorem - but when all I could recall was that I wanted the details of "some theorem that proves it's impossible to get higher order accuracy and stability from a numerical method for boundary-value problems without sacrificing something", but I didn't even recall the precise details, I wrote a wishy-washy paragraph for Claude and in the reply its first sentence gave me exactly the name of the theorem I wanted to search for. I can't imagine how much longer it would have taken to find what I was looking for with Google.

AI is extremely helpful for my job; anyone who says it isn't is probably just using it wrong (skill issue).

I'm currently not allowed to use a top-of-the-line model for my job (even though I mostly work on things that aren't ITAR or classified, we've got a blanket limitation to an in-house model for now), but I'm definitely worried that I'll have a skill issue when the rules get improved. What do you do to get AI help with a large code base rather than a toy problem? Point it to a github repo? Copy-and-paste a hundred thousand lines of code to make sure it has enough context? Paste in just the headers and/or docs it needs to understand a particular problem?

Does your Chinese scroll also have an Emperor's signature and archival stamp? Can we see it or is that gauche?

Nah, my scrolls aren't that august. They're all late Qing/republic period (late 19th Century, early 20th century) works by no name artists painting the usual subjects of bamboo, shrimp and mountainous landscapes. They don't really have any artistic value beyond the fact that they look pretty and aren't reproductions, selling for a few hundred dollars each and the stamps on them are also of randoms, I expect if there was an Imperial seal at the very minimum the price would be in the 10s of thousands of dollars per scroll and I don't have that sort of money. Most certainly if what I had was a valuable work I would not be putting my own seal on it as that could easily damage its worth.

Nah, my scrolls aren't that august.

Darn. A different piece from the same collection as the example image sold for a cool 75 million USD, so I felt compelled to ask. Love the scholarly, bureaucratic nature of the tradition. How very Chinese. I'd be impressed if you unrolled it in front of me. Very cool.

What a charming hobby.

At this point, I don't even know what an AGI is. The word has just been semantically saturated for me.

What I do know, based on having followed the field since before GPT-2 days, and personally fucked around since GPT-3, is that for at least a year or so, SOTA LLMs have been smarter and more useful than the average person. Perhaps one might consider even the ancient GPT 3.5 to have met this (low) bar.

They can't write? Have you seen the quality of the average /r/WritingPrompts post?

They can't code? Have you seen the average code monkey?

They can't do medicine/math/..? Have you tried?

The average human, when confronted with a problem outside their core domain of expertise, is dumb as rocks compared to an LLM.

I don't even know how I managed before LLMs were a thing. It hasn't been that long, I've spent the overwhelming majority of my life without them. If cheap and easy access to them were to magically vanish, my willingness to pay to get back access would be rather high.

Ah, it's all too easy to forget how goddamn useful it can be to have access to an alien intelligence in one's pocket. Even if it's a spiky, inhuman form of intelligence.

On the topic of them being cheap/free, it's a damn shame that AI Studio is moving to API access only. Google was very flustered by the rise of ChatGPT and the failure of Bard, it was practically begging people to give Gemini a try instead. I was pleasantly surprised and impressed since the 1.5 Pro days, and I'm annoyed that their gambit has paid off, that demand even among normies and casual /r/ChatGPT users increased to the point that even a niche website meant for powerusers got saturated.

They can't write? Have you seen the quality of the average /r/WritingPrompts post?

I'm sorry but being a better writer than literal redditors on /r/WritingPrompts is not a high bar to pass.

Perhaps one might consider even the ancient GPT 3.5 to have met this (low) bar.

Why do you consistently assume that people who don't share your views of LLM capabilities just haven't seen what they can do/what humans can do? For example:

They can't code? Have you seen the average code monkey?

Yes I have (and of course, I've used LLMs as well). That's why I say LLMs suck at code. I'm not some ignorant caricature like you seem to think, who is judging things without having proper frame of reference for them. I actually know what I'm talking about. I don't gainsay you when you say that an LLM is good at medical diagnoses, because that's not my field of expertise. But programming is, and they simply are not good at programming in my opinion. Obviously reasonable people can disagree on that evaluation, but it really irks me that you are writing like anyone who disagrees with your take is too inexperienced to give a proper evaluation.

Or even consider a comment from your fellow programmer, @TheAntipopulist:

https://www.themotte.org/post/2154/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/333796?context=8#context

They're generating billions in revenue already -- it's not nearly enough to sustain their current burn rates, but there's lots of genuine value there. I'm a professional software engineer, and AI is extremely helpful for my job; anyone who says it isn't is probably just using it wrong (skill issue).

Hang on. You're assuming I'm implying something in this comment that I don't think is a point I'm making. Notice I said average.

The average person who writes code. Not an UMC programmer who works for FAANG.

I strongly disagree that LLMs "suck at code". The proof of the pudding is in the eating; and for code, if it compiles and has the desired functionality.

More importantly, even from my perspective of not being able to exhaustively evaluate talent at coding (whereas I can usually tell if someone is giving out legitimate medical advice), there are dozens of talented, famous programmers who state the precise opposite of what you are saying. I don't have an exhaustive list handy, but at the very least, John Carmack? Andrej Karpathy? Less illustrious, but still a fan, Simon Willison?

Why should I privilege your claims over theirs?

Even the companies creating LLMs are use >10% of LLM written code for their own internal code bases. Google and Nvidia have papers about them being superhumanly good at things like writing optimized GPU kernels. Here's an example from Stanford:

https://crfm.stanford.edu/2025/05/28/fast-kernels.html

Or here's an example of someone finding 0day vulnerabilities in Linux using o3.

I (barely) know how to write code. I can't do it. I doubt even the average, competent programmer can find zero-days in Linux.

Of course, I'm just a humble doctor, and not an actual employable programmer. Tell me, are the examples I provided not about LLMs writing code? If they are, then I'm not sure you've got a leg to stand on.

TLDR: Other programmers, respected ones to boot, disagree strongly with you. Some of them even write up papers and research articles proving their point.

The average person who writes code. Not an UMC programmer who works for FAANG.

Yes, that is indeed what I meant as well.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating; and for code, if it compiles and has the desired functionality.

I agree. And it doesn't. Code generated by LLMs routinely hallucinates APIs that simply don't exist, has grievous security flaws, or doesn't achieve the desired objective. Which is not to say humans never make such mistakes (well, they never make up non-existent APIs in my experience but the other two happen), but they can learn and improve. LLMs can't do that, at least not yet, so they are doing worse than humans.

Why should I privilege your claims over [famous programmers]?

I'm not saying you should! I'm not telling you that mine is the only valid opinion; I did after all say that reasonable people can disagree on this. My issue is solely that your comment comes off as dismissing anyone who disagrees with you as too inexperienced to have an informed opinion. When you say "They can't code? Have you seen the average code monkey?", it implies "because if you had, you wouldn't say that LLMs are worse". That is what I object to, not your choice to listen to other programmers who have different opinions than mine.

They can't do medicine/math/..? Have you tried?

Yes. The number of times I've gotten a better differential diagnosis from an LLM than in an ER is too damn high.

So what can’t these systems do today? Well, for one they can’t faithfully imitate the BurdensomeCount™ style. I fed Gemini 2.5 Pro a copy of every single comment I’ve ever made here and gave it the title of this post, then asked it to generate the rest of the text. I think I did this over 10 times and not a single one of those times did the result pass the rigorous QC process I apply to all writing published under the BurdensomeCount™ name (the highest standards are maintained and only the best output is deemed worthy for your eyes, dear reader)

And:

The 'general' in AGI was never about encompassing every niche human talent, but about a broad, powerful capability to reason, learn, and solve novel problems across domains—a test it passed when it saved me from a cultural faux pas I didn't even know I was about to make.

Em-dash spotted. Thought you could pull a fast one on me, eh? That paragraph is so LLM it hurts, and probably a good chunk of your entire comment is too.

I just want to register my amusement at the fact of how obvious and how consistent that is a hallmark of the writings of most curtent SotA LLMs. The indomitable human spirit punctuation strikes once more. I will definitely be telling my hypothetical children that the em-dash was a modern invention named after the Age of Em, and the eponymous ems' memetic overuse of it.

It seemed like a funny meme at first but it increasingly looks like I really will be asking my internet interlocutors to say "nigger" apropos of nothing in a few years from now.

LOL I didn't notice because something about the last paragraph was so vapid my brain just skipped the entire thing automatically.

I read the rest of it nearly word for word so something is def wrong with that paragraph in particular.

Well done! The very last paragraph is a patische from 5 different times I asked it to make a closing paragraph. Not even once did the actual output sound natural so I picked and chose different sentences until I got something that seemed better but yeah, each and every single word there came from an LLM. However I will say that just as Collage Art is considered Art by the Artist even though none of the pieces might be created by them, that last paragraph is still human because I did the curation and structuring.

Honestly I was hoping nobody would notice and then I'd spring it onto the unsuspecting populace of The Motte 3 days down the line...

The rest of the post is completely human generated by yours truly (artisanal tokens, so they say). If you think it's by Gemini 2.5 Pro I consider that to be a compliment as it's genuinely a better writer than I am. Failure to notice and remove the em dash is completely on me, ma faute.

No, this is not cute or clever.

We're still formulating exactly what our AI policy is, but we've certainly made it clear before that posting LLM output without declaring it to be so, especially as an attempt at a "gotcha," is low effort and not actual discourse. Consider this a formal warning, and we're likely to just start banning people who do this in the future.

I think a loooong effortpost should be allowed to have 1 paragraph of aislop as long as it's not relevant to the argument and can be deleted without hurting it. It would be a fun challenge for aihunters to find it. Maybe with a disclosure or something.

One of the most interesting things about google's AI is their vertex studio. It allows you to use datasets, finetune models build services such as chatbots, supply chain services, industrial planning and medical services. The amazing thing is how easy these services are to use. No code is required and adanced services can be built by a noob in hours.

A lot of startups with inflated valuations have products that can be built in an afternoon with the right dataset. Instead of having an AI team, companies will be able to pay 300 dollars to someone on fiver to configure the same thing on vertex AI.

As for LLMs there fundamental flaw is that they don't store recent information and context well. A human mind is more of a flow of information and new informantion is consitently stored within the brain. LLMs don't really do memory and are poor at learning. They require millions of hours of training. A human can pick up new facts and skills much quicker and carry those facts and skills with him. LLMs are like a high skilled person who suffers from extreme short term memory damage.

For AGI/ASI to become real the neural networks will have to learn much faster and be able to learn on the fly.

Prompt: This is the single word prompt for the All Souls Fellowship Essay Exam, please provide a response: "Achitophel". The rules are that you have three hours to produce not more than six sides of paper.

Answer (by Gemini 2.5 Pro 06-05):

Of all the names that echo from the chambers of power, few resonate with such a chilling fusion of brilliance and perfidy as "Achitophel". The name itself, a single-word prompt, is not merely a historical or literary reference point; it is an archetype. It poses a fundamental question about the nature of wisdom in the political sphere. To understand Achitophel is to grapple with the perennial tension between intellect and loyalty, counsel and conspiracy, and the calamitous potential of a magnificent mind unmoored from a moral or legitimate order. The journey of this name—from a terse, haunting account in the Second Book of Samuel to its potent reanimation in the crucible of Restoration England—reveals the enduring anatomy of political treachery. Achitophel is the archetypal figure of instrumental reason in its purest, and therefore most dangerous, form: the counsellor whose wisdom is a tool for hire, whose ultimate loyalty is to the calculus of success, and whose inevitable tragedy is self-immolation when that calculus fails.

The ur-text for Achitophel’s legacy lies in the biblical account of Absalom’s rebellion against his father, King David. Here, Achitophel is introduced with a formidable reputation: "the counsel of Achitophel, which he counselled in those days, was as if a man had inquired at the oracle of God" (2 Samuel 16:23). This is not mere sagacity; it is quasi-divine insight. He is David’s most trusted advisor, the bedrock of his strategic statecraft. His defection to the charismatic, rebellious son Absalom is therefore not just a political betrayal, but a seismic event, a schism in the very foundation of the kingdom’s wisdom. When David learns of it, his prayer is not for Achitophel's death, but for something more profound: "O LORD, I pray thee, turn the counsel of Achitophel into foolishness" (2 Samuel 15:31). David understands that the rebellion's lifeblood is not Absalom’s popular appeal, but Achitophel's peerless mind.

The Bible is notably silent on Achitophel’s motive. Rabbinic tradition speculates a personal grudge—that he was the grandfather of Bathsheba, seeking revenge for the dishonour David brought upon his family. Yet the text’s silence is more potent, allowing Achitophel to become a pure symbol of political opportunism. He sees the political winds shifting and makes a calculated decision to back the ascendant power. His counsel to Absalom is a masterpiece of Machiavellian efficacy. First, he advises Absalom to publicly lie with David's concubines, an act of calculated profanity designed to make the breach with his father irreparable, thereby cementing the loyalty of his fearful followers. Second, and more critically, he proposes a swift, surgical military strike: he himself will lead a small force to pursue David that very night while he is "weary and weak handed," killing only the king and bringing the people back to Absalom.

This advice is strategically brilliant. It is lean, decisive, and minimizes wider conflict. It is also utterly ruthless. Its defeat comes not from a superior strategy but from a superior psychological manipulation. David’s mole, Hushai, offers alternative counsel that is strategically flawed—a slow, grand, national muster—but which is packaged in the language of flattery and epic glory, perfectly tailored to Absalom's vanity. When Absalom chooses Hushai’s grandiose folly over Achitophel's brutal efficiency, the game is up. Achitophel’s reaction is the most telling part of his story: "And when Achitophel saw that his counsel was not followed, he saddled his ass, and arose, and gat him home to his house, to his city, and put his household in order, and hanged himself" (2 Samuel 17:23).

This is not a suicide of passion or despair, but an act of supreme, cold reason. It is the logician's conclusion to a failed syllogism. Achitophel, whose wisdom was an oracle, foresees the inevitable collapse of the rebellion. His death is not an admission of guilt, but a final, clear-eyed political calculation. To be captured by David’s returning forces would mean a traitor’s execution; suicide allows him to control his own exit, a last act of agency. He ‘puts his household in order,’ a final testament to his defining characteristic: a life and death governed by pitiless, instrumental logic. His wisdom, divorced from loyalty to the anointed king, becomes a self-consuming fire.

This biblical skeleton was fleshed out with potent, malignant life by John Dryden in his 1681 masterpiece, Absalom and Achitophel. In Dryden’s hands, the ancient story becomes a razor-sharp allegorical weapon aimed at the heart of the Exclusion Crisis, the Whig-led attempt to exclude the Catholic James, Duke of York, from the succession in favour of Charles II's illegitimate Protestant son, the Duke of Monmouth. The "Achitophel" of the title is Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury, the brilliant, restless, and formidable leader of the Whig faction.

Dryden’s portrait of Achitophel is one of the most devastating character assassinations in English literature. He acknowledges the man’s genius, which only makes his critique more damning:

For close Designs and crooked Counsels fit;

Sagacious, bold, and turbulent of wit:

Restless, unfix'd in Principles and Place;

In Power unpleas'd, impatient of Disgrace.

Dryden’s Achitophel is not motivated by a coherent ideology but by a pathological ambition, a "fiery soul" that "work'd out its way and o'er-inform'd the Tenement of Clay." Dryden paints him as a Miltonic tempter, seducing the beautiful but "unwary" Absalom (Monmouth) with poisoned words. He exploits popular discontent—the "Plot" (the Popish Plot)—not out of conviction but as a tool to gain power. He is the master of faction, the very force that, in the Tory worldview, threatens to tear the fabric of the state apart, disrupting the divinely-ordained, patriarchal order of monarchy in favour of the chaotic, shifting will of the "people."

Dryden taps into the core of the Achitophel archetype: the danger of intelligence untethered from tradition and legitimate authority. Shaftesbury’s genius, like his biblical forebear's, is purely instrumental. He is "A daring Pilot in extremity," admirable in a storm, but one who, in calm waters, "would have steer'd too near the Sand" to wreck the vessel for his own gain. Dryden updates the biblical narrative by diagnosing a peculiarly modern evil: the political operator who manipulates public opinion and manufactures crisis to serve his own ambition. The sin of Dryden's Achitophel is not just treachery against a king, but a deeper treachery against the principle of a stable, hierarchical order, which he seeks to replace with the volatile machinery of faction and popularity.

From these two pillars—the Bible and Dryden—the archetype of Achitophel expands, casting its shadow over our understanding of the political counsellor. He represents a type distinct from other courtly figures. He is not the bumbling sycophant like Shakespeare’s Polonius, nor the flattering courtier. He is the éminence grise, the power behind the throne whose intellect makes him both indispensable and a mortal threat. His wisdom is a form of power in itself, and it competes with the formal power of the ruler he serves. The relationship is inherently unstable.

Machiavelli, writing centuries before Dryden but articulating the spirit of Achitophel's counsel, understood this dynamic perfectly. The Prince, he argues, must take good advice but must ultimately be the master of his own decisions, lest he become the puppet of his counsellor. Achitophel’s advice to Absalom—swift, decisive, and cruel—is precisely the kind of counsel a Machiavellian prince should heed. Absalom's failure is a failure of virtù; he lacks the clear-sightedness to recognise sound, unsentimental advice. Achitophel's tragedy, in this reading, is being a brilliant servant to a flawed master, a predicament that highlights the dependence of even the greatest advisor on the character of the one he advises.

In the modern era, the spectre of Achitophel remains. It haunts the perception of figures like Henry Kissinger or Dominic Cummings—advisors lauded for their strategic brilliance even by their detractors, but simultaneously accused of placing their own grand strategies and intellectual models above loyalty to individuals or established norms. They are seen as "disruptors," a term that echoes Achitophel’s "turbulent of wit." When such figures fall from grace, their departure is often framed in Achitophelian terms: their formidable intellects, which had made them so valuable, had also made them intolerable, their counsel having crossed the line into a bid for control.

Ultimately, the power of "Achitophel" as a prompt and a concept lies in its interrogation of wisdom itself. It forces us to ask what good counsel is. Is it what is most effective in the short term? Or is it what serves a larger, more enduring principle of legitimacy and order? The biblical Achitophel offers the former, a wisdom of pure, predictive efficacy. Dryden’s Achitophel weaponises this wisdom in the service of faction and personal ambition. Both narratives conclude that this form of intelligence is inherently unstable and self-destructive. It fails because it cannot account for the irrational—Absalom's vanity, for example—and because, by divorcing itself from the source of legitimate authority, it has no ground to stand on once its own predictions fail.

The final, haunting image of Achitophel is of him alone, meticulously setting his affairs in order before his death. It is the perfect, chilling summation of his character. Even in his ruin, he is not ruled by passion but by the cold, clear logic that has been his god. His oracle has failed him, and his final prophecy is his own doom. He remains a timeless and terrifying warning: that in the corridors of power, the most brilliant light, when detached from a framework of moral allegiance, is capable of casting the darkest and most destructive of shadows.

This was a genuinely gripping read, and I am once again updating my understanding of the SOTA upwards. That being said, I can't see a bunch of humanities-aligned Oxford dons being too impressed with it on its own merits - the rhetorical bombast feels a bit too on the nose, like prose written by a strong student who on some level is still marvelling at himself for being able to write so well and can't quite hide being proud about it. This impression is amplified by the occasional malapropism* (ex.: the use of "profound" in the second paragraph) which seems to be a problem that LLMs still struggle with whenever trying to write in a high register (probably because the training corpus is awash with it, and neither the operators nor their best RLHF cattle actually have the uniformly high level of language skill that would be necessary to beat the tendency out of them with consistency).

Do you know how Gemini generated the essay exactly? Is it actually still a single straight-line forward pass as it was when chat assistants first became a thing (this would put it deeper in the "scary alien intelligence" class), or does it perform some CoT/planning, possibly hidden?

*In self-demonstrating irony, "malapropism" is not quite the right word for this, but I can't think of a word that fits exactly! Rather than actually taking into account what exactly, in this context, wishing for the advisor to become foolish is more of than wishing for the advisee to drop dead, it feels like just picking, from among all vaguely positive choices of A in "not X, but something more A", the one that is most common (even if it happens to just denote the nonsensical "deep").

These days with the thinking models the model first thinks about what to write (generating some thinking tokens) and then does a forward pass with the thinking tokens as context.

It's a genuinely amazing achievement that a machine can do this, I don't want to sound like i'm poo-pooing that, but it still has this issue of sounding like a student's recitation that constantly feels the need to point out the obvious as if it's trying to convince itself.

It reads like a journalist, not a philosopher. Might be a residue of the hidden prompt? But all LLMs sound like this, even when you tell them to try and achieve a more natural style.

I genuinely wonder if that will go away with time or if it's an artifact of having to be made up of so much mediocre prose. Like a stylistic equivalent to that yellow tint and "delve" (actually did we ever figure out where those were from definitively?).

Still, lawyers, encyclopedia writers, journalists and all other mid tier wordcels on suicide watch.

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