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AGI Was Never Going To Kill Us Because Suicide Happens At The End of Doomscrolling
I'll go ahead and call this the peak of AI version one-dot-oh
The headline reads "OpenAI Is Preparing to Launch a Social App for AI-Generated Videos." People will, I guess, be able to share AI generated videos with their friends (and who doesn't have THE ALGO as a friend). Awesome. This is also on the heels of the introduction of live ads within OpenAI's ChatGPT.
Some of us were waiting for The Matrix. I know I've always wanted to learn Kung Fu. Others were sharpening our pointing sticks so that when the paperclip machine came, we'd be ready. Most of us just want to look forward to spending a quiet evening with AI Waifu before we initiate her kink.exe module.
But we'll never get there. Because Silicon Valley just can't help itself. Hockey sticks and rocketships. Series E-F-G. If I can just get 5 million more Americans addicted to my app, I can buy a new yacht made completely out of bitcoin.
I am a daily "AI" user and I still have very high hopes. My current operating theory is that a combination of whatever the MCP protocol eventually settles into plus agents trading some sort of crypto or stable coin will create a kind of autonomous, goal-seek driven economy. It will be sandboxed but with (semi) real money. I don't think we, humans, will use it to actually drive the global economy, but as a kind of just-over-the-horizon global prediction market. Think of it as a way for us to have seen 2008 coming in 2006. I also was looking forward to a team of maybe 10 people making a legit billion dollar company and this paving the way for groups of 3 - 5 friends running thousands of $10 + $50 million dollar companies. No more corporate grind if you're willing to take a little risk and team up with some people you work well with. No bullshit VC games - just ship the damn thing.
And I think these things are still possible, but I also, now, think the pure consumer backlash to this silicon valley lobotomy of AI could be very much Dot-Com-2-point-O. The normies at my watering hole are making jokes about AI slop. Instead of "lol I doomscrolled into 3 am again" people are swapping stories about popping in old DVDs so that they can escape the ads and the subscription fatigue.
Culturally, this could be great. Maybe the damn kids will go outside and touch some grass. In terms of advancing the frontier of human-digital knowledge, it seems like we're going to trade it in early not even for unlimited weird porn, but for pink haired anime cat videos that my aunt likes.
This is the worst that AI video gen is ever going to be.
Which is good, because that means that there's every chance that quality will improve until it isn't slop anymore. I look forward to actually decent and watchable AI movies, TV shows and animation. We'll be able to prompt our way to making whatever our hearts desire. Even if the cost doesn't become entirely trivial for a full-length project, as long as it's brought down to mere thousands or tens of thousands of dollars, a ton of talented auteurs will be able to bring their visions to life. Will Sturgeon's law still hold? Probably, but we'll go from 99.9% unwatchable slop to a happy 90% soon enough.
And it's bad, because this is the least viral and compulsively watchable AI generated media will ever be, including shortform "reels". I'm not overly worried, I have some semblance of taste, but eventually the normies will get hooked. And I mean the average person, not people with dementia. If it gets me, it'll have to work for it, and if I'm being presented with content more interesting and high quality than typical mainstream media, I don't really think that's a bad thing. I already have little interest in most human visual output.
Some of the really bad consequences of media addiction are currently limited by the low quality of most ‘bulk’ visual content (reels, daytime TV, YouTube, most video games).
When you get to a stage where you can cheaply generate infinite seasons of Mad Men or Sopranos or Red Dead Redemption quality entertainment, such that you can play a 5000 hour Rockstar campaign or watch 10,000 episodes of your favorite comfy comedy show with no discernible dip in quality, it’s over.
Wall E remains, the failure to predict Ozempic excluded, the most deeply prescient piece of 21st century mainstream science fiction media.
While I get your point that once you allow everyone to basically wirehead, most people will happily wirehead and only stop playing RDR Infinite when their heart finally fails, I am not sure things are so bleak.
Over the past 50 years, the supply of cheap entertainment readily available has increased by orders of magnitude. Back then, you only got whatever was on any of a few channels on TV, everything else required some effort, like going into a video store. Where previous generations might have bought a porn video tape, today the main obstacle is to narrow down what genres and kinks you are looking for out of the millions of available videos. Video games offer all sorts of experiences from art projects to Skinner boxes. If you want resources on any topic under the sun, the internet has you covered. Entire websites are created around the concept of not having to pay attention to one video for more than 15 seconds.
Humanity has not handled this overly gracefully, but it has handled it somewhat. Personally, I am somewhat vulnerable to this sort of thing, but while I sometimes get sucked into a TV series, video game, or book series and spend most of my waking hours for a week or two in there, I eventually finish (or lose interest) and come out on the other side. I am sure there is some level of AGI which could create a world from which I would never want to emerge again, but it will require better story-telling than ChatGPT. Of course, I am typical-minding here a bit, but my impression is that I am somewhere in the bulk of the bell curve of vulnerability. Sure, some people get sucked into a single video game and play it for years, but also some people do waste a lot less time than I do.
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I disagree, I think you’ve got the relationship backwards. People who are already addicted to media demand the meaningless bulk content. They reel at more substantial works. Substantial works would require them to invest themselves in a more enriching way in what they consume. Offering them infinite high quality works wouldn’t get them to actually partake in said works, and this is shown by the fact that currently most people give little attention to those that are already on offer. For them to partake in quality works would presuppose them not being addicted to consumer slop.
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I mean, in such a scenario, we'll get Wall E if we're lucky.
If not, we'll end up with Blindsight. Which, funny enough, predates Wall E by two years.
I'd rather not have either of them, personally.
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What's over? Do you genuinely believe that there will be meaningful cognitive or physical work for baseline humans to do beyond the near future? If we're economically unproductive, we have to pass the time somehow. It's like complaining that the music of the angelic choir in heaven is too good and you don't feel like playing tennis.
Those who want more ever more sophisticated forms of entertainment will probably get them, I'm not enough of a snob to think that someone watching the equivalent of the best prestige TV or better ad their primary hobby is doing something wrong.
I don’t know, I think company and companionship with other biological humans are important. Call me sentimental but if everyone’s going to be living out hyperrealistic fantasies in VR for dopamine for 80 years then I struggle to see why you mightn’t just save the resources and administer them a euphoric fatal heroin dose and be done with it.
I am increasingly absolutely convinced that a fulfilling post-scarcity world will involve mandatory make-work, not 40 hours a week of fake emailing (ideally), but forced interaction with other human beings, teamwork, shared projects, civic engagement, some kind of social credit to encourage basic politeness and decency even if you don’t need them to survive and so on.
I grew up with many people who already live ‘post scarcity’ lives on account of great inherited wealth and the ones who consume all day are universally less happy than the ones who work, even in high pressure jobs, even though they will inherit more than they could make in a thousand years.
Wall-E is about the choice that post-scarcity offers. At the end, when the humans are replanting trees and clearing garbage it’s clear that AI and robotics are good enough in this universe to do this work, but it’s the humans who win when they do it themselves.
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It'll be over because pure consumers of value who produce nothing and aren't even related to the producers of value will cease to be around sooner or later. Sooner or later some paperclipper will optimize us away, and there'll be no good reason not to do it.
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I don't believe people want to game or watch TV endlessly on repeat though, I certainly don't. Regardless of how good something is I want to cycle between different sorts of stimuli and types of activities, some providing "fun" and others "meaning".
This seems to be a lot like gambling and many addictions to me. The vast majority have no issues to engage in moderate use while a small minority can't control themselves and self destruct, and young people are more vulnerable.
The fanfic industry gives the lie to this. Many of us do indeed want endless streams the same media with a few changes and wrinkles thrown in. Most of these fics are very derivative even for an inherently derivative art form even where it doesn't make sense - see Stations of Canon - and many are just bad yet we slog through them hoping to find the few that let us recapture the same feeling we got consuming the original work.
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The popularity of thousand-chapter webfics indicates otherwise. If the AI learns to generate cultivation LitRPG isekai with ten thousand chapters (and tailor it to the reader's taste), a lot of people will never touch anything else.
I don't know about thousand chapter webfics, but I've been reading Hajime no Ippo for nigh on 20 years, and it's over 1000 chapters. It's a particular relationship between reader and author, a long running manga like this. You get someone's idiosyncratic direct creative output, without the design by committee aspects of a lot of other media. You watch them grow and develop, not just in their craftsmanship, but in their perspective, which often comes through in how the story evolves. As you age with them, they continue telling a story that hits right at your mutually changing maturity level.
Hajime no Ippo and Berserk are more or less the only manga I still read anymore. Everything else either finished, or I lost interest. Now the question is if I live long enough to see anything resembling an ending to either.
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That's not quite what I'm getting at. I don't really care if someone wants to read a an endless webserial or not, I don't see how that matters. What I tried to respond to was the media addiction part, with the implication that sufficient amount of quality media of ones preferred sort, like endless office episodes for those who are into that or an endless webserial, would lead people to only engaging in that, essentially amounting to a low tech wireheading.
My point is that even if we got endless episodes/chapters/whatever, most people would still want to do a variety of things outside of media consumption.
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Do people pick these up and read forever though? A lot of these webfics are serialized, people reach the end and then just read chapter by chapter.
One of the big draws for me with webfiction is that I am a very fast reader, and if I was buying everything it would bankrupt me. A million word story can give me a nice week of reading, but I wouldn't be spending more than a few hours of leisure a day, and most of the time keeping up with ongoing web releases is ~1hour a week
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Better yet, imagine a story where you are the main character, playing in a rich world with real agency, learning things, judging, fighting, ruling, plot threads springing up around you. We could have that too, a whole new fusion between games and literature. We have that right now, albeit in a limited, experimental form.
That's just called "life".
Kind of. Compare "life" to a game though...
I don't know, someone needs to revamp this "life"
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How about "Life 2.0"? With adventure, romance, high-speed chases, daredevil stunts, whatever you want.
You can have all that already!
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Banned for targeted personal attacks (on me).
I wish there was more actually good Xianxia, 3k chapters just isn't enough.
I'm writing one, don't worry. Hopefully it's good. ;D
Send me a link!
Sure, here you go. https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/133044/seed-of-the-radiant-grove
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