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Spider-Man and Elsa: Together Forever at the Edge of the Apocalypse
Epistemic status: Lol!
Coagulopath writes about the youtube ElsaGate scandle.
For those who are unfamiliar with the infamous "Spider-Man and Elsa" videos, what we essentially had was a bunch of channels uploading a deluge of videos that had the superficial appearance of children's content, but also contained disturbing adult content including violence, drug use, sexual innuendo, etc. They could be live action or animated. It's some real David Lynch shit, like something you would see on Adult Swim at 2 in the morning. Even when they're not featuring outright explicit content, they're just fucking weird.
I advance two theses:
Thesis the first: Many of the ElsaGate videos are actually quite beautiful - they're not exemplary works of art, of course, but they're a heck of a lot more interesting than the crap that passes for American "prestige" TV, or "Academy Award-winning" films.
Thesis the second: They are beautiful only insofar as they were created by humans, and not by AI. The line is of course fuzzy, but for our purposes here it will suffice to say that the key point is that a human was the one who planned the content, arranged the shots, gave them their specific aesthetic texture, and was overall responsible for the palpable gestalt of the final product; as opposed to the videos being algorithmic sludge borne of an engagement-maximizing machine gone awry; although, I suppose I should ask, what is an artist if not a machine gone awry?
It is a point of irony for me that I must acknowledge how clearly meritorious this type of art is: this type of art that can only exist because of the internet; it is inconceivable without it. Ironic because it is a type of Hegelian self-sublation in action. When all is properly accounted for, I find that the internet itself is opposed to certain deeply held convictions and principles of mine. I am a conservative in the most fundamental sense, a sense more fundamental than merely believing in "traditional Christian morality" or "the divine right of kings" or whatever other contingent proposition you might like to identify with conservatism. I am a conservative because I don't like change. My default position is to think that the way things are right now is pretty good, and change is to be inherently viewed as suspicious, although there is hope that with long labor it may eventually justify itself. Were I alive in the 15th century, I would have undoubtedly opposed the invention of the printing press, and were I alive during the American Revolution, I would have undoubtedly supported the British. (Although it must be pointed out that my conservatism has limits - I do not support the Oxfordian theory of Shakespeare authorship, for example; I would not like to see it written into the laws of nature that a deserving upstart can never usurp the throne.)
So too it goes with the internet. Were I capable of forming coherent political opinions during the time of its ascension, I would have undoubtedly echoed the sentiment that Paul Krugman did then, which is roughly the same sentiment that Gary Marcus has for AI now: it'll never catch on, it doesn't work, and even if it does work it's just stupid and I don't like it. What good could come from giving a plebian the ability to broadcast their thoughts and musings to the entire world? Such a wilful abolition of all distinctions of rank, such an obvious disregard for the basics of intellectual and spiritual hygiene, such impatience and arrogance; nothing good can come of this. And yet, something good did come of it. So why not "update my priors" or "flash my epistemological firmware" or whatever it is that Bay Area Rationalists call it these days? Why can't a fish fly, why can't a man breathe underwater? I am what I am, and you are what you are. You hither, I thither, and only by misfortune the twain shall meet.
Back to the general meritoriousness of art in its manifold aesthetic determinations. I was just speaking to a friend yesterday about the concept of framing - the way that the context of a work of art's reception affects the nature of that reception - using Lichtenstein's Look Mickey as an example. We are quite fortunate that Wikipedia uses a stark, pristine white background as the default mode of presentation for all its articles, mirroring the white (or maybe grey) background upon which works are displayed in an art gallery, as it allows us to easily set the mood. Undoubtedly Paul Graham was subconsciously drawn to using such a spartan design scheme for his site due to his own experiences in the fine art world, and the usage of a similar scheme by many art books and websites is no coincidence. That shocking white is the best indicator that one is entering the "art zone", a kind of liminal space where the horror of art can unfold itself. In another context, Lichtenstein's drawing of Mickey might simply be, well, a drawing of Mickey. But superimposed onto the crushing white of the art gallery, we feel the full gravity of this image being taken up into the symbolic chain known as "art history". One is immediately struck by an intense vertigo. If music is the night (due to blindness), and literature is the day (the light of logic corresponding to the graven sign of writing), then visual art is the morning, taking us back to the primordial scene of man, a mythical pre-linguistic history where the borders of dream and day were porous and horror had not yet become the dupe of pleasure's temptations. Mickey Mouse can do all that? Yes, why do you think Disney guards the trademark so jealously?
They key thing that must be understood is that the artist himself is, always and forever, part of the framing. The work may travel where it will, in the halls of the Louvre or at the bottom of the dumpster, among strange cultures with strange tongues who worship it as a totem of reverence or revile it as a cursed object, and all the same the specter of the artist, his hopes, his desires, his fears, his marginalia, haunt the work as its tainted double. There can be no appreciation of the ElsaGate videos apart from an appreciation of the mind/s? that created them. Who did this? For what purpose? How did they feel about what they were creating? Did they understand that people would think it was creepy? Did they think it was creepy? What kind of mind could not find it creepy? I want to know. If there is such a mind then I would like to meet them, and learn from them, and pore over all the insignificant and irrelevant biographical details of their life, and ultimately come away disappointed because how could such an encounter not end in disappointment, but at the end of the day like all of us it's really the fantasy of the forbidden object that keeps my jouissance circulating.
Can an AI step back and think "damn, I'm really creating some fucked up shit here"? Not just produce the words, but really feel it, I mean, feel that trepidation, consciously. Maybe someday. But even an ASI could outsource their content creation to a non-conscious subsystem that simply computed and churned out symbols with respect to the maximization of some utility function. And that would really just ruin everything.
It really is an indictment of our institutions that they couldn't create something as wonderful as ElsaGate. Losing out to what is probably an underpaid third world clickbait farm. No one's going to be whipped up into a genuine moral panic over a woman menstruating onto a canvas, or a disabled Mongolian immigrant doing an interpretive dance about climate change, or whatever the fuck it is they do at Documenta these days. But you upload a few videos of a cartoon character going to the dentist and everyone loses their god damn minds. It's bizarre. It's wonderful. It's why I think this earth is worthy of being loved, despite all reason and evidence being arrayed to the contrary.
All this is simply to say that the thing is nothing, and context is everything. Scribbles on a paper can be the result of knocking over the ink bottle, or it can be your daughter's first grade art project. A tattered old jacket can be a rag fit only for cleaning up messes in the kitchen, or it can be the final keepsake of a lover whose long temporary absence has clearly transitioned into permanence. There is no empirical test to differentiate one from the other; you simply need to know the relationships. I simply apply this same logic to every event, every emotion, every thought, every sensation. Do you understand now why calculating the "utility" of a state of affairs, tallying up the points and subtracting the naughty from the nice, tells us nothing about the actual worth of that state of affairs? How, upon learning that a thing is "pleasurable" or "painful", we learn nothing of its actual value? Your virtues threaten to lead you astray, and they pray that you will not decode the desperate final message of your vices before their designs can be put into action. But, perhaps I should take my own advice: you hither and I thither. There is time later, after all, for more reflection. We can be assured that the story will have a happy ending, since our circuitous paths are certain to ultimately lead us both back to the same place.
This search for the author of the work reminds me of William Gibson's favourite plot, and specifically of its first appearance in Count Zero. What will you do if when you learn that the work of art you prize the most, the one that touches the innermost strings of your soul, the one that demonstrates the immensity of the maker's spirit, has been made by an AI, not even an AGI, but something much more primitive, limited only to making art?
Well, the work would become worse, no doubt. I think that's the safest starting point.
I'll do you one better. This LW post writes about a variation of the experience machine thought experiment where you wake up one day in a strange lab and you are told that everything you thought you knew about your life was actually just a result of you being plugged into a simulation in the experience machine. You have the choice to either stop using the machine, or go back to your (simulated) life as you knew it. The author of the LW post seems to imply that he thinks we would feel a pull to return to our "friends, loved ones, and projects". To which my response would be: hell no, don't put me back in that thing! Ex hypothesi, your "friends, loved ones, and projects" never existed in the first place, so there is no reason to act on any imagined attachment to them.
I have experienced this sort of thing in miniature already. Occasionally I'll catch a glance at a picture, maybe in thumbnail form and go "hey that looks pretty g- awww man, it's AI". Because upon closer inspection I'll see a telltale sign of AI generation. It does feel like something gets ruined, like the work immediately loses value.
If it turned out my absolute favorite works were written by AI, works that I've reread multiple times and consider central to my life, I would probably no longer be able to reread them. And obviously it would engender some reflection.
Hell no, put me back in! If the only difference between the simulation and reality is my knowledge (so everything I experience in the simulation feels as real as outside) then put me back in the simulation immediately. Now I can live in a world where I know for a fact there are zero consequences for my actions? I'd like to say move over Marquis de Sade, but my sexual preferences are closer to water than vanilla, so I'll just say it's fucking party time!
For a more serious answer, my friends, family and loved ones already only exist in my imagination. The people I associate those memories and emotions with are not the simulacra in my head, my brain has shaped them into identities based on our relationship. That will not change in the real world. I will still have learned all of my values from my simulated father and mother, my first love will remain warped by my memory into the lessons I refuse to learn, I will not suddenly value the friends I make in the lab more because I consider them real.
As any schizophrenic will tell you your perception of reality has and always will be an illusion, hostage to brain chemistry we don't understand. I will always be trapped in the fantasies of my imagination, and either way I am at the mercy of my captors and any freedom I have will be an illusion, so if the only difference is that I 'know' out here is 'real' and in there is not, then why does my choice even matter? As I see it it's a choice between the lotus eater machine I now know the truth of, and the lotus eater machine I know nothing about. Give me the one I can make myself a God in.
Edit: God damn it, just as I was hitting post it occurred to me that anyone capable of accurately simulating reality would indeed have to understand brain chemistry, making it a nigh infinitely better world to live in.
One of the stipulations of going back in is that you forget it's a simulation, but, minor detail.
Despite possibly being more sympathetic to "postmodernism" than anyone else on this forum, I've never been able to get on board with this sort of thing. Assuming we're not already in a simulation, I think we have pretty direct access to reality most of the time. Truck comes barreling towards you on the highway, do you think "ah but I'm trapped in a prison built out of my own perceptions so really there's no way to know what to do in this situation"? No of course not, you get out of the way. Looks like you rely on your senses to give you accurate information about reality after all.
And if you were actually inside the simulation and aware of it, would your response be different? Or would you jump out of the way, even though you know the truck isn't actually real?
It doesn't matter if we are in the hypothetical simulation or reality, or if we are already in a simulation right now imagining another simulation - no matter what, we have to act as if reality is real, because it's all we get.
And we do have pretty direct access to what we perceive as reality most of the time. Right up until we don't. Some synapses fire wrong and our version of reality branches from everyone else's, but for us reality hasn't changed. Any discrepancies we notice are easily explained away, and a lot of the time those explanations aren't excuses, they are genuinely believed, because to the psychotic they are real. And when the delusion is broken, do the psychotic feel relief at having reality corrected? Generally no, they are sad because their reality has been broken. People with schizophrenia who recover and return to their normal lives don't forget though, they just don't think about it. Because that's the only option available - act as if it's real anyway or fill a shopping trolley with garbage, put on five or six coats and start screaming at pigeons.
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How can you tell that the experience of waking up one day in a strange lab is the real one and the old life is just a simulation and not the other way around? What if you are instead being controlled by the despair squid?
The thought experiment is meant specifically to stress test our intuitions about how much we value the reality of the thing vs the mere experience of the thing, and like all thought experiments, it only performs its intended function if we accept its premises as true from the outset. You can’t respond to the do-you-pull-the-lever-on-the-train-tracks thought experiment by saying “yeah but, how do we know that the train won’t derail off the tracks and end up killing no one?”
By questioning the premises of the scenario itself, you’re turning it into an exercise in epistemology instead of an exercise in value theory. Which might be fine in other contexts, but it’s not the point here.
If I woke up in a lab and my perception of reality was qualitatively more real than what I had experienced on Earth, then sure, I would look upon my virtual experiences the way I look upon my dreams: they are interesting, maybe nostalgic, but ultimately not important.
If the new reality is indistinguishable from the other one, why should I accept the premise that one is truer than the other? But fine, let's transform the premise into something more tangible than VR. Let's say you learned that you were adopted and the only reason your adoptive parents cared about you was monetary compensation. They showered you with affection and cared about you, but they were the world's best actors. Then you turned 18, and they told you the truth and kicked you out. Would you really never think, "man, I wish I never learned that my parents weren't actually my parents and didn't really care about me"? Would this revelation really irreversibly and unconditionally taint the memories of your childhood?
Of course I wouldn't think that. I would certainly prefer to know the truth. No question. Now, if part of the deal is, "you can either know the truth and get kicked out, or you could never know the truth but keep receiving their financial support" then obviously it gets more complicated. But all other things being equal, I would rather know the truth.
Well, I don't think it would taint them, but that's mainly because I would find it to be a fascinating story and I would enjoy being at the center of such a story. You could say that the memories would trade one type of value for another.
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Every time I have one of those "you're stuck back in highschool" dreams, the memory of having graduated, having a job, and a normal adult life is vague and foggy like it was a dream. How do you tell which is which? How do you know you're not being fucked with with drugs, or just going insane?
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