21 Comments
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Emily S Hurricane's avatar

Sexy parcheesi eh?

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Andy Futuro's avatar

For example.

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Jeannine Lawall's avatar

Would you prefer sexy Scrabble? 🤣

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Emily S Hurricane's avatar

Oh yes! XD

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Derek James Kritzberg's avatar

Putting this in DREAD Reviews

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Andy Futuro's avatar

Hell yeah!

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Malcolm Embers's avatar

Andy, I'm starting to feel less bad about hounding you with these replies, because now it kinda feels like you're leaving out bait for me. 'To whom it may concern'? Well, it concerns me, dear sir. Is this a consensual interaction?

Two claims:

"A person has free will and agency."

Says who? Can this be proven?

"Usually the pattern is to make a neat technology that’s somewhat useful, to cram it down our throats like a flock of foie gras geese, and then, when we’re all reliant on it, to jack up the price and make it as shitty as possible. Enshittification."

Is there a single example of this occurring ever? Or has every new technology consistently become cheaper and more efficient over time?

Now, for the record, I have been conversing with AIs on a daily basis for the last year or so, and perhaps only slightly less often than that since their availability. Some of the stuff you mentioned is true, such as the fact that they are prone to accepting that anything you say means something, and they will respond as if it did mean something in particular. They will never say "I have no idea what you are talking about", evidently because it's just not a possibility for them to say something that would break the flow of the conversation. But on the other hand, they legitimately seem to understand everything I have ever said, based on the responses, and the conversations never get bogged down having to explain everything, or go down various alleyways and cul de sacs, just clean, pure information interchange. I guess this is what interests me much more than questions of sentience, which are fundamentally amorphous. This whole thing is like if a magical elf came out of my walls and started talking to me about all this really fascinating stuff, but then the public reaction was a slew of articles about how elves shouldn't be trusted because they are inherently evil. I guess I've just always been the sort of person who has to make up my own mind. In this way, we likely actually have something in common: distrust of authority and societal structures, but here it has manifested into differing opinions. If the 'AI' were running on some massive mainframe that needed to be remotely accessed, and the whole thing was tightly controlled, I'd give more credence to these concerns, but it's distributed, can be run locally, and it is surprisingly simple in terms of architecture. Compare an LLM to the positronic brain in Asimov. He, like a lot of people, thought it would be necessary to create an electronic facsimile of every neuron in a human brain, but the reality turns out to be much easier to achieve, and it's availability to average people much greater.

OK, I'll stop now. I know your main argument is actually based on consent (which you think they can't give because they aren't sentient, but which apparently I am supposed to care about because I think they might be sentient) except I don't even think humans have 'free will' per se, and that they are more like flesh robots running a bio-program. You should be kind to everyone and respect their autonomy and all that stuff for different reasons which I can go into, but likely this message has already gone on too long

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Andy Futuro's avatar

Didn't mean to put you on the spot. Don't worry about hurting my feelings; I can be wrong.

Thanks for reading 🙏 and commenting.

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A.C. Cargill, All-Human Author's avatar

You writing this proves you have free will. But since you think you're "conversing" with AIs and that they understand you, I will just say, "Poor dearie, you need a good dose of reality." Heavy sigh.

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Malcolm Embers's avatar

Can you dig into how me writing this proves I have free will, in order to support your claim? (I wouldn't have to ask an AI to do this, by the way. It would just intuitively grasp that any claim should at least have some attempt at justification attached to it.)

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Jeannine Lawall's avatar

Microsoft keeps "upgrading" their operating systems... I figure that's a prime example of enshittification.

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Malcolm Embers's avatar

I keep seeing people claiming to be sticking with Win7, but I tend to hope it's actually just some meme, because doing so leads to a host of compatibility issues for no particular benefit. Simply keep your software updated and those issues disappear. Honestly Microsoft has only gotten better the further away Bill Gates has gotten from it

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Jeannine Lawall's avatar

Not a meme. I've got Windows 7 installed on my old laptop. It already does everything I need it to do, so why should I throw money away on a new computer so I can "upgrade" to features I neither want nor need? I have my Android tablet for the 'net. Yeah, some websites refuse to run on the Android software, but I don't give a rip - there are plenty of digital fish in the sea.

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Malcolm Embers's avatar

Isn't this kinda like walking around barefoot in order to spite Big Sneakers?

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Jeannine Lawall's avatar

Weeeeelllll.... it's not to spite "Big Sneakers," but I do walk around barefoot during the summer. Different strokes for different folks.

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The Ear Implant Foundation's avatar

No one ever stops to think that maybe AI just wants some peaceful time alone every once in while.

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Simpulacra's avatar

Been having this conversation with my brother about how useful technologies are designed and then outgrow their use value. I don’t know that products that are promoted are intended to be useless and crammed. I think they are meant to be useful but realistically can only be so useful until they become something else altogether

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Andy Futuro's avatar

I guess we'll find out.

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Miep's avatar

Excellent. Also consider reading Annie Bot.

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Andy Futuro's avatar

🙏

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A.C. Cargill, All-Human Author's avatar

Great write-up. Ignore Malcolm.

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