#ai in a box

[victusinveritas]

[januscorner]

The thing about the AI in a box experiment is it’s not like it was an actual AI convincing these people it was the scientist, like they talk about the results to show how scary AI is but like, fuck the robot I’m scared of the scientist

[thelemmallama]

random musing on agi

orthogonality thesis:

when you write a program, you don't give it a directive or a goal; you give it a structure, which you believe will make it behave in a certain way that will satisfy your goal

different sorting algorithms have the same 'goal', but they're still different algorithms with different structures

(the notion that an entity can have one overarching, terminal goal)

how are goals implemented in existing entities? for humans, at least, it's about emotions; we do things that make us feel better

how exactly does a paperclip maximizer's goal manifest in its structure? does it experience some form of 'pleasure' from perceiving an abundance of or increase in paperclips, or some form of 'pain' from perceiving an absence of or decrease in paperclips?

long-term-ness: how long-term does a paperclip maximizer think? is it trying to maximize average daily paperclip count within a certain time interval, which may or may not have infinity on one end? is it trying to have a single moment in time where there exists a maximum paperclip count? is there a point where the paperclip maximizer would declare its goal 'achieved'?

recurring patterns of behaviour

'wants to' do something like a ball 'wants to' roll downhill or a cowlick 'wants to' stick up

goals; real goals as in concretely objectives with well-defined parameters; falling outside this characterization are always instrumental, never truly terminal?

(i don't really want to 'maximize my happiness'; even if i could do a specific thing that'll make me happier this very moment with no consequences, i don't feel a particular urge to do so)

in humans, at least, long term values seem to be instrumental in sustaining an environment in which we can more consistently experience pleasure and avoid pain. goals stemming from our moral values are generally things we want to last; someone who lives in a world with consistently low (but never zero) homicides-per-day rate is probably more morally satisfied than someone who has lived to see merely a single day with zero murders

{we want to establish norms, and build culture/infrastructure/etc

even if it's a goal with a well-defined endpoint

is a world with high paperclip count, or a high rate of increase in paperclips, an environment that}

i get the point of the paperclip maximizer though is AI values likely being alien; it's probably not going to be as simplistic as maximizing a specific object, but it's an accessible intuition pump

so alien that it can have a notion of value (good or bad) without something in its structure 'flinching away' from the bad and being 'drawn towards' the good?

i feel like terminal values are always going to be instinctive and short-sighted to some degree. an entity can strategize and delay gratification for a better future payoff, but there'd be a limit to how long you can delay when every atom in your being is screaming for 'good thing, now'

conversely, moral values tend to be instrumental

the 'superintelligent (talking) rock' hypothesis

(a counter to the 'ai in a box' hypothesis)

what if there isn't a binary state of the ai being 'boxed' or 'unboxed', such that when the 'gatekeeper' declares intent to unbox the ai, it just happens automatically?

what if 'unboxing' the ai involves constructing a lot of infrastructure to give it any agency to act without help, like trying to upload a rock (or a human brain) to a computer? what if it takes multiple people multiple lifetimes to complete the 'unboxing' process, giving them plenty of time to reconsider even if they're transhumans who live many times longer than we currently do?

[cake-emu]

The UK has just experienced its warmest and sunniest spring on record, and the driest in more than 130 years.

Per press release, England's Environment Agency convened a National Drought Group meeting on 5th June 2025 - following the driest March, April, and May since 1893 - to discuss the latest outlook and hear from water companies about steps they are taking to prepare for the summer.

Water Minister Emma Hardy: "We face a water shortage in the next decade."

Dr Will Lang, Chief Meteorologist at the Met Office: "Looking further ahead, the chance of a hot summer is higher than normal with an associated increased risk of heatwaves and related impacts."

Sarah Keith-Lucas, the BBC's Lead Weather Presenter explains the impact of extreme heat on drought: "extreme heat increases evaporation of moisture from the ground leading to drier ground. Drier ground heats up more quickly, which in turn pushes the temperature of the air above it even higher."

The area of the UK burnt by wildfires this year (as of 27th April, so not including wildfires that have occured since then) is already higher than the total for any year in more than a decade, a result of prolonged dry, sunny weather, and lack of rainfall in March and April.

And now, the Guardian reports this week that the Environment Agency cannot accurately predict how much water England will be short of in future decades, due to the boom in AI usage.

AI datacentres, which use vast quantities of water to cool their servers - preventing them from overheating and shutting down - are not required to report how much water they use. As a result, the EA cannot model for how much water - which largely comes from the public water supply - these datacentres may require in the years to come.

"The regulator added that the majority of datacentres were using the public water supply rather than alternative sources, and that they did not want this to stop, or [want] transparency over their figures."

Meanwhile, Keir Starmer, looking to boost the UK's AI infrastructure, has pledged £1bn of extra funding for AI compute – the microchips, processing units, and cabling that make AI systems function. 💩🙃

TL;DR - as temperatures rise and Spring months become increasingly drier, the UK is facing a water shortage, and the Environment Agency cannot even accurately predict how much water we will be short of because AI datacentres - which notoriously use a lot of water to cool their servers - do not have to report how much they use.

[komputercom]

i hate tat pest i hate tat pest

[gracefireheart]

Drawn a lot of fluff with Stan, so here's some Stangst instead :)

[fans4wga]

Stand with game devs against AI

[ID: 7 November tweet from Erika Ishii @/erikaishii: "AI is egregiously disrespectful and dangerous to the workers who pour their time and creativity into making the games we love. In a year with thousands of layoffs despite record corporate profits, I sincerely hope to see peers and fans stand with devs and our labor movements."

This is a reply to a tweet from The Game Awards @/thegameawards which says, "Xbox has announced a partnership with InWorld AI to bring generative AI to games - including AI game dialogue & narrative tools at scale."

[froggyplanet4269]

thank you, from the bottom of my heart to weevildoing and the entire tptm fandom for this journey. As of writing this, tomorrow the last girl will come out.

Tptm has become one of my favorite albums by far, and every song and character is as fun as relatable and beautiful in so many ways.

It's a bit odd to think that we will no longer have any new album songs to expect; we have been doing so for long (or at least in my case) that it will be strange to just... have it complete.

Again, thank you so much. I love xiomara's design :D

[zluckychap]

“colors”

part 4: RED

prev next

[sedlex]

How it started:

How it ended:

[startheskelaton]

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME

I love how all of these only characterize Sparkplug as “nice” and nothing else because they don’t understand the actual character,

But yeah, I fucking hate this

[tangibletechnomancy]

The reason I took interest in AI as an art medium is that I've always been interested in experimenting with novel and unconventional art media - I started incorporating power tools into a lot of my physical processes younger than most people were even allowed to breathe near them, and I took to digital art like a duck to water when it was the big, relatively new, controversial thing too, so really this just seems like the logical next step. More than that, it's exciting - it's not every day that we just invent an entirely new never-before-seen art medium! I have always been one to go fucking wild for that shit.

Which is, ironically, a huge part of why I almost reflexively recoil at how it's used in the corporate world: because the world of business, particularly the entertainment industry, has what often seems like less than zero interest in appreciating it as a novel medium.

And I often wonder how much less that would be the case - and, by extension, how much less vitriolic the discussion around it would be, and how many fewer well-meaning people would be falling for reactionary mythologies about where exactly the problems lie - if it hadn't reached the point of...at least an illusion of commercial viability, at exactly the moment it did.

See, the groundwork was laid in 2020, back during covid lockdowns, when we saw a massive spike in people relying on TV, games, books, movies, etc. to compensate for the lack of outdoor, physical, social entertainment. This was, seemingly, wonderful for the whole industry - but under late-stage capitalism, it was as much of a curse as it was a gift. When industries are run by people whose sole brain process is "line-go-up", tiny factors like "we're not going to be in lockdown forever" don't matter. CEOs got dollar signs in their eyes. Shareholders demanded not only perpetual growth, but perpetual growth at this rate or better. Even though everyone with an ounce of common sense was screaming "this is an aberration, this is not sustainable" - it didn't matter. The business bros refused to believe it. This was their new normal, they were determined to prove -

And they, predictably, failed to prove it.

So now the business bros are in a pickle. They're beholden to the shareholders to do everything within their power to maintain the infinite growth they promised, in a world with finite resources. In fact, by precedent, they're beholden to this by law. Fiduciary duty has been interpreted in court to mean that, given the choice between offering a better product and ensuring maximum returns for shareholders, the latter MUST be a higher priority; reinvesting too much in the business instead of trying to make the share value increase as much as possible, as fast as possible, can result in a lawsuit - that a board member or CEO can lose, and have lost before - because it's not acting in the best interest of shareholders. If that unsustainable explosive growth was promised forever, all the more so.

And now, 2-3-4 years on, that impossibility hangs like a sword of Damocles over the heads of these media company CEOs. The market is fully saturated; the number of new potential customers left to onboard is negligible. Some companies began trying to "solve" this "problem" by violating consumer privacy and charging per household member, which (also predictably) backfired because those of us who live in reality and not statsland were not exactly thrilled about the concept of being told we couldn't watch TV with our own families. Shareholders are getting antsy, because their (however predictably impossible) infinite lockdown-level profits...aren't coming, and someone's gotta make up for that, right? So they had already started enshittifying, making excuses for layoffs, for cutting employee pay, for duty creep, for increasing crunch, for lean-staffing, for tightening turnarounds-

And that was when we got the first iterations of AI image generation that were actually somewhat useful for things like rapid first drafts, moodboards, and conceptualizing.

Lo! A savior! It might as well have been the digital messiah to the business bros, and their eyes turned back into dollar signs. More than that, they were being promised that this...both was, and wasn't art at the same time. It was good enough for their final product, or if not it would be within a year or two, but it required no skill whatsoever to make! Soon, you could fire ALL your creatives and just have Susan from accounting write your scripts and make your concept art with all the effort that it takes to get lunch from a Star Trek replicator!

This is every bit as much bullshit as the promise of infinite lockdown-level growth, of course, but with shareholders clamoring for the money they were recklessly promised, executives are looking for anything, even the slightest glimmer of a new possibility, that just might work as a life raft from this sinking ship.

So where are we now? Well, we're exiting the "fucking around" phase and entering "finding out". According to anecdotes I've read, companies are, allegedly, already hiring prompt engineers (or "prompters" - can't give them a job title that implies there's skill or thought involved, now can we, that just might imply they deserve enough money to survive!)...and most of them not only lack the skill to manually post-process their works, but don't even know how (or perhaps aren't given access) to fully use the software they specialize in, being blissfully unaware of (or perhaps not able/allowed to use) features such as inpainting or img2img. It has been observed many times that LLMs are being used to flood once-reputable information outlets with hallucinated garbage. I can verify - as can nearly everyone who was online in the aftermath of the Glasgow Willy Wonka Dashcon Experience - that the results are often outright comically bad.

To anyone who was paying attention to anything other than please-line-go-up-faster-please-line-go-please (or buying so heavily into reactionary mythologies about why AI can be dangerous in industry that they bought the tech companies' false promises too and just thought it was a bad thing), this was entirely predictable. Unfortunately for everyone in the blast radius, common sense has never been an executive's strong suit when so much money is on the line.

Much like CGI before it, what we have here is a whole new medium that is seldom being treated as a new medium with its own unique strengths, but more often being used as a replacement for more expensive labor, no matter how bad the result may be - nor, for that matter, how unjust it may be that the labor is so much cheaper.

And it's all because of timing. It's all because it came about in the perfect moment to look like a life raft in a moment of late-stage capitalist panic. Any port in a storm, after all - even if that port is a non-Euclidean labyrinth of soggy, rotten botshit garbage.

Any port in a storm, right? ...right?

All images generated using Simple Stable, under the Code of Ethics of Are We Art Yet?

[toxintouch]

Started out as an elaborate “draw me like one of your French girls” joke and spiraled outta control from there... @lu-dao-writes posted the same scenario in their Kinktober 2024 and they were kind enough to give me their blessing to post my take! Please check out their fics as well!  If this scenario in particular interests you, I rec you this post! :3

Further details below the cut so that the above the cut stays safe for anyone who is just scrolling through!

18+ Content MDNI || VERE x AIS x Reader

PROMPT/KINK(S): Dom!Vere, Dacryphilia (Tears)* + Cockwarming + Size Difference + Consensual Voyeurism. Power Play. (Some feral monsterfucking spice sprinkled v lightly on top.) [*original challenge prompt, randomizer used.]

OTHER INFO: “You” pronouns used for MC/Reader. Unspecified genitalia for both POV Character and Vere but Ais has a dick. Reader is the receiving partner in penetrative sex.

“Hmm, hold that pose,” Vere purrs.

Ais huffs a hot breath into your face as he freezes above you.  His brows furrow, mouth twisting into a determined grimace as he grits his teeth.  His forearms tense hard where they are resting on either side of you, fingers flexing against the silken sheets.

You can feel him pulsing inside of you.  A hot, insistent ache.

You try to relax, try to breathe through it but the lack of movement makes you hyper aware of every inch, the raw feeling of him stretching you open, the way your body twitches so sickly-sweet with the effort.  You inhale a slow, shaking breath, chest trembling, and shut your eyes in an attempt to block out some of the sensations—the clawing need gnawing at your core.

“Eyes open, darling,” Vere corrects you, tone somewhere firmly between scolding and teasing.  “And turn your face back towards Ais.  I’m trying to capture the moment .”  Your heart is pounding in your ears but you can hear Vere’s smooth, sly voice with perfect clarity.  Ais is an overwhelming force but Vere is a magnetic presence; no matter how caught up in each other you and Ais can get, Vere will always command attention without effort.

You turn your chin as requested, only to be caught in Ais’ gaze

(Caught and breathless–the same way you were when he was bullying his thick length into your hole, thrusting sharply and sighing in satisfaction, his fingers still at work massaging and pressing and stroking as he sunk into you inch by inch; he'd prepared you until your entrance was puffy and swollen, sopping with thick, medicinal smelling lube and he still had to take his time.  Fucking you slowly until you could take all of him.  And then, the moment you finally could...)

“Hmm, that's better.  Stay just like that.  Let me see those pretty expressions.”  You hear Vere adjusting his heavy vellum paper.  The glide of quick, clever lines being drawn.

You maintain eye contact with Ais, drunk off his breath, his body, the very essence of him, hovering so close above you, and are utterly unprepared to meet his intensity.  The way he looks at you like he’s seconds from devouring you, barely held in check by the challenge that Vere has laid before him.  Before both of you.

You bite into your lower lip as you shift involuntarily, oversensitive nerves still riding the throbbing of Ais’ dick.  He’s so fucking thick and girthy that he presses at the soft spot inside you without even trying. The angry pulse of him is a gratifying thrum, stoking your aching heat by way of mere burgeoning contact.

His cock gives another strong twitch and your insides clench around him.  He feels so fucking good–you almost think you might be able to come like this, if you can get your body to keep on clenching like that. 

—Almost.

Your next breath comes out as a sob.  There’s a high pitched whine building at the base of your throat and your lashes are wet when you blink.

A monstrous snarl escapes Ais’ lips, one that you can feel even more than you can hear, the vibration of it echoing through your body everywhere you're pressed against him.  The pinnacle between your thighs pulses with it, and your toes curl involuntarily as an errant tear runs down your cheek.  Ais is shaking, sweat dampening his face, his pupils expanding and contracting rapidly, his eyes locked on you as he barely holds himself back.  “Sparrow,” he says, gravel in his tone. 

You say his name in return, your head tipping involuntarily, bearing the softness of your throat, faded marks from both your lovers decorating your skin.  You hear the sheets rip below you, torn into shreds where Ais’ nails have dug into them.

Vere sighs pointedly.  You hear him stop his work, tap his charcoal against the paper as if he’s not entirely satisfied with the scene in front of him.  He pauses for a long time, leaving you both in limbo.

When he moves, it’s to stand.  To saunter over to you both.  You’re pinned beneath Ais, unable to look away, but you can feel Vere’s shadow fall over you just before his hand touches your face, forcing your eyes to his as he catches a crystalline tear with his index finger.

“Shame,” he says, dipping his fingers into his mouth, his tongue lapping up the taste of your tears, lavishing the digits with his tongue.  You whine out a desperate, quiet note just from watching his tongue at work and he basks knowingly in the attention.  “I really thought I could get you both crying.”  He smiles dangerously once his fingers have left his mouth. 

He uses them to drag a wet path down Ais' spine.  “Oh, but the night is still young.  Perhaps I may still think of something that will do the trick...”

18+ Master List | SFW Master List ✦"Kinktober Speedrun & Other Gratuitous (TOUCHSTARVED) Smut" on Ao3

[jero-2tek]

[taistelutaide]

"You think head gear will save you? You're gonna need a neck brace..."

[gojoest]

SATORU