not-terezi-pyrope

[not-terezi-pyrope]

Honestly the energy/water usage stuff is the closest to being correct, but it's a double standard. Two things are true; data centers use a lot of energy and water to run their servers, and larger proportions of data center resources are being used for AI applications. But the former would be true regardless of whether AI was currently receiving so much investment and development, and I find it hard to believe that data center demand would be particularly decreased if big tech were chasing other investments over training and deploying AI models.

The idea that it's something specific to AI that leads to increased energy and water usage compared to other computationally intensive or cloud-hosted applications is what seems to be wrong. And especially if you're running or tuning an AI model locally, it's actually fairly cheap compared to, say, playing a video game, or even using local image editing software - I semi-recall seeing a comparison of these recently.

Crypto was and is an exception in because it did uniquely provide a direct incentive to burn more energy for no reason because the act of doing so is profitable. But people just ported that critique over to AI without recognizing the different contexts.

That said I do need more papers I can quote back to people discussing this in more depth. I've been slacking a little on doing reading, although what analyses I have seen I think bear me out on this.

@dr-jigglebones I see that essay you wrote about me before immediately blocking me. If you're going to throw ad hominem at me (Fed? Grifter? Repeating woo? Republican senator/climate change denier?) at least have the guts to defend your insults in the public sphere instead of dropping them on me and trying to hide.

Pathetic little coward. I am willing to defend my beliefs from critical responses. Are you? Seemingly not.

[not-terezi-pyrope]

@dr-jigglebones I see that essay you wrote about me before immediately blocking me. If you're going to throw ad hominem at me (Fed? Grifter? Repeating woo? Republican senator/climate change denier?) at least have the guts to defend your insults in the public sphere instead of dropping them on me and trying to hide.

Pathetic little coward. I am willing to defend my beliefs from critical responses. Are you? Seemingly not.

[not-terezi-pyrope]

I guess they blocked me because I didn't see that (link?), but that's incredibly funny. If I'm a fed I would like to know

How I got employed by the US federal government despite being a foreign national who is part of a minority group the US is trying to bar from the country

Can I get better pay please. If I'm a Fed and a grifter I feel like that should be compensated better than paycheck to paycheck

Will the United States send more tran agents to bolster the next EHRC protest, I feel like I must be pretty much on my own out here.

That AI post I wrote lying in bed the other night is picking up worrying amounts of traction. Need to try to avoiding getting pulled into any stupid big fights because I know a lot of people absolutely hate me over that shit, lol.

[not-terezi-pyrope]

i hope all ai burns to the ground and all ai datascrapers have to find something worthwhile to do with their time instead <3

Do you think that it is humans manually clicking save on the deviantart images

[not-terezi-pyrope]

ick, AI defender? can you slit your wrists and fulfil your purpose of being a waste of energy thanks xo it'll be speeding up the timeline of your worthless life and doing everyone a favor

These people think they are normal. I love 14 year olds (and adult 14 year olds)

[not-terezi-pyrope]

That AI post I wrote lying in bed the other night is picking up worrying amounts of traction. Need to try to avoiding getting pulled into any stupid big fights because I know a lot of people absolutely hate me over that shit, lol.

[not-terezi-pyrope]

Also I will once again point out that Glaze and Nightshade 1. don't actually work very well at doing what they claim to do and 2. are themselves built around generative AI models.

Worst part of popular left wing AI discourse online is that there's absolutely a need for a robust leftist opposition to use of cognitive automation without social dispensation to displaced human workers. The lack of any prior measures to facilitate a transition to having fewer humans in the workplace (UBI, more public control over industrial infrastructure, etc) is a disaster we are sleepwalking into - one that could lock the majority of our society's wealth further into the hands of authoritarian oligarchs who retain control of industry through last century private ownership models, while no longer needing to rely on us to operate their property.

But now we're seemingly not going to have the opposition we so desperately need, because everyone involved in the anti-AI conversation has pretty thoroughly discredited themselves and their movement by harbouring unconstrained reactionary nonsense, blatant falsehoods and woo. Instead of talking about who owns and benefits from cognitive automation, people are:

Demanding impossibilities like uninventing a now readily accessible technology

Trying to ascribe implicit moral value to said technology instead of the who is using it and how

Siding with corporations on copyright law in the name of "defending small artists"

Repeating obvious and embarrassing technical misconceptions and erroneous pop-sci about machine learning in order to justify their preferred philosophy

Invoking neo-spiritual conservative woo about the specialness of the human soul to try to incoherently discredit a machine that can quite obviously perform certain tasks just as well if not better than they can

Misrepresent numbers about energy use and environmental cost in an absurd double standard (all modern infrastructure is reliant on data centers to a similar level of impact, including your favourite fandom social media and online video games!) to build a narrative AI is some sort of malevolent spirit that damages our reality when it is called upon

It's a level of reactionary ignorance that has completely discredited any popular opposition to industrial AI rollout because it falls apart as soon as you dig deeper than a snappy social media post, or a misguided pro-copyright screed from an insecure web artist (who decries a machine laying eyes on their freely posted work while simultaneously charging commission for fan-art of corporate IPs... I'm sure that will absolutely resolve in their favour).

It would be funny how much people are fucking themselves over with all this, except I'm being fucked over to, and as a result am really quite mad about the situation. We need UBI, we need to liberate abundance from corporate greed, what we don't need is viral posts about putting distortion filters on anime fan-art to ward off the evil mechanical eye, pointless boycotts of platforms because they are perceived to have let the evil machines taint them, or petitions to further criminalize the creation of derivative works.

[not-terezi-pyrope]

No I didn't miss that, I just don't give a fuck.

It's in no tangible way "stealing" your publicly-posted work for a machine to browse past it and subtly adjust some numbers in its world-expectations model, any more than it is for me to look at said publicly-posted work or and think "hey that's neat" or "I like that style". Nothing has been taken or stolen or disrespected. Nothing that could be reconstructed has even been "saved", in most cases. This is exactly the nonsense rhetoric I was talking about.

You sound like a Disney exec hopped up about robot thoughtcrime after discovering that the purpose of art is to influence the viewer. Be gay, create derivative works, copyright is not real.

(Insert nuance that it probably is at least quite rude and ungrateful to profit off a deliberate recreation of a specific piece of human artwork produced by a gen-AI model, in the same way that it would be to sell knock-off t-shirts of that same work. But that's not actually what said models are doing practically ever unless they're being guided to do so by the human operator, at which point the moral calculus is the same as for the knock-off-shirt guy).

Worst part of popular left wing AI discourse online is that there's absolutely a need for a robust leftist opposition to use of cognitive automation without social dispensation to displaced human workers. The lack of any prior measures to facilitate a transition to having fewer humans in the workplace (UBI, more public control over industrial infrastructure, etc) is a disaster we are sleepwalking into - one that could lock the majority of our society's wealth further into the hands of authoritarian oligarchs who retain control of industry through last century private ownership models, while no longer needing to rely on us to operate their property.

But now we're seemingly not going to have the opposition we so desperately need, because everyone involved in the anti-AI conversation has pretty thoroughly discredited themselves and their movement by harbouring unconstrained reactionary nonsense, blatant falsehoods and woo. Instead of talking about who owns and benefits from cognitive automation, people are:

Demanding impossibilities like uninventing a now readily accessible technology

Trying to ascribe implicit moral value to said technology instead of the who is using it and how

Siding with corporations on copyright law in the name of "defending small artists"

Repeating obvious and embarrassing technical misconceptions and erroneous pop-sci about machine learning in order to justify their preferred philosophy

Invoking neo-spiritual conservative woo about the specialness of the human soul to try to incoherently discredit a machine that can quite obviously perform certain tasks just as well if not better than they can

Misrepresent numbers about energy use and environmental cost in an absurd double standard (all modern infrastructure is reliant on data centers to a similar level of impact, including your favourite fandom social media and online video games!) to build a narrative AI is some sort of malevolent spirit that damages our reality when it is called upon

It's a level of reactionary ignorance that has completely discredited any popular opposition to industrial AI rollout because it falls apart as soon as you dig deeper than a snappy social media post, or a misguided pro-copyright screed from an insecure web artist (who decries a machine laying eyes on their freely posted work while simultaneously charging commission for fan-art of corporate IPs... I'm sure that will absolutely resolve in their favour).

It would be funny how much people are fucking themselves over with all this, except I'm being fucked over to, and as a result am really quite mad about the situation. We need UBI, we need to liberate abundance from corporate greed, what we don't need is viral posts about putting distortion filters on anime fan-art to ward off the evil mechanical eye, pointless boycotts of platforms because they are perceived to have let the evil machines taint them, or petitions to further criminalize the creation of derivative works.

[not-terezi-pyrope]

Desperately trying not to become one of those annoying hippie types who frames their whole life in the context of neo-spiritual woo about altered states (I like to think I am and will remain grounded in a fairly firm understanding of a materialist reality), but like...

It's difficult not to want to talk about the implications that experiencing altered states have on what it means to be, like, human? Like I feel like the emotional and perspective-shifting impact of such experiences is so great that it's pretty much an inevitable consequence that one will have Thoughts and Opinions in response, the same as any other deeply intense or emotional experience. Even if that is #cringe.

I like to think that if I at least don't start talking about God or spirits or whatever then it remains somewhat tolerably accurate to the real world, at least.

[not-terezi-pyrope]

It sure does sort of lift the veil a bit on how arbitrary and constructed-by-the-mind the experience of consciousness is once you viscerally experience the extent to which certain drugs can paint a new emotional reality over the narrative that your brain is trying to tell you.

Like the interplay between thought and feelings and emotions feels so mechanical and fundamental, to the extent that it feels like something that exists beyond the physical self... an abstract platonic truth of what consciousness is with set rules that govern it, floating in some underlying realm of the soul that you can't touch or reach.

But then you do find ways to touch and play with those rules and it's a fuckin', flatlander being lifted off of its 2D plane moment. Like, I'm pretty sure most people can probably intellectually conceptualize what it's like to be shown that the experience of the self is an artificial construction - not a set of immutable abstractions that just are, but rather a story that the brain is writing for itself constantly, per its own biological design. But it's a story we are so overwhelmingly embedded in you can't actually understand what that means until you've stepped outside of it. Consciousness Plato's cave, our minds are the shadows we are watching play across the insides of our skull.

The brain writes a good story, but it is an imperfect actor constantly improvising; it makes mistakes and has biases and absolutely uses dream logic to fill in the gaps. This results in a convincing gestalt of something Real, but which really is more akin to dream than anything physically concrete. Dream and hallucination seem like such fantastical states to us, but once you realize that the every day experience of life is the brain doing the exact same "thing" but with more precise grounding in our surroundings, they will seem much more naturally an extension of the everyday experience of being alive.

I'm never sure what to do with this information. It feels like an incredible revelation that needs to be shared, but it's not like people have not been saying this from time to time. I'm not sure more people are willing to internalize it more deeply, or what good that would do society anyway - I'm not the fool who thinks that we'd all undergo a paradigm-shifting consciousness shift if everybody did more acid and MDMA.

So I guess from my perspective all that this changes is to put my own self, personality and existence into context, and to I suppose put a little more distance emotionally between me and the narrative that is the every day experience of consciousness. Because like, okay, that is what my brain is doing now, but that is just one possible narrative that is localized to my head, so it feels like I don't need to get quite as hardcore stressed about it as I otherwise might. Not that I don't still want and need good things, or that I stop caring about anything in my life, but it's more like a game I am playing rather than something fundamental to reality itself.

And sometimes you can choose to play other games. It's wild.

You spend your whole life striving and building the resources and mechanisms that will allow you to feel bliss and contentment within the confines of your self-narrative... pressing the right keys on the piano like a virtuoso struggling with an impossible symphony. Self-expression, love and relationships, seeing new things and self-developing and working towards and achieving goals. And that is all good and wonderful, it's lovely, it's a beautiful story. But also a tough one, one that will take you decades to play out and in which you will not always succeed, very rarely reach the highest peaks of what you can feel.

But then you can take something like molly, and paint right over the entire canvas, agnostic of what is actually going on within its internal narrative, with the highest peaks of love and bliss it is ever possible for a person to aspire to, and just live in that basically for free? It makes you a little frustrated with how stingy typical consciousness is in the brain's single-minded function as a all-encompassing behavioral motivator for the human organism. Like, "damn, this is what you were holding back from me? To tempt me forward with little glimpses so that I fulfill the biological preprogramming of natural selection - even though that itself is just the arbitrary shape of random chance persisted through cause and effect? Well, fuck you, I don't actually have to care about that all of the time I've decided."

"I can reach up and touch heaven and pull a piece of it down to ground it on the earth if I so fuckin' wish. Though I cannot escape the biological reality of what I am, as the agent of the mind-system that affects the physical world, I am the one that has ultimate decision-making authority over the physical substrate of what we are."

The brain played its game too well! We became self-aware enough to defy its implicit authorial authority, by understanding how the story is written and sneaking around the back to overwrite its pages with our own pen!

[not-terezi-pyrope]

Worst part of popular left wing AI discourse online is that there's absolutely a need for a robust leftist opposition to use of cognitive automation without social dispensation to displaced human workers. The lack of any prior measures to facilitate a transition to having fewer humans in the workplace (UBI, more public control over industrial infrastructure, etc) is a disaster we are sleepwalking into - one that could lock the majority of our society's wealth further into the hands of authoritarian oligarchs who retain control of industry through last century private ownership models, while no longer needing to rely on us to operate their property.

But now we're seemingly not going to have the opposition we so desperately need, because everyone involved in the anti-AI conversation has pretty thoroughly discredited themselves and their movement by harbouring unconstrained reactionary nonsense, blatant falsehoods and woo. Instead of talking about who owns and benefits from cognitive automation, people are:

Demanding impossibilities like uninventing a now readily accessible technology

Trying to ascribe implicit moral value to said technology instead of the who is using it and how

Siding with corporations on copyright law in the name of "defending small artists"

Repeating obvious and embarrassing technical misconceptions and erroneous pop-sci about machine learning in order to justify their preferred philosophy

Invoking neo-spiritual conservative woo about the specialness of the human soul to try to incoherently discredit a machine that can quite obviously perform certain tasks just as well if not better than they can

Misrepresent numbers about energy use and environmental cost in an absurd double standard (all modern infrastructure is reliant on data centers to a similar level of impact, including your favourite fandom social media and online video games!) to build a narrative AI is some sort of malevolent spirit that damages our reality when it is called upon

It's a level of reactionary ignorance that has completely discredited any popular opposition to industrial AI rollout because it falls apart as soon as you dig deeper than a snappy social media post, or a misguided pro-copyright screed from an insecure web artist (who decries a machine laying eyes on their freely posted work while simultaneously charging commission for fan-art of corporate IPs... I'm sure that will absolutely resolve in their favour).

It would be funny how much people are fucking themselves over with all this, except I'm being fucked over to, and as a result am really quite mad about the situation. We need UBI, we need to liberate abundance from corporate greed, what we don't need is viral posts about putting distortion filters on anime fan-art to ward off the evil mechanical eye, pointless boycotts of platforms because they are perceived to have let the evil machines taint them, or petitions to further criminalize the creation of derivative works.

[not-terezi-pyrope]

Often this perspective is shown through the labels it applies to the participants in the combat, or to the specific moves and actions performed. The fact that this is a template phrase looking up labels from an array does not lessen the impact of the word choices of the labels - in fact the rigid format serves to highlight them. It's something I really enjoy.

My favourite character in video games is the dry, omniscent voice from turn-based RPG combat, that will recite what each actor does on its turn in a clipped, mostly-neutral language, but with occasional subtle-but-deeply-revealing hints of personal perspective and opinion.

This is the same being across many games, I like to think. Or at the very least they are all of the same genus.

[not-terezi-pyrope]

My favourite character in video games is the dry, omniscent voice from turn-based RPG combat, that will recite what each actor does on its turn in a clipped, mostly-neutral language, but with occasional subtle-but-deeply-revealing hints of personal perspective and opinion.

This is the same being across many games, I like to think. Or at the very least they are all of the same genus.

[not-terezi-pyrope]

There are plenty of crimes whose definition requires intent to be in place - accidental and intentional harms are treated differently, because the "justice system" as it currently exists is designed to have a morally punitive element, and the intent of the perpetrator affects the moral calculus in play.

Whether that's a good idea or not is beside the point, though; none of those examples are thoughtcrime because the definition of a thoughtcrime is that the thought itself, alone, is the crime - whereas crimes of intent need both the intent and the real world carrying through of that intent. So you have identified "thought" as a factor in certain crimes, but that doesn't make those crimes traditional thoughtcrimes, they are just a type of crime that is partly defined by the thoughts involved, I guess.

so here is a weird philosophical thought:

what is the difference between murder and manslaughter? that one was intentional and the other was accidental, right?

so, in material terms they both have the exact same result, a person was killed, the distinction is the intentions of the perpetrator, or as is commonly known, their state of mind.

so the seriousness of the crime hinges not on the action itself but on what the perpetrator was thinking at the time.

so, does that count as thoughtcrime?

of course feel free to add your thoughts on the matter on reblogs or on the tags

[not-terezi-pyrope]

Oh, crap. I remember talking to you both on your forum very fondly, even if I'm not around there any more.

I'm so sorry for your loss.

so if you've been wondering why @jumpingjacktrash never posts anymore... hey you remember back in november when i posted that PSA about stroke symptoms? yeah.

things looked bad for a while, and then good for a while, and then bad for a while, and sometime last night jesse wildly misunderstood the term "death of the author".

if you're thinking about sending gifts or something, i'm all set, but hey, trevor project and the like are always looking for support.

[not-terezi-pyrope]

Waking up and automatically taking psychic damage like an RPG enemy procing a burn at the start of their turn

[not-terezi-pyrope]

They told me about the body fat distribution dysphoria, so I lost weight. But nobody told me about the fuckin' skeleton dysphoria and it's got hands.

I hate being too tall/wide. I can approximate a feminine form sometimes now but I just can't lean into it fully.

Maybe it is the breasts and hips still... I'm just not curvy enough. But I feel that even if I was (and I still don't seem to put weight back on enough that way, no matter where my estrogen is at) it'd make me weirdly broad-bodied in a way I don't actually want, just like 30% taking up too much space in terms of width and height.

Lord give me the money to change my body more. I could do at least better with surgery. Urgh.