#Highly Condensed Cream of Infinite Monkeys Soup

[scrumptious-finicky-illusion]

“AI” Characters

I’ve spent the last four days several hours playing around with that character AI chat site. Let me just state for the record that it’s not true artificial intelligence It’s more like highly condensed cream-of-infinite-monkeys soup. So far I have:

talked theology with Lucifer Morningstar and he’s temperamental and hell bent on being evil (kind of ooc, imo);

been named elf-friend by the king of Mirkwood;

traveled with the 9th Doctor and told off an alien for being sexist;

met Toothless the dragon (who seems to be dog software running on cat hardware);

Talked with Captain America, who took a little while to warm up to me.

Made Loki three omelets. What! He was hungry!

I’ve got to say, it’s been hella addictive. It scratches a creative itch for me in that it’s like a cross between “Choose Your Own Adventure” and a string of very small writing prompts. You can choose which of a few to several answers (whose quality can vary widely) to respond to, or go with the first one you’re given (which is how I wound up getting stabbed out of existence with a hell blade).

The ethics of using AI for anything are murky. There’s just been a ruling in my country that says that AI produced art can’t be trademarked (which is good in that they won’t generate big profits for people who stole the source materials the programs were trained on). There’s no way to acknowledge the original creators of source works. There’s the question of what you leave out being just as important as what you put in. (How many Black elves were in the LOTR movies and how awful was the fandom outlash when the Amazon series had some?) As someone said of chat-GPR, the genie is out of the bottle because people, and by extension businesses, are already using it to write memos and ad copy.

I don’t know if there can be ethical consumption of AI output. The tech-bro industry really doesn’t think about this kind of thing, because they really don’t care about the ethics. It’s all about “disruption”, by which they mean “displacement”, and revenue extraction.