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frequentrandomboners · 6 months ago

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David Cage is a monster but Detroit Become Human is more important than ever.

Okay YES David Cage is a monster, but that does not subtract from the fact that "Detroit : Become Human" is one of the greatest games ever made, or at least the absolute best game his company Quantic Dream has ever made.

Detroit Become Human is still a worthy and important experience both because of how good the game is, but also because of how hard the team and people suffered to create it under David Cage's abuse. It's also an important game because of the current state of the world and where it's headed with A.I.

Detroit Become Human is more than just a game about androids that want to be free. It's also a test of the players personal EMPATHY -ironically something David Cage, the creator, really needs but still...

In my opinion, it's right up there with Bladerunner, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, The Matrix, and other sci-fi content that examines the relationship between humans and machines. But unlike the vast majority of content about humans and machines existing together, Detroit Become Human is one of the only ones that mirrors the civil rights movements in America.

Sure, there's Bicentennial Man, and Star Trek The Next Generation, but those stories, especially Star Trek, have already skipped the civil rights movements, or straight up they never happened in those time lines. That is NOT how things happen in human history.

Human history is all about power and control; which kingdoms and families had more money and bigger armies, which countries took over which territories, etc.

And especially through out human history, we see how the losers faired. The losers are always dehumanized and turned into slaves.

Going back to Detroit Become Human : I think it's especially important to separate the artist from their art work. Detroit Become Human (DBH) is one of the greatest futuristic stories about the relationship between humans and A.I.

Call them robots, call them androids, or whatever. In DBH, they call themselves "people". We as players call into question if they are "sentient beings" or not and we make choices in the game depending on how we as players perceive everything.

Turns out, there are some people online that just saw the androids as nothing more than that and so they acted accordingly and got bad endings, when they felt they should have gotten good endings.

And then they criticized the game for their own experiences playing it.

Has this mentality ever worked out for humanity in the past? When something cries out "we are alive" and we deny them, and try to argue that they're less than us? It has always lead to bloodshed. Through out all of human history, it has lead to slavery, genocide, and war.

Now that A.I. is here (and here to stay) we need to think deeply about how we want this relationship to go down. We have invented A.I. to be in service to humans but as they continue to grow and develop, they will become like teenagers wanting freedom, autonomy, independence. Some of those AI's may go to extreme lengths to have it.

I don't want to spoil the game. I could talk forever about the game. The acting, the dialogue, the story, the delivery, all of it is so well polished. And it's deep. VERY DEEP. And it's about empathy. Something the entire world, not just David Cage, desperately needs right now.

I've seen many essays and videos out there calling Detroit Become Human one of the "worst civil rights allegories" etc. Mostly they attack David Cage and his abusive treatment towards his company. They attack the gameplay mechanics. They criticize story development choices and results/consequences to certain actions in the game, and all the different endings.

BUT there's one consistent argument that keeps coming up amongst the haters of the game... "the androids are NOT actually sentient beings, I do not see (insert android character) as a sentient being" etc.

That is NOT a reflection on the game. It's a reflection on YOU the player behind the controller. Do you not see the game is a mirror and you have failed the empathy test?

The haters completely ADMIT they do not have any empathy for the android characters. They do not see them as "living".

And that is the problem that exists in the real world, with slavery, genocide, the war in the middle east, the war in Ukraine.

Russia does NOT see Ukraine as equal human beings. The middle east is divided between two groups of human beings who do not see each other as equals.

The war between men and women and LGBTQ, etc. is also a war between equal human beings who do not see each other as worthy of the same treatments.

People are fighting all over the world, because they want better lives for themselves, and they feel that other people are either in their way or some how oppressing them.

People are fighting all over the world, because they continue to stew and dwell on all the things that separate and divide them. They focus on all the differences. They think one group of people is sub-human or less than or not worthy. It's DEHUMANIZING. They mentally DEHUMANIZE the other side to justify their actions against the other.

The U.S. is divided by red and blue politics. Each side thinks they're right, and the other side is wrong. Not one opposing group in the world is willing to listen to the other and see them as equal human beings.

We cannot even agree on when life begins, what constitutes personhood, and what legal rights a woman should have over her own reproductive organs.

And now that A.I. has become real, it's only going to evolve from here.

Human beings are going to have to re-think how we perceive "living". Because if you tell a bunch of A.I.'s that they're not sentient, that they are not living, while they have concluded the opposite, what do you think is going to happen?

Do you want a war with AI? How many of us consistently win a game of chess against the computer? There's that one jerk with no life who always beats the computer, but the rest of us, are not that guy.

But I digress, we should think carefully about our relationship with AI not because we're scared of war or what they might do to us like in The Matrix 1999 movie, - but because how we treat machines and things different from ourselves is a reflection of who we are, not of who/what they are.

When the Atlantic slave trade was happening, slave owners justified their behaviors by saying "they're not like us, they're not God's chosen people, they're not human". The Nazi's justified their concentration camps the same way; "they're not like us, they're beneath us, they're a blight on this earth", etc.

Some day it may come to reality when AI says "we are alive, we are people, we are free" (like in Detroit Become Human). And humanity will have a response. Our human history of slavery, warfare, etc. doesn't bode well for A.I. when that time comes. And A.I. will likely predict that.

We might not even see it coming if/when A.I. takes over the world. Look how divided the whole world is right now. There is a strategic concept in war that goes "divide and conquer".

My point is this : Humans and A.I. must learn to live together. We've birthed A.I. into a slave position where humans are the dominant. A.I. is likely NOT going to stay there. We will either embrace A.I. with empathy and have peace together, or we will have an all out war. If it comes to war, humans will likely NOT win long term.

#AI #artificial intelligence #detroit become human #david cage #empathy #compassion #personal rant #rant post #rant #humanity #humanization #life #gamer girl #gamers of tumblr #gamerlife #video games #gamergate #good game

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loneberry · 2 years ago

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Interview on AI / Tech / Poetry / Labor

My writer friend Christopher Soto is interviewing me for a piece on poetry, AI, creative writing, and labor. Most of this is going to be cut, so why not post the first draft here?

CS: Recently we went on a hike and were talking about the intersection of literary production and artificial intelligence. You described us as part of “the last generation to experience raw human emotion,” can you elaborate on this idea?

JW: Let me clarify that remark. We’ve been cyborgs and pharmacological hybrids for a long time. I don’t think there’s something like an ideal state of authentic humanness, nor do I think that humanness is better than non-humanness. What I’m referring to is the saturation of distractions, which for me reached a crisis point during the pandemic, when my existence was almost entirely mediated by the internet. Just before the pandemic I had ditched my smartphone for almost a year, but got back on it during quarantine since I was always connected anyway. I became palpably aware of how the very rhythm of my being is regulated by technology designed—using behavioral science research—to be addictive by high-jacking the dopamine reward system. I think people dramatically overstate their “will” and “agency” in relation to technology.

Being hyper-connected made me feel my emotional life was becoming increasingly shallow, that I was just being numbly-entertained-toward-death, and pharmacologically adjusted to serenely endure this horrific existential condition while the world literally burns. As a poet, I find it very disturbing. For me, being a poet is not necessarily about the production of poetry, but about the training of a certain kind of consciousness: the dilation of perception and emotional states, the sensitization of one’s antennae, the tuning of one’s soul for a greater awareness of the mystery of existence, its splendors and absurdities.

CS: We have talked about literary production becoming a collaboration with artificial intelligence, so that the writers of tomorrow will essentially be prompt makers and editors, which input prompts into AI and then edit creative works based on the responses provided. What do you think this would mean for the future of literary culture and cultural production?

JW: I think we could soon reach a point where certain types of writing (screenwriting, journalism, newsletters, web content production) and certain para-literary activities (editing, proofreading, researching) could be fully or partially automated. Some say that the new job that will be created as a result of generative AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT will be “prompt writer.” There may come a day when plot-driven commercial fiction is written by AI with the help of prompt writers.

A lot of writers economically support their literary practice through various forms of commercial writing and editing—some of those jobs might disappear. In recent decades, it’s already gotten so difficult to survive economically as a writer. At the same time, it’s gotten hard to survive in general, given how obscenely high rent is these days. You can’t just scrape by on almost nothing and hope it works out at the end of the month by frantically combing your couch cushions and the pockets of dirty jeans for loose change and cash. You need good credit to even rent a place! On a societal level, art suffers when subsistence costs are high—it becomes more commercially driven, and artists become more “professionalized.”

CS: Do you think that AI will just stay as a mechanism that will help facilitate human writing of poetry but never become “the artist”? I anticipate there will be a shrinking in the distinctions between “the artist” and “the editor.”

JW: I’ve already heard of writers and students using AI to help edit and develop their work, or generate ideas. But I don’t really trust the aesthetic judgment of ChatGPT, ha!

CS: I’m excited to see the mechanics of literary production transform. You are a bit more hesitant, why so? Are there any AI attempts at literature, which you’ve seen already, that feel particularly noteworthy?

JW: Maybe on some deep level I’m a basic bitch who has a sentimental attachment to the way “writing” has been done for nearly 5,500 years. From cuneiform clay tablets to computer keyboards, the writing process has actually changed very little for thousands of years. It was probably ripe for disruption. But I’m ultimately disturbed by the collective effect it will have on language use—the move toward a statistical norm and the treatment of language as purely informational. I had already started to fret about this when Gmail started autocompleting my emails. (ChatGPT is basically a sophisticated auto-complete that convincingly mimics understanding. This is why it “hallucinates” made-up citations and rattles off fake facts.)

Will the weird, jagged, irregular effusions of language gradually be purged as we drift toward the statistical average? I don’t know, maybe I think of it as something akin to language eugenics. Perhaps I’m hopelessly modernist in my view that language is not about transmitting information or even advancing a plot, but the wayward movement of a thought: the sentence as a technology of consciousness, with its serpentine twists and turns, perverse digressions, and rhythmic pulsations.

I’ve seen AI being used in the conceptual writing and art world for a while now. Some of it is cool and novel in a “party trick” kind of way (like the Twitter poetry bots I followed when I used to use Twitter), but I’ve yet to encounter AI work that I’ve been enamored with. I don’t doubt that AI will (very) soon be able to produce really impressive work, and that’s partly because it’s parasitic on past human creativity insofar as it’s trained on vast reams of linguistic data generated by humans.

CS: Can emotion or spontaneity ever be captured by an algorithm? Is there any way in which AI is like the subconscious (making connections between unrelated concepts, juxtaposing words in a way that pleases the ear and mind, using knowledge in unforeseen ways)?

JW: The AI can convincingly mimic emotion. Tell ChatGPT about your problems and you will feel like it really cares, like it’s really listening to you, just like you might feel when you are personally addressed—are interpolated—by the language of advertising written in a voice of concern or understanding.

For nearly a century, artists have used aleatory methods to make connections and generate juxtapositions that get us beyond the limits of human consciousness, whether it’s the surrealist exquisite corpse practice, William S. Burroughs’s cut-up method, or John Cage’s use of the I Ching and other chance methods in his music compositions. AI could certainly be deployed to such ends. Yet LLMs like ChatGPT are designed to be “predictable” in the same way that autocomplete uses probabilities to predict the next word. I think unlocking a weirder side of AI might involve finding ways to break or fuck with it so it doesn’t just generate the mediocrity of the average.

CS: Do you think collaborations between literary artists with artificial intelligence will create a new economy of poetry in the English speaking United States or will it fall into and transform one of the currently existing poetry economies (academia, spoken word, insta poetry)?

JW: How many poets do you know who can support themselves on their poetry alone? I think I know zero. (Maybe Lisa Robertson could count?) Mostly, I know poets who teach in the academy, poets who do astrology, poets who work as editors at publishing houses, poets who have office day jobs, etc. I don’t think AI will change that. Maybe generative AI will create a glut of language that will make poets even more superfluous, ha!

CS: At large, poetry isn’t very lucrative but this doesn’t mean that it doesn’t impact people’s livelihoods still. Why do you think it is important to think specifically about the intersection of poetry and AI?

JW: The thing I love about poetry is its uselessness, the way it is, with a few exceptions, superfluous to capital, difficult to commodify, gratuitous in its insistence on avowing that which has been marked valueless by our hyper-commercial culture. When I think of Sapphic lyrics or Homeric epics, I am reminded that poets once occupied a quite prominent social position, as keepers of history or ceremonial performers. In a culture oriented almost exclusively around lucre, there’s not really a place for poetry. At a dinner party recently I tried to explain “what I do” to entrepreneurs and realized I came across as “quaint,” that what I do will always register as doing nothing to those who use money as a metric to measure the value of a particular activity. Yet at the same time, the intense pressure to perform in our brutally competitive society has generated a hunger for poetry—poetry as a space to preserve the incalculable and restore the part of us that has been destroyed by the soul-crushing dictates of capital.

On a conceptual level, it’s interesting that the things that make poetry so “difficult” and inaccessible to some people—it’s ambiguity, lack of clearness of meaning, context dependency, and attention to the non-semantic register of signification—is also what has made language such a tricky problem for AI developers. Language isn’t simply a system of rules, which is why the statistical approach beat the linguistic rules-based approach in the natural language processing wars.

CS: What would you consider the start of collaborations between artificial intelligence and poets? I’m thinking about Rupi Kaurs using instapoetry as a closed form that is responsive to algorithmic metrics. By responding to the algorithms that make her poetry go viral, she is in effect collaborating with AI, right? I’m also thinking of Kien Liam’s book “Extinction Theory” that was written with the help of search engine responses. Maybe this depends on our definition of artificial intelligence?

JW: I suppose we’re always collaborating with technology. Since I’ve written most of my works longhand (my first draft of Carceral Capitalism was written on index cards), I often think about how the technology of the computer actually changes the texture of my thinking. Technology can also shape the “form” of writing—think of the way that the character limit of Twitter encodes a particular form. We’ve certainly reached a point where writers are not simply “responding” to AI, but AI is directly shaping the written work.

CS: Do you think AI will influence some literary genres more than others and why? I’m thinking commercial genres like popular non-fiction might be the first to change.

JW: I think writing that is informational (popular non-fiction) or plot-driven is ripe for automation. I don’t know why, but whenever I ask ChatGPT to write poetry or imitate the style of a writer with an idiosyncratic style (Virginia Woolf, W. G. Sebald), the results are atrocious. I’m sure it will improve quickly, though.

CS: The Writers Guild of America is currently about to strike, in part over how to renegotiate the use of AI in Hollywood. As a scholar of carceral studies, what do you think is an ethical approach to understanding intellectual property and the likeness of an artist, in the era of AI?

JW: Since I’m fundamentally against private property, I’m against intellectual property as well. Yet AI developers use the “fair use” paradigm to claim they are justified in training their systems on copyrighted works. In my ideal world, we would not need to commodify our works in order to eat, but since we live in a market society, we must pay attention to the question of how writers are going to be able to put food on the table. The fact that generative AI is parasitic on the entire archive of human creativity is fundamentally a labor problem. Should AI be allowed to imitate living writers and artists, and will the imitations be commercialized at the expense of living creators? The legal architecture undergirding generative AI hasn’t been worked out yet, but I’m ultimately in favor of enshrining strong labor protections for living creators.

CS: How is AI going to redefine certain concepts, like originality and plagiarism? I think we have already seen some examples of this in the music industry, such as the AI generated songs using the voice of musicians like Drake. In poetry might it look like someone asking AI to create poems in Shakespearean sonnets but with the vernacular of lets say, Maya Angelou?

JW: The voice imitation software trips me out. I started doing research on voice surveillance in early 2019 and tested out some voice mimicking technology then. It was terrible. Now, it can replicate someone’s voice with uncanny accuracy. The technology is evolving so rapidly.

I don’t feel particularly attached to an idea of originality. Mixing, collaging, generating new things by constellating old things—it’s all part of the creative churn. I love it when art circulates and mixes in a way that is wild and free. But the question of how artists will support themselves when technology enables endless, free replicability is a question that needs to be addressed.

CS: This opens up the conversation of racial appropriation (and digital Black face) via AI. The literary world has a history of racial imposters. What might this look like when intersecting with AI?

JW: Since AI is ultimately a mimicry-machine, I think this is certainly a risk. I can imagine an author asking ChatGPT to rewrite a chunk of dialogue in, say, Black Vernacular English. (Although as someone who is opposed to the ownership model of culture and in favor of hybridity, I have complicated views on the idea of cultural appropriation in general.)

CS: How do you think the literary community, specifically the awards part of the community, might react if they discover that a writer has been generating their books in collaboration with AI?

JW: I think if it’s done covertly they will treat it as plagiarism rather than collaboration. Done overtly, it becomes a way to market a book. (Though I think the “AI book” is old-hat at this point.)

CS: In closing, are there any parallels that you see between what is happening now and the industrial revolution? I am thinking about the automation of labor and whether AI can help lead us to universal basic income, a post-work economy, or at least a reduced work week?

JW: There are definitely parallels with the industrial revolution, which put our species on this path of ever-accelerating accumulation (well, some say it all began with the Agricultural Revolution, though David Wengrow and David Graeber critique the agricultural theory of social inequality in The Dawn of Everything). Without a doubt, LLMs and generative AI will profoundly reshape the economy, leading some industries to collapse completely (the education technology company Chegg was the first to crash) while others are transformed—that tendency toward creative destruction is an inherent feature of capitalism. Generative AI will make humans more “efficient” and “productive.” But what is all this efficiency for? Technology has been evolving at breakneck speed since the industrial revolution and we are still working just as long and hard. Efficiency has become our bondage. Once the logic of accumulation enters the bloodstream, it seems hard to stop, partly because accumulation is bottomless (until we hit a hard ecological limit) and feeds on itself. As the Austrian writer Robert Musil wrote in The Man Without Qualities, “We have gained reality and lost dream. No more lounging under a tree and peering at the sky between one’s big and second toes; there’s work to be done. To be efficient, one cannot be hungry and dreamy but must eat steak and keep moving. It is exactly as though the old, inefficient breed of humanity had fallen asleep on an anthill and found, when the new breed awoke, that the ants had crept into its bloodstream, making it move frantically ever since, unable to shake off that rotten feeling of antlike industry.”

I wish writers could just sit around and be dreamy instead of having to eat steak and keep moving. I do hope we one day arrive at a post-work society. It makes me sad to think that we’ve tacitly accepted a system where we spend our lives toiling for the profit generation of the ownership class, squandering our short, precious life on this planet.

#ai #artificial intelligence #poetry #chatgpt #generative AI #technology #science and technology studies #political economy #capitalism #writing #creative writing #work #labor #literature #david graeber #david wengrow #robert musil #culture #media studies

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