This is sort of a continuation of the post about what generative AI boosters are missing about art, where I expressed an opinion that even if generative AI eventually becomes capable of creating legitimately beautiful texts or images or musical tracks, people would still treat generated works as “slop” and not want to engage with them.

I believe that the opinion I expressed there is, overall, a harsher opinion than the one I hold on AI-generated software (which I dislike, but can tolerate in specific circumstances). Software, a lot of people argue, is also a kind of art. While I largely agree (pretty much anything other than the most basic piece of software will reflect the author’s views and desires, and can be analyzed as such), I also see that software also tends to have practical needs, and in some cases, a generated tool can be better than having none at all.

So I got a new tablet and as I was setting things up on it, I noticed that VLC kept crashing upon trying to parse my audio files. Android’s logcat gave me the following lines:

10-01 17:49:23.228  3650  3685 E VLC-std : libc++abi: terminating due to uncaught exception of type std::invalid_argument: stoi: no conversion
10-01 17:49:23.228  3650  3711 E libc++abi: terminating due to uncaught exception of type std::invalid_argument: stoi: no conversion
--------- beginning of crash
10-01 17:49:23.228  3650  3711 F libc    : Fatal signal 6 (SIGABRT), code -1 (SI_QUEUE) in tid 3711 (DefaultDispatch), pid 3650 (main)

with the following backtrace:

As I see it, the people who promote generative AI under a promise that it will “democratize” artistic / creative work or make personal communication easier are misunderstanding a very important thing.

I can see the part of the argument that says that a lot of people have good artistic ideas that they’re simply incapable of properly expressing. I, myself, have a few that probably will not ever turn into complete works because I’m not good enough at writing that kind of stuff. The problem is that even if generative AI is developed to such an extent that it will no longer make errors or have significant negative externalities, a lot of people will still prefer to avoid any artistic content that seems generated.

I feel like a big problem that communities, both physical and online, are currently struggling with is a variation on the “Nazi bar” problem.

Michael B. Tager wrote the following thread on social media back in 2020:

I was at a shitty crustpunk bar once getting an after-work beer. One of those shitholes where the bartenders clearly hate you. So the bartender and I were ignoring one another when someone sits next to me and he immediately says, “no. get out.”

One of my strongly-held opinions, and one that helps understand a lot about both politics and real life, is that most people are conservative.

This is distinct from as being a conservative in the way that those who want to deport undocumented immigrants or pay as little taxes as possible or allow prayer in schools are, but rather simply that (aside from whichever issues happen to specifically matter to that specific person) most people want things to generally stay the same or slightly improve, and not be bothered otherwise.

A few months ago, I was watching a friend stream “Minishoot’ Adventures” (an action adventure game with shoot-’em-up gameplay mechanics), and she referred to one of the foes in it as a “major enemy”. On a whim, I decided to write up a small parody of the “Major-General’s Song” from The Pirates of Penzance themed around that. She found it amusing enough to still refer to it weeks later, so now I’m writing it down here for posterity:

This is a translation of the song “It’s Raining Men” by “The Weather Girls” into Esperanto. It is slightly inspired by Avlönskt’s multilingual translation of the same song.

It was supposed to be a simple operation, one that she’s done thousands of times. Assume the identity of a mortal, become this writer guy’s biggest supporter, seduce him, give him an unforgettable night, only to watch him disappear without a trace in a burst of flames shortly after. There was nothing to go wrong, and yet there he was, peacefully asleep, his body and soul completely intact. It was at that moment that “Artemis” began to think that maybe that “fall of gods” might have been real.

Lots of people these days are talking about how generative AI technology is leading workers to lose skills, bosses to trust chatbots more than their employees, folks at risk to make absurd decisions, etc.

As these models are very capable of providing wrong, yet correct-seeming, answers, this causes people to accept low-quality results and pass them through, as if there’s nothing wrong with them, especially when contrasted with asking questions from other people, who are much more likely to refuse or question one’s request or take way more time to accomplish it properly.