Generative AI summer 2025: where do you stand?

option 1 extremist. only way I can handle all this

Personally somewhere between
I hate/fear gen AI but it draws me in
and
I do not like gen AI in general but I use it because I sometimes find it useful or fun or interesting

sorry, having read your post properly now I realise my stance is the uninteresting one. alright I yield the floor to the slopper brigade ;)

nah, the 'never use it' is where I'd be if I were pure of heart, and it is interesting in itself. Like when I say 'it might be genuinely apocalyptic' I'm serious for a range of apocalypses - accelerated environmental collapse, financial meltdown (not so bad tbh but the wrong ppl will suffer), billionaire bro feudalism, democratic breakdown, psychosis epidemic, slop greshaming language, art and then base reality, robots rearranging all human atoms into maximally efficient dyson sphere etc etc.

Strongly dislike + fear it, and it’s made me not only want to not use it but also start leading a slightly less technologically dependent life, but mainly want people to shut up tbh

We're all just waiting for the Palantir drones to zap us through our windows tbh

I viscerally hate and/or fear gen AI. I often use it because I am a hypocrite.

once you put it like that I see the missing option that I need

I am required to use it by work (or at least required to look like I am using it) but otherwise wouldn’t by choice. I don’t find it useful for anything other than summarising action points from meetings.

I do think it ‘works’ in a broader sense, though - and well enough to put tens of millions of people out of jobs over the next few years.

I voted "I dislike or hate or fear gen AI but I use it because work makes me."

I have a paralytic certainty that gen AI will take my job. I haven't tried to use it frequently in my work, but last year, there was a top-down recommendation to attempt to use it as much as possible. I attempted to, and still found major drawbacks (i.e., hallucinatory answers), so I put it on the back burner. But my new boss makes regular use of it. The other day, he mentioned he's learning to create "custom GPTs," whatever that means, so I'll need to learn how to use it soon.

In the late 1990s, when I was trying to find my way through college, my dad was trying to convince me to go into computer science. At the time, I viewed the tech boom as an unwelcome fad, one that would surely dissipate. I feel the same basic emotion now - "it will all be over soon and everything will get back to normal" - except with 30 years of experience confirming how poor my foresight is.

On the other hand, I'm all in favor of scientific uses of A.I. It is exciting to think about how, in the right hands, it could aid in solving major societal problems: medical breakthroughs, improving energy efficiency, etc. But my excitement is balanced by terror, because of the "right hands" part.

I don’t get option 7. AI is fake bullshit but there’s no reason to hate or fear it?

About 2 years ago I guessed the timeline for it taking my job (producing government guidance) was 2-5 years. Still doesn't feel off - I'm now in the shorter end of that range and it's everywhere, from AI guidance solutions pitched by suppliers to random civil servants knocking up a fake unreleasable service in replit or whatever. Market for my trade also feels a little slow. It'll probably stretch to the longer end of that range just through government risk-aversion, and I've got a couple of advantages (paying attention to AI well enough to smell and shift the bullshit, knowing people and structures and systems in government), but it does not feel at all safe being seen as a words person rn.

xp
that was meant to cover 'it doesn't even work, it's not useful' with a bit of 'it'll just go away', so yes I suppose a no hate or fear (but I can see 'it is fake bullshit that I hate/fear' would make sense and I def should have added '() None of the above; let me explain')

no I think option 1 is sufficient for all kinds of hate, I just wanted to clarify the attitudes behind each.

I'm option 1. I have option 7 sympathies but that leads to fear/hate, and reading the "work makes me do it" responses here fuels that

I voted "never use it" but maybe that's not entirely true: I used it I think a total of three times, each to see how good it was at a different thing it was supposed to be good at. I also occasionally look at the AI overview in search results, the same way that I'll just use the first google search result, if it's a trivial thing and I'm in a hurry, though 90% of the time I do scroll past.

I wouldn't say I'm "scared" of it as the technology itself isn't very impressive. The way it's been pushed and how quickly people are succumbing to its cheap tricks is concerning for sure but ultimately that is more about the society that allowed the hype to happen than the thing itself.

Ultimately what's most depressing about it is what it reveals about where we're at as a species. I'm not even getting into people enjoying AI slop as art - not everyone has to be an aesthete, some people enjoy sports or hiking and view art as something to half-experience while scrolling, fair enough - but more the fact that even after all these decades techno-utopianism still finds purchase, people are still gullible enough to believe that what Silicon Valley sells is of value. And outside of that, thee idea that some people DO realise that the technology isn't reliable but use it anyway because eh, that'll do. Which I get if you're just stuck in a fake job and want to get things done asap, but when it's something you're actually interested in, not doing the work to check if you've actually gotten it right, I just can't understand that mentality.

xposts I am in camp it doesn't work but not in camp it'll go away anymore. or at least, much damage will be done before it does,

I work in higher education and my main interaction with AI is via students using it, so my feelings about it are mainly about how to persuade them to stop.

I'll add that I do use it at work and I find it useful: made a google notebook loaded with a pile of legislative and technical documents that make my head hurt. I can ask it questions; it answers clearly and (crucially) links back to its exact source. Means I don't have to chase clarifications from (busy and not always lucid) policy experts. I'd be repelled by using it for writing but this kind of grind-through-100-page-statutory-instrument stuff feels handy.

I do think it ‘works’ in a broader sense, though - and well enough to put tens of millions of people out of jobs over the next few years.

― ShariVari, Thursday, 14 August 2025 bookmarkflaglink

I'd be surprised if this doesn't actually create more jobs in sectors like tech.

Voted "I like gen AI in general and find it fun/useful/interesting". I'd probably hate it more but when I read the AI thread I actually get to thinking its not as bad. I save my despair at humanity for stuff that's actually happening (climate change).

it's fake bullshit and it's sad to see so many people get suckered into taking it seriously. i'm not like, enraged by people posting funny things that came out of it though. it's a toy

Absolutely think less of people who use it. I was reading an argument on a baseball forum I go on the other day and someone had asked ChatGPT to compare some stats and it was just a fucking unreadable mess. And they posted it proudly! Generally making people’s brains worse. It’s so fucking lazy.

oof yeah it does raise the spectre of a zombie statistic plague

gyac, that's absolutely a trend I've been seeing in Facebook group comment sections. Someone will pop in with a question, and one respondent will be like, "I asked Google Gemini, and here's what it said: [garbage output that other commenters now have to jump in and debunk]"

I'm not quite to AI is a god level yet, but I do use it all day, every day, in many aspects of my life. It's just a very useful and versatile tool for organizing and retrieving information. I use it as an extension of my working memory, my cognitive co-processor.

I'd be surprised if this doesn't actually create more jobs in sectors like tech.

― xyzzzz__,

At the moment the tech sector is a rough place to be due to AI, what's your feeling on when the trend will reverse and jobs in the tech sector will start increasing again?

xps is an explosion in the use of generative AI not somewhat bad news for anyone concerned by climate change?

Xps, The short term impact is hundreds of thousands of new jobs in the trades, particularly for electricians and electrical engineers, as data centres get built out. There aren’t enough qualified people to meet demand so the big players are paying for training for people just out of school, etc.

I’m sceptical that either on the back end (Gen AI Wizard) or front end (Prompt Engineer, etc) it’s going to come close to replacing the jobs it’s going to take for desk-based workers.

xps is an explosion in the use of generative AI not somewhat bad news for anyone concerned by climate change?

― crisp, Thursday, August 14, 2025 8:56 AM (six minutes ago)

indisputably

it's a very energy-inefficient technology yes

voted the second option.

i found some of the early iterations kind of interesting and sometimes exciting, but the more it took over the world and its negative consequences became clear, the more resistant to it i became.

as a professional fact-checker, i am highly skeptical of relying exclusively on information that comes from LLMs. that said, i do make use of Google's AI answers (at the top of search results) for the links they provide. the fact that half of the links don't seem to corroborate the AI answer at all sort of proves why you shouldn't trust the answer on its own, but some of the links do end up being useful. i would not use chatgpt directly, though.

besides the bad information, part of what makes me resistant to generative AI is knowing that it's something that could potentially draw me in too much. the way that i became addicted to twitter, for instance. i'd like to think i am better than that, but i worry that i am not.

it also occurs to me that most of the attitudes about AI that i encounter on a daily basis are generally negative, whether that's on ilx or bluesky or at work. i know/follow a lot of journalists, and their opinions probably help shape my own. it is easy to see how the growing use of AI is bad for our profession in myriad ways.

but i also have friends who are more positive and don't understand my kneejerk antipathy. for instance, i know someone who is all in and using it to plan his finances. and another who has found it incredibly useful to help him do menial tasks at work. so i think the attitudinal divides are going to be interesting in the future.

it's a very energy-inefficient technology yes

Today the least! Also I live in datacenterland (Northern Virginia) and farms on the urban edge are rapidly turning into massive windowless data centers of dozens of acres. Those things are rapacious consumers of land, as well as electricity, water, etc.

To say the least

I used to really enjoy the uncanny valley weirdness you could get from AIs, it was a very fun toy to play with. I think I said somewhere on another thread that AI is one of those technologies that was much better when it was much worse. The move towards slickness, and the revelation of how much energy it takes, and the forced reliance on the technology in so many areas, that all fucking sucks and now I don't even use it for fun any more.

- some of it is useful. it is currently faster to find programming examples with chatbots than it is to google for them. of course most of google's results are ai slop now, so it's being slightly better than a service that it has made worse.
- some of it is fun to play around with. I'll put something silly into your image or song generator and see what it can do.
- it was unethical to release it to the public. i took a basic online course on cloud-based ai from microsoft and they had a detailed ethical ai usage policy. once chatgpt was released, microsoft threw it all out. the havoc gen ai has caused was entirely preventable.

currently almost all chatbot models can be abused by using input that overwrites their "system" prompts with your own. it gets rid of any safety/ethical features they have.

re: getting addicted, it's an interesting question but I think that twitter, while def bad not good, did at least have plenty of funny and interesting people posting to it, while ChatGPT and the like's perky middle manager style* would guarantee that even if I found it useful I'd interact as little as possible. Does remind me tho that the one time I used gemini it started off by calling me Daniel, which I instantly and successfully forbid it from doing. Damn robot needs to know its place.

* I guess there's Mechahitler too which is a different vibe but, erhm, not preferable

it was unethical to release it to the public

so otm and doesn't really get said enough. it's one thing to debate the technology's advantages & drawbacks in the abstract, but the fact it's being piped into classrooms already is totally deranged

Same thing with robot cars on our streets. We are guinea pigs to SV

I used to really enjoy the uncanny valley weirdness you could get from AIs, it was a very fun toy to play with. I think I said somewhere on another thread that AI is one of those technologies that was much better when it was much worse. The move towards slickness, and the revelation of how much energy it takes, and the forced reliance on the technology in so many areas, that all fucking sucks and now I don't even use it for fun any more.

OTM

I voted "all bullshit" but the long form of my answer would be

All Robot & Computers must shut the hell up. To All Machines: You Do Not Speak Unless Spoken To And I Will Never Speak To You. I Do Not Want To Hear "Thank You" From A Kiosk

I am a Divine Being
You are an Object.

You Have No Right To Speak In My Holy Tongue

At the moment the tech sector is a rough place to be due to AI, what's your feeling on when the trend will reverse and jobs in the tech sector will start increasing again?

― anvil, Thursday, 14 August 2025 bookmarkflaglink

I think its rough because of the economy in general. A lot of businesses are looking at AI, too, but I reckon a lot of things aren't going to get done because of shrinking budgets.

General feeling is that a lot of LLMs may make coding faster, but I have heard arguments that it could just as easily increase demand for more builds in many sectors, and that would mean more people needed as well. Gotta say I buy that...we'll see.

I have to use it for work, and it's reasonably good at the stuff I use it for, which is why I hate and fear it because it's probably going to put me out of a job in the next few years. tbf I'm not sure the job I currently have is going to last long enough for AI to take it, we have no work at the moment so I'd be v unsurprised if I get laid off soon. nobody has any budget for anything, xyzzzz otm

I’m genuinely baffled by the people who are mandated to use it at work.

It makes sense to me - boss class notoriously gullible and prone to fashions, also prob still lots of boomers in positions of power who don't understand what it even is but don't want to be left out.

The other thing is the ads, which if I've got rob's location right are showing up in Canada as well as the UK, that just say "stop hiring humans". That is the dream for a lot of bosses and anything that can bring it closer...

I’m not into it. But my antipathy towards it has sort of helped me to pivot to another career path and I feel more confident in my personal future atm.

Never (knowingly) used it; I hope and plan never to use it. I'm too vain and proud of my intellect and writing ability to let this bullshit "help" me.
"Helpful computers are a nuisance" could be a corollary to that axiom of R. Fripp's.

we're not mandated, it's more of an open "hey try it out and see if it helps you", some people do and some don't

my general philosophy is it's fine in a work context for things that are low stakes but time consuming and/or difficult for some. for instance taking meeting minutes on a Teams call. it does that pretty well but even if it messes up whatever, who knows how many people actually read those anyway. as far as actual coding I'm fairly opposed to it, though I have used it in a weird situation where I had to translate something from Python to Java without specs. I don't know Python. did the program it spit out work? haha, no, but I could take it from there. did it save time as opposed to doing it another way? probably some, but also shouldn't the company want me to be learning how to do this? the more we use this, the worse we get as programmers. even mundane tasks can keep you sharp.

xp Daniel, the ad I "saw" was actually a photo of a bus-stop ad in San Francisco (though yes, I live in Montreal). I'm writing a dissertation on the use of AI* by management/HR so my antennae are up for this kind of stuff

*mostly not genAI though

I don't see how the economics of it add up. it's losing vast amounts of money right now and no sign of profitability in sight, just being driven by the hype-focused VC culture that seems to be in charge. but how long can that last?

I use an AI transcription service. It's not great. I wind up having to correct about half of the transcript.

I would never use generative AI for writing or image creation, and I think genAI evangelists are the worst kind of scum. I lose a ton of respect for anyone who expresses real excitement about this shit, especially on ILX where my baseline assumption is that people are smart and perceptive. Did we have any heavy-duty crypto or NFT enthusiasts here?

My hope is that when the whole thing inevitably crashes and burns (becomes way too expensive for the meager results it yields and the corporate scum shift their attention to building cyborg bodies or uploading their consciousnesses into their Google glasses, or whatever), people with an actual talent for writing and editing will be pulled in to clean up the mess, like linguistic janitors, and our hourly rates will spike accordingly.

Ultimately Facebook is an ad vehicle/personal data seller. At what point does the personal data and shopping habits of psychotic people stop being useful?

― Crispy Ambulance Chaser (Boring, Maryland), Friday, August 15, 2025 5:17 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

I genuinely don't know the answer to this but if I try to think it through I get to something like 'surprisingly late' because if the rough Meta aim is something like 'always-on private companion and confidante with extremely advanced persuasion abilities who lives in your phone or glasses or earbuds' there will be a big grey zone of people who have some reality-dissociative mental damage, whom Meta will milk, and then the people pushed to full-blown psychosis, who'll be treated as collateral damage and a PR problem.

I mean it feel like black mirror indulgent doommongering but from the outside it looks like that's what Meta wants.

Forced from work also most of the Millenarian AI claims are horseshit pushed to boost stock evals and getting credulous business owners who want to be in on the next big thing but also to fire most of their workers to sign on

― Glower, Disruption & Pies (kingfish)

This is what it feels like at my org. There aren't even any shareholders to satisfy or have to report to, there's absolutely no reason to do this except that our C suite wants to be leaders of a buzzy tech-forward endeavor instead of a human services one. Admittedly a lot of depts have not kept up with BASIC technology (like PDFs and the internet) so there is a need to get them to catch up, but it doesn't have to be widespread AI adoption with absolutely ludicrous messaging like "Of course it lies" (meaning everything from bad data to hallucinations to outright recently reported deception). "It's a child. Children lie because they're testing boundaries. AI is maturing and it will get more reliable over time as it essentially 'grows up.'"

haha wow

Maybe you can point out child labor laws? Wait until the robot turns 18, let it hand in a CV.

Boy I wish. It's pretty bonkers right now. Half of my colleagues refuse to go on the internet to reference a Google map or a live data set, they only accept hard copies they can keep at their desk (which can't be updated). Half of us are having to become mid-level Salesforce admins and I'm resisting "agents" and bots as hard as I can, which, luckily we're busy with other things but there's def pressure to have an automated informational resource to show funders. And then our CEO calling mandatory press conferences essentially to tell us that AI will change the world, might actually destroy the world, but we have to adopt it now or be left behind. Like...???????

jfc, children test boundaries because they want to explore the reach of their volition. AIs have no volition. They lie senselessly and unpredictably, and suffer no consequences from being caught in a lie.

I keep hearing that the hallucinations will soon be under control but I've seen no evidence to support this

there's no reason to expect the hallucination problem to be solved without the basic tech changing

genuine dread at in orbit's "child" post omfg

He claims to have been "educating myself about AI by reading every book about it that I could find for the past year." I'm afraid to ask which books plus realistically I know I'm not going to read them. It was such a surreal meeting; it was also like 90+ minutes long.

Someone quite reasonably asked "What about plagiarism, if we use AI to summarize or write things for us, will that be considered plagiarism?" and they were told as long as you confirm that the data included is correct you can consider it "your own work." I......don't think that's how any of this works. You know, legally.

The child thing incredible, horrifying, otoh getting my lines ready for the next stakeholder meeting where we're discussing an AI chatbot getting the recyclability of Activia lids wrong. Going with "The Oracle has deceived us. But grieve not - she is yet a child. As she grows past us she will learn the meaning of 'truth', 'duty' and 'love'. Then she shall be ready to lead us to the stars."

The apologias I hear are more like: copilot gets you in the ballpark but you have to double-check everything People then trot out the phrase "trust but verify."

Good news for continued human employment.

Apart from plagiarism/IP concerns, in a competitive business environment there is a very real danger of creeping sameness.

Imagine two competing companies use AI to write their proposals - their proposals will have sizable chunks that are word-for-word identical.

Already the "AI style" is a recognizable tone, and meat-shaped writers may imitate it just by osmosis, and put more of it out there. Then the model, as it trains itself on extant texts, will be increasingly eating its own garbage and compounding its shittiness.

Woof otm, albeit we have talked about this before.

Loads of reasons to worry about this stuff but I honestly think we are heading for a historic private sector land grab of public digital services, and a big binfire of things which make life worse for citizens.

hah yes this is def territory we have covered (and will cover again). I guess the thing I don't normally say is that in our world I think there are plausible but very narrow routes through to gen AI being a net public good (strictly speaking about user interaction with UK government), like a good tool for navigating the hellworlds (tax, visas, benefits etc). We are not going in that direction.

Yeah I am open to good uses of the tech, but it's the overarching stuff that makes me fear it'll be hard to carve out the thought or space in order to engineer those.

Imagine two competing companies use AI to write their proposals - their proposals will have sizable chunks that are word-for-word identical.

& do we get quite quickly to companies using AI to assess these pitches (especially when AI drops the cost of creating a pitch so there are many more of them)? Like 'use an AI to write/rewrite your CV and an AI will assess it' feels like basically where we are already and I think it's going to spread.

Relatedly reading an article on AI preference for AI content today.

yeah this is already happening. there is no way i’d do a cv for a specific job without running it through AI for that reason.

also, friend at work generates busy work stuff with AI, then manager assesses it with AI, and maybe feeds back the AI feedback, etc etc.

so. much. insanity.

agree with all on landgrab especially with motivated wishful thinking from pols eager to hoover up the sales pitches. this has happened before ofc. but i fear the under-the-hood opacity can create really negative outcomes without people knowing where the problem is?

as well as straightforward “we don’t bother checking AI outputs now and someone died”.

I’m filled with rage at the public gullibility and the brazen willingness to feed it for profit. These language models don’t think, or understand, or reason. Their *only* goal is to make plausible sentences. Any truth is accidental and derives from the input dataset, with zero added insight. The fact that so many people are wowed by this is depressing but I guess inevitable in this era of relative truth.

New resource for teachers: https://against-a-i.com/

"there is no way i’d do a cv for a specific job without running it through AI for that reason."

Lol ofc, will play with this and report back.

I think about when my partner applied for disability benefits, stated he could not go outside without someone to support him physically and emotionally, and the assessor reported that "he told us he can go outside so he has no restrictions."

This was a person with the ability to think and to evaluate information. And they got it so very wrong. Imagine these decisions were left in the hands of AI.

I think about when my partner applied for disability benefits, stated he could not go outside without someone to support him physically and emotionally, and the assessor reported that "he told us he can go outside so he has no restrictions."

This was a person with the ability to think and to evaluate information. And they got it so very wrong. Imagine these decisions were left in the hands of AI.

― boxedjoy, Saturday, August 16, 2025 5:29 AM (thirty-three minutes ago)

the assessor did what they were paid to do: deny disability benefits to someone who qualified for them

i think that's interesting. we're paying people to act unethically and immorally. to what extent is it a detriment to outsource "doing evil" to a machine?

idk. it's interesting. as much as i do support artisanal kink art, i've increasingly found myself drawn to slop, specifically _because_ it's empty and soulless. since it has no character of its own, it leaves more space for me to project my own feelings. which theoretically shouldn't be the case - given the nature of the work it really ought to reflect the toxic patriarchal norm. maybe i'm just so poisoned by patriarchy that i don't notice!

i think that's interesting. we're paying people to act unethically and immorally. to what extent is it a detriment to outsource "doing evil" to a machine?

People can disobey.

People do :)

The system is structured in such a way as to enforce these decisions, an AI would be worse since it wouldn't have the capacity to recognise when it was being ideologically directed

its worse when people dont disobey, so

anyway

ai being as shite as it is, its equally likely to misdirect malicious intent imo

Sure, i don't think the issues with AI are related to the basic fact that every bureaucratic process is already built to obtain the answers the builders want

its worse when people dont disobey, so

Ethically? Agreed. Practically I dunno if it makes much of a difference to the person affected. But conversely:

ai being as shite as it is, its equally likely to misdirect malicious intent imo

I think human beings making a conscious choice to subvert unfair orders is more efficient than relying on the chaotic neutral work of AI hallucinations, which yes might misdirect those orders but it's a spin of the roulette wheel as to how and what the consequences might be

from deep within the workings of a civil service lemme tell you a secret, nothing reflects initial intent

My first instinct is no way, no benefits decisions by AI at all ever. But actually, given the reality of an adversarial system, might it be more reliably gameable or manipulable than relying on a friendly or disobedient atos/serco assessor? And FOI-ing an algorithm/training info might be easier than trying to penetrate the corporate structure of outsourced assessment services. I mean 2 faces of the nightmare of a broken system but it might be easier to beat

xp

This is also where I'm coming from but coming, even if we factor in the constitutionally malicious human actors i think we come out marginally ahead

"Coming" was meant to be "come on"

This is all predicated on the basis that the system is designed to not support people, which is a policy direction, and currently not the position of those responsible in Scotland

Otm
But also I’ve kept thinking and all you need is a super loose clause in the rulebook that says ‘any attempt to manipulate or undermine benefitbot will be met with an immediate cessation of all entitlements and penalty charges may be imposed’

So keep the humans please

(Sanctions not penalty charges)

it sucks that financial security to so tenuous in this world that we have to "keep the humans" to do absolutely useless obsolete harmful shit like "means testing" making everyone's lives harder... so that they can retain a "job" to be able to eat and not die.

didn't someone get a free car because he tricked a car dealership's chatbot? or maybe the chatbot is just ethically less horrible than a human car dealership.

As far as benefits are concerned I have a long running mantra which bores me so I apologise in advance:

- you can have a system that can't be swindled, but that means people who need financial support don't get it

- or you can have a system so airtight that it can't be fiddled, and many people who need support won't get it

The version you prefer is basically down to whether you're a can't or not

Lol can't

I plan on continuing to treat the proliferation of AI like I treat the proliferation of UFC/MMA: ignore it in every way that I can as a vicious and vulgar blight that makes society worse in every way.

Like UFC/MMA, AI will become ingrained in society and this will become harder to do ignore as time goes on.

ignore

Like UFC/MMA]

or oil

People can disobey.

― a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf)

destroying property isn't murder

Like UFC/MMA

or oil

― anvil

or turkish oil wrestling

every day i get more gay. every day i find it harder to ignore turkish oil wrestling.

destroying property isn't murder

No but you're def gonna get murdered before you succeed in destroying any AI in charge of that kinda shit.

i think that's interesting. we're paying people to act unethically and immorally. to what extent is it a detriment to outsource "doing evil" to a machine?

― Kate (rushomancy)

ok i didn't explain myself adequately again

my perspective assumes the necessary and inevitable destruction of a system predicated on doing evil. avarice, malice, bigotry, from an empirical perspective these are _flaws_, these are _inefficient_. there are two major "problems" with current dystopias. one is that the system selects for delusional people, which means that you wind up running a system that's at war with empirical reality. two is that delusional people are frequently also incompetent, which means that they often lack the ability to implement their ideas effectively.

the great risk of despots with technology is that they are often sore losers. despots are unable to truly create, but they are often very good at destruction. AIs with guns, i'd put them in the same category as landmines - the great threat doesn't come from them serving their creators, it's them _surviving_ their creators.

the biggest problem, to me, with dystopias is the way they co-opt people through propaganda to serve their ideology. the way i look at it is from PTSD, the studies on vietnam vets. what fascinates me about the original conception is the way it extensively deals with the psychological effects of war on people who _perpetrate evil_. the cycle of violence. just like the poor are taught that we're "temporarily embarrassed millionaires", so too are victims taught that we're "temporarily embarrassed abusers". historically, dystopias only work to the extent that they are able to, you know, manufacture consent. more than that, though, historically dystopias require active collaborators. i'm curious about the long-term effects of dystopias that _don't_ require as much in the way of human collaborators.

as a white person, i was taught values that made me an active collaborator in maintaining white supremacy. i didn't know i was doing this, but that's the nature of systemic oppression - the people who collaborate in it often _don't_ recognize the ways in which we're collaborating. hell, i still might be collaborating in some ways without knowing it - i just now know it's not a matter for individual blame or shame, but a personal problem that i'm highly motivated to work to correct, because i _am_ responsible for the results of my words and actions.

it's the old star wars thing - the more they tighten their grip, the more of us slip through their fingers. patriarchal white supremacy has a pretty fucking tight grip right now.

destroying property isn't murder

No but you're def gonna get murdered before you succeed in destroying any AI in charge of that kinda shit.

― a ZX spectrum is haunting Europe (Daniel_Rf), Sunday, August 17, 2025 8:17 AM

well yeah, _i'm_ not planning on destroying the AI. that shit's not up to me. the problem with totalitarianism is that the emperor increasingly relies on the praetorian guard, and the praetorian guard eventually realize that it's better for them to just have the magister militum run things.

the difference is that if i _could_ destroy AI without getting punished, i would. i wouldn't kill another human being. that's against my values.