He’s got a big apology video up somewhere on Youtube. If you search on “Vaush” and “lolicon” you’ll probably get to it.

What does this look like to you, Sparky?:

I’m not “missing” anything, Sparky. I’ve lived through quite a few such changes, and it wasn’t pretty.

I just don’t see anything special about this particular one that renders the moral hue and cry. Like I said at the start: there’s plenty of real reasons to target AI. People deluding themselves into a cult is not one of them, since people have been deluding themselves into cults even before the historical record, likely.

You be you. I’ll be me. I find “endless struggle” a boringly tedious and draining way to live. Not for me to choose for you. Nor vice versa.

Or I can ignore walled gardens. Which is what I do.

“The story” is the key part of this, however.

This is almost word for word what’s been said about every new technology or social trend for my entire life. “This new thing is worse than everything that has ever come before and the Apocalypse is nigh.”

Sorry. After hearing this over and over and over and over again all my life I just don’t take this kind of moral panic seriously.

The paywalled one?

Weird cults victimizing people are literally prehistoric in age. It’s a bit “hue and cry”-ish to go into a moral panic over “AI cults”.

There’s plenty to criticize in modern “AI” (beginning with “it doesn’t work”). Let’s not make stupid reasons up!

What do you think the difference is between being “not indemnified” and “liable”?

News Flash!

AI fan says deranged arguments made by another AI fan are “pretty reasonable”.

In other news water is wet and the sun is hot.

That’s the whole point. The terminology isn’t clear. “AI” is marketing, not technology.

Words have meanings. Established words have established meanings. If you introduce something new and use words that have meanings radically different from the way they’re usually used, you’re being fundamentally dishonest. “Intelligence” is one of those words that has established meaning in several different fields: common conversation, biology, neuroscience, psychology, and even philosophy. NOTHING that has ever been called “artificial intelligence” is an artificial version of any of these meanings.

Now the first generation I’ll cut some slack for. They genuinely believed (through a combination of hubris and programmer arrogance) that they were really working on the automation of intelligence as per the fuzzy overlap of the aforementioned fields. So them calling it “Artificial Intelligence” was hubris, not cynicism (though even there: it was called other things before “artificial intelligence”; there was some intent to mildly deceive).

Nobody after that gets any slack.

The second generation started talking about “perceptrons” and “multilayer perceptrons” and “feedforward networks” before settling on “neural networks”. Despite the “perceptrons” (a good name) involved in making these having absolutely nothing in common with, you know, networks. Of neurons. Which “neural networks” was clearly intended to invoke. This was grant fodder and nothing more. This was a sop for poorly-educated money supplies to say “ooh, that sounds impressive” and toss cash.

The same applies to swarm intelligence, or genetic algorithms, or machine learning, or or or or. The terminology isn’t selected because it’s an accurate description of the technology involved. “Swarm intelligence” doesn’t in any way resemble how any serious biologist would model swarms. A more honest name might be “particle swarm optimization”. For genetic algorithm a descriptive name that doesn’t deceive would be “stochastic optimization”. For “machine learning” try “statistical pattern recognition”.

And for LLMs try “hallucinating, forest-burning, stochastic parrot”.

NONE of any of this matches anything that is “intelligence” by any definition other than a computer scientist, leaving us with a tautology that would have Anselm staring at you with disapproval and recommending that you through in random prayers here and there to disguise the fact that your entire name and argument in support of that name boils down to “this thing we determined arbitrarily to call artificial intelligence is artificial intelligence” while ignoring literally thousands of years of what “intelligence” means outside of your narrow circle jerk circular argument.

So, yes, indeed, let’s be clear about our technology. We do not have an artificial version of “intelligence” and nothing we have in any way resembles “intelligence” as used by anybody beyond a certain little clique who says “what we define as intelligence is intelligence, Q.E.D.”

The Anselm clique, I like to call them.

Ah. Vaush. The “leftist” who doesn’t think a fascination with non-consensual sex is a red flag at all, even when it’s drawn.

With leftists like this, who needs fascists?

From biology. Or psychology. Or neurology. Or philosophy, even.

It’s pretty clear from their writing that the original AI researchers thought they were on the path to the “intelligence” talked of in these other disciplines and that it only became the very narrowly-defined field mentioned above years after their abject failure at actually capturing what anybody else would call intelligence.

And now the term “artificial intelligence” is essentially just a marketing term, with as much meaning as any other random pair of words used for marketing purposes.

Ah. So your argument is “we have defined ‘intelligence’ in a way that is literally not accepted by anybody but us, therefore we have made an artificial version of it”.

Anselm’s ontological proof of the existence of AI.

Bravo.

You’ve managed to recreate one of the most famous 11th century tautologies.

We can’t even agree on a definition for “intelligence” so it’s pretty obvious we haven’t got an artificial version of it yet.

Can’t make what you can’t even define, after all. “Artificial intelligence” is about as meaningful a term as “artificial geflugelschnitz”.

We need to have AI before we start worrying about what happens if it gets smarter than us.

We do not have AI.

Then there’s really not a lot you can do short of manually curating everything or making copies of known-good sites before they get ruined.

It might be best to return to the days of in-person gatherings of hobbyists. Like my mother and quilting circles.

And an insult to Anne Frank’s memory and legacy.