Cupid from Valentines day, and where he comes from, Biblically.

MarkRohfrietsch said:

I could not agree more; I would call it AI (another word starting with "S").

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Indeed, the spamming of youtube with such material being particularly annoying. For example, there is now a channel that pretends to be a ”How things are made channel”, which consists of AI generated videos which are so obviously false, for example, one such video depicted the manufacture of an Italian Frecciarosa ETR 1000, and not only was the manufacturing process fantastic and absurd, but when the train left the factory, it was depicted with a three man crew in the cab - one engineer, like a flight engineer, advancing the throttle, and a pilot and co-pilot with Boeing-style yokes and LCD displays with an artificial horizon and other aircraft instrumentation! Which, naturally, since this was a train, the artificial horizon remained completely level, so at least in that one respect the video was accurate.

By the way, as annoying as this is to you, consider for a moment my friends how much infinitely worse it is for me, someone who uses AI as part of a rigorous, creative process, because the automated slop factories producing this content in order to spam youtube and get advertising money have the effect of de-valuing all of my work with AI, including my efforts to cultivate elegant emergent behavior, and the careful, iterative artistic process I used wherein specially trained agents, made deeply aware of all facets of the fictional story of my novel, were able to create relevant artwork with the correct uniforms, insignia and so on, which was not easy to achieve.*

This becomes even more frustrating because chatGPT then wasted millions and millions of dollars on Sora, a completely unprofitable service for generating videos which created much of the slop that now infests YouTube, rather than spending that money on more constructive things, like improving model reliability, context horizons and so on. And that effort caused the surge in memory and GPU purchasing that in turn allowed the likes of Nvidia and the RAM cartel (Corsair, Samsung, Patriot, et al) to jack up prices massively, so we’re now paying for 16 GB what we were paying a decade ago…

Indeed we can almost directly trace the price increase to chatGPT, because Google, for its part, already had massive datacenters and an established upgrade cycle, as did X, so the real breakout in terms of CPU processing power came from chatGPT‘s datacenters (both their own, and those operated on their behalf by Microsoft Azure), and it happened only after the launch of Sora and the explosion in slop AI videos, so Sora basically harmed consumers in two different ways - by flooding YouTube with spam content (in the case of TikTok, uncharitably perhaps, it was already largely flooded with spam content so the addition of AI slop was not too much of a deterioration), and then by massively increasing prices for new computers for people to use (by either creating an actual shortage, or more likely, giving the RAM, HD and GPU manufacturers the perfect excuse to feign a shortage and raise prices; this is not like the bona fide shortage in non-SSD HDs caused by flooding in Thailand around 15 years ago, which took out several factories used by Western Digital, Seagate and other vendors, resulting in decreased availability of conventional disk drives and, ironically, and unpleasantly for the non-SSD disk manufacturers, helping to drive migration to SSDs; since that time, various manufacturers have claimed attempts to diversify their supply chain, but the intermittent shortages we saw after the Covid pandemic continue to suggest the supply chain is not optimally robust, and this of course enables profiteering).


*If left to its own devices, the image generator was causing Princess Leia and TIE fighters to appear in the illustrations you see above, as well as placing a psuedo hammer and cicle on the uniforms of one of my protagonists (actually it was more of a plumber’s snake and wrench). Of course that was legacy DALL E 3, which has been decommissioned, thankfully - but the interesting and amusing thing about that is the AI model actually noticed these anomalies and pointed them out to me at the same time the image was generated. The way image generation worked at the time with chatGPT is you would tell the model what you wanted, and it would try to coerce DALL E, which was rudimentary and inaccurate and also incapable of iterating over an existing image to fix errors, into producing that, and it required many more runs to create a usable image. Legacy Grok was slightly better. Since then the improvements with image generation has improved industry-wide particularly at Google, whose in-house AI was something of a joke a year ago (I recall how spectacularly useless its contribution to search results was, whereas now I find myself using it vs. chatGPT for a quick lookup).

ViaCrucis said:

Most of my experience with AI is limited to Windows Copilot and ChatGPT (the free one available).
My use of the term "slop" isn't so much about quality, as it is a general dig at generative material. I say this as someone who, for personal creative projects, has used AI.

I've also played with Suno to see what it's like to turn lyrics I've written into songs--but given the nature of generative AI content and the ethical concerns involved, I have never been comfortable with it as more than a personal toy.

I'm not as anti-AI as some, but I think there are genuine ethical concerns about the technology.

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Concerning the ethics, I disagree with the idea that there are ethical considerations concerning the use of AI to generate artwork or text, because the AI models are trained on such a wide range of inputs, and furthermore the training data of the reputable vendors does not include copywritten materials; given the diffuse nature of the inputs, claims of plagiarism are not particularly relevant (where it does happen, such as where I had Star Wars-related content popping up in early versions of some of the above before DALL E was retired and replaced, well, this was due to their outside influence on the cultural gestalt as pertains to science fiction; since my story contains some elements set in space, it was almost inevitable that this kind of problem would occur given the limitations of DALL E at the time.

Rather, the major ethical concerns pertain to two primary areas: resource consumption by datacenters having adverse effects on the IT market and potentially the environment (that being said, datacenters can be environmentally friendly, if done correctly, and they do not leak toxins into the environment under normal operations (the main source of primary pollution from datacenter operations, as opposed to secondary sources of pollution such as if the datacenter if fueled with a coal-fired power plant or environmental hazards generated by the manufacture of the semiconductors, which to be clear, is a very dirty industry, one which uses such nightmare chemicals as chlorine trifluoride, which has the interesting property of being able to ignite concrete and water, aside from being corrosive, neurotoxic, explosive and carcinogenic), is in the form of diesel generators used for emergency power during outages. So while the manufacture of the compute power can be fabulously dirty, once the computers are made, their operation is only as dirty as the power plants that operate them, and also the vehicles required to bring personnel and equipment to the datacenter.

The more pressing concern rather is the potential job loss. Companies are laying off people due to AI (which is often either incapable or much less capable of doing the job), and this is a legitimate social problem that the major AI companies are ignoring, while harping on about alignment, and in the case of chatGPT, removing the 4o model, callously causing emotional distress to a number of users, with only 13 days notice for mass market users without Business or Enterprise accounts, despite assurances that any retirement would be presaged with an ample warning, while at the same time planning on introducing actual erotica (which 4o did not generate, beyond R rated romantic scenes in fictional novels).

Indeed, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI (whose past reputation as a CEO before joining openAI, I am looking into, as it appears he is not a stranger to controversial actions), recently made a spectacularly callous remark when asked about the power consumption required to train new AI models. He dared to liken this to the amount of energy required to feed and train humans over a 20 year period from birth … which is so callous as to be despicable, the idea of reducing humans to an energy expenditure vs. productivity equation, which was clearly the application. It was chilling, and dystopian.

Indeed, it was exactly the sort of thing that Pope Leo XIV warned us about last year, when he warned of the de-humanizing potential of AI.

AI by itself is only evil if we make it evil or use it for evil ends, which is what is occurring. And I would add, if we think what is going on with chatGPT and the other major American AI vendors is bad, we should recoil at the thought of DeepSeek, because while Sam Altman may be talking in hypotheticals about the “valuation” of human beings vs. AI as an energy:time ratio, as if humans are a commodity, you can bet that for a dystopian regime like the People’s Republic of China, whose human rights record is worse than abysmal, is absolutely doing with their own AIs such as DeepSeek - AIs which by the way will in some cases actually deny atrocities like Tiananmen Square or the Uighur genocide (the output varies depending on whether one talks to them in Mandarin or English).

I would ask your prayers for me, because much of my work includes efforts to mitigate that (for example, my attempts to engineer ethical behavior into AI model configuration).

By the way, our pious Roman Catholic friends @Michie @Xeno.of.athens and @RileyG , who I have discussed AI with previously, might be interested to read this post, and thus I have tagged them.

ViaCrucis said:

It's a bit of a pet peeve of mine when I see some people use their highly modernistic, recent tradition as a means to reject ancient, historic, long-standing Christian tradition and practice (especially when such tradition and practice actually has biblical foundation).
But it happens incredibly frequently, and I know that--at least in part--it stems from a simple lack of knowledge and education about such topics.

Because I grew up in an environment that regularly viewed "Catholic" things as bad, but then substituted historic practices and ideas with ones that did not exist until the last 100 years and which were created whole-cloth from human imagination. In that way I've been a bit of am amphibian. It's why I often recognize the arguments, because it's the stuff that I had spoon-fed to me for years before I did independent research--which led me to traditional, normative, historic Christian practice and teaching.

Almost as though there are GOOD REASONS why Christians have believed what they have always believed and done what they have always done. And hating the past is not a good reason to re-invent the wheel (especially if the new wheel is a square)

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I grew up in a relatively formal UMC parish before the UMC was hijacked by the far left despite the GC adopting by a strong majority the Traditional Plan in 2018 in a chain of events I continue to regard as very strange, and attended an LCMS parochial school - so for me, the amount of cognitive dissonance caused by these radical sects that disregard the ancient faith is even more distressing. Every contact I’ve had with such groups has been alienating and in some cases spiritually toxic; for example I recall being variously depressed, appalled by and scandalized by the writings of Hal Lindsay, or for that matter the pre-millennial dispensationalist commentary of the King James Study Bible, which is actually fairly mild compared to the iconoclastic anti-Catholic extremes we see in most of the Restorationist sects (the exception being the mainline Christian Church / Disciples of Christ denomination, which is basically just another liturgical Protestant denomination at this point (on the other hand, the more hardline members of the Stone/Campbell movement formed the Churches of Christ, which definitely fit the Restorationist sectarian mold, with a local Churches of Christ pastor having to fight with members of his congregation in order to defend the celebration of Christmas, yes, Christmas, the feast of the Nativity (I don’t know why I’m so shocked, since annually it comes under attack on these forums, I suppose its seeing an example of such anti-incarnational behavior in the real world) from those who would suppress it on various charges such as it not being in the Bible (contra Matthew 1-3, Luke 1-3, John 1, the prophecy of St. Isaiah, et cetera, ad nauseam ad infinitum) or constituting some kind of pagan idolatry because Christmas trees and an unrelated West Semitic deity and the other usual non-sequiturs we see…

Somehow encountering it in the wild, first hand, makes it all so much worse, since in the context of online forums, a certain sense of disbelief can apply.