So, a while ago I watched one of those "30 for 30"'s on ESPN. I watch those sometimes, they're usually good. I don't watch all of them or anything, but if there's one I'm interested in, I'll usually seek it out, and even if you're not a sports fan, there's some top quality filmmakers and top quality storytelling going on most of the time. Some are better than others, but ESPN's made enough of them now over the year that when they don't have sports to show and don't feeling like poisoning the airways Stephen A. Smith, or whatever random former athlete blowhard or obnoxious former sports journalist-turned obnoxious sports columnist they have on talking nonstop about whatever sports soap opera they're trying to conjur up, they'll some old "30 for 30" episodes. I personally wish they'd air something like women's 9-ball, or hell, just make "Sportscenter" more tolerable like it used to, but these docs are fine. Anyway, the one I was watching was called "Al Davis vs. The NFL".
It's fine on it's own if you want to watch it,- actually it is pretty interesting- it's about the Raiders' longtime owner Al Davis and how he fought the NFL, several times, but about the big one that got all the way to the Supreme Court was when he moved the Raiders from Oakland to Los Angeles in the early eighties, against the approval of the league. It's not a new or unusual story to me or anything, but I still liked the documentary for going over all of the details 'cause if you know about these people involved, particularly Raiders' longtime owner Al Davis and then-NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle, there's a lot of history that spreads decades there, and going over every point of it in one thing,- it's a good retelling of those events in ways that we might gloss over otherwise. That said, from a filmmaking and storytelling manner, they-, made a weird choice in my mind....
You see the documentary begins with shots of Allegiant Stadium, the Raiders' current home stadium in Las Vegas, NV, and begins with legendary announcer Brent Musberger talking about the then-new staidum 'cause the Raiders had just moved to Vegas from Oakland then he talks about how the stadium, despite being built years after the deaths of both Al Davis and Pete Rozelle, it claimed that, their ghosts, were still luring around the stadium and, in essence, haunting the place? It was weird, and then, the movie tells us that they hired actors to stand-in for Davis and Rozelle, and through the magic of a.i., has replicated their look and appearance for this documentary, essentially being interviewed about each other, in order to talk about the events of the documentary. In essence, they're giving their sides of the conflict, through the their recreations through artificial intelligence.
Umm, that was, a choice.... I-, hmm.... like, okay, I kinda see it, like, the Raiders fought to move to Los Angeles, and that opened the door for other teams to move, as well as instigate expansion, and the creation of the Raiders new stadium in the Vegas desert is something that literally couldn't have happened with the court cases and conflicts between these two titans of the league, so they're presence, while not literal, is still there. I kinda see the idea. On the other hand, Al Davis had nothing to do with the Raiders moving to Las Vegas, he passed away in 2011, it was Mark Davis, Al's son and current Raiders priority owner who moved the team to Las Vegas, and even though the state and taxpayers paid for a lot of that building, I think if anybody's fingerprints are on the building it's Mark's way more than Al, plus Pete Rozelle also had passed away long before, back in 1996, and he hadn't been commissioner for seven years prior to that,- I haven't been to Allegiant Stadium yet, even though I do live in Vegas, but I can't imagine there's the ghosts of these two there! I get it, it's a storytelling device, but it's a weird one, right, just on that level, it's weird, but like, that's not even the part that concerns me. Like,- why do the a.i. recreations, like, at all?
I mean, the documentary, is mostly archive news footage and highlights,- Al Davis and Pete Rozelle-, I guess they were a little coy to the cameras when talking about each other, but they didn't exactly make their feelings unknown about each other, nor were they particularly camera shy in general, there's plenty of footage of both of them, in general and talking about and to each other at times. And, okay a lot of the people who were around back then, they aren't here now, but not all of them. The movie has plenty of talking heads and it's not a super-obscure story they're telling. If you need to get, like, the "thoughts" of Davis and Rozelle, like, you don't need to get it from their own words. You could just, have like a close friends or representatives of both of them, just say the copy out loud of what their thoughts would've been, in their own words, describing what Davis and Rozelle felt and were thinking when appropriate, if you really couldn't find like, the silver bullet archive footage you want of them, but like, even then,- like, the main thing I'm getting at here, is that this was clearly a decision by the filmmakers, that wasn't necessary in order to tell this story.
Does that mean it's bad? Does it mean it's good? Umm..., honestly, I don't know. It has an effect, I'll say that, but I think it could've been done a different way.... I'm not bringing it up, 'cause I liked it or hated it, I'm bringing it up because it's the first time I saw something in a film or TV show that really genuinely made me think about artificial intelligence, or a.i. in terms of it's use in filmmaking. I don't know what other peoples' moments for that would've been, I'm sure most people have seen A.I. in films or television and certainly in online media recently and had a striking reaction to it, in one way or another. Honestly, I don't have an immediate story like that.... Maybe I haven't seen anything so striking before, or really, it's probably that I just have a terrible uncanny valley meter to begin with. (Sorry, I- I've heard people use that term for decades now and give me examples of it, and I don't get it. I've seen the Kyle Kallgren video about it, I've seen other things, and 99% of the time, I don't see what they see mean and I just don't get it in general. Whatever example you can name, I probably will not have have the same effect. Sorry animators.)
Anyway it wasn't the effect of it, so much as, the decision to use it at all. It's so clearly unnecessary that it also clearly means that it was a stylized choice by the filmmakers; they believed that it would improve the story. And this isn't an ESPN-thing, they're pretty hands-off on most of these docs in general, and also their latest "30 for 30", "Boo-Yah: A Portrait of Stuart Scott", begins with a specific note that all of that film's audio is source from archive footage and that none of the audio has been manipulated with, so I doubt this was something insisted upon or anything. (Yes, Stuart Scott's story is probably a little more personal to ESPN than this one about Al Davis, but still..., unless I hear otherwise, I suspect this wasn't a choice made against a filmmaker's wishes or anything. BTW, I watched that documentary too, and it was excellent. Sad, but excellent.) That's the part that struck me, it's never what it creates, it's why are they using it, and what are they using it for?
I know others have talked about a.i. for awhile now, I'm probably the last person who's talked about it at this point, but honestly I hadn't had anything to really say about it. I mean, I get why people hate it; I see why people use it....
(Shrugs)
Honestly, I only kinda understand what it is. On the surface it doesn't seem that different to me, than things people already had been doing, just a lot easier. People had been warning about, say computer animated models taking the place of actors, forever-, I remember when "The Sopranos" got in hot water over recreating Nancy Marchand's character for a scene after she had passed away-, they didn't use the term A.I., but essentially it's the same thing.
Yeah, this scene, that frankly I didn't know/believe was CGI until after people told me and were upset at how unnatural and wrong it looks? (See, told ya, I don't have an Uncanny Valley meter, this looked fine enough to me; I was convinced they shot this scene and then changed the whole rest of the episode to have it be about her actor/character's passing.)
CGI/a.i.... is there a difference? (Shrugs)
Sometimes it doesn't really seem like it, but yes, the difference seems to be that, instead of painstaking humans doing the actions, it's now, easier, through the use of machines? Algorithms? Something like that?- I'm not here to pretend I'm an expert on it. A.I. seems to be a catch-all term for a lot of things, but the basic difference I see is that, unlike having to teach the machine how to do what you want it to do, the machines can be programmed so advanced that they can help you out instead. This is through a process called "Machine Learning".
Okay, I might not fully get what we're calling, A.I., but I definitely remember the first time I heard the term "Machine Learning". If was fifteen or so years ago when I saw a machine do something that few people thought a machine could do.
If you're not familiar, Watson, was an IBM supercomputer that was designed specifically to win on "Jeopardy!". And not just, win, against anybody, those two players that he's competing against, current host, and still the all-time record-holder in consecutive wins on "Jeopardy!" Ken Jennings, and Brad Rutter, who at the time, was the highest money-earner ever on "Jeopardy!" and I think is still, 2nd or 3rd on the list-, basically, the two greatest "Jeopardy!" contestants ever, and Watson, despite admittedly a few hiccups, like thinking Toronto was in America, for instance, still, he beat the crap out of both of them. This was the modern-day equivalent of Big Blue defeating Garry Kasparov times 1000, it's one thing to teach machine how to move chess pieces on a board, but getting it to understand speech and language, and figure out "Jeopardy!" clues,- hell teaching it to ring in, is hard! Teaching it to answer in the correct format, is hard!...- It was undeniably impressive, and even then, I remember hearing that the technology used to build and create Watson, would inevitably help lead to other greater advancements where machines could assist in things like, figuring out genetic codes or diagramming unknown disesases and helping find cures faster than scientists trying to do it alone, and you can look up the things that WATSON been doing, it's technique have advanced the world. It's also the same kind of technology and process that would create something like ChatGPT.
(Sigh)
I'm a little, um, hmm, uncomfortable, talking about ChapGPT or other similar programs; they're quite controversial, and especially as a writer, it-, it makes me a little queezy to a degree. That's not true for everybody; when it first started to break out a few years ago, I saw a lot of friends of Facebook, many of whom were way more successful writers than I am, using ChapGPT, you know, to create, laughs basically. Like, they would give ChatGPT a concept and a style and tell it write something and then we laugh and whatever it blurted out. It was funny then, 'cause we were laughing at it, on some high level, but the more ChatGPT has become in use, the more natural it's become for many to use. There's good and bad to this, obviously, these are tools; it's not what they do, it's how you use them....
(Sigh)
I guess you all might be wondering if I've ever used it, right.... Well, not on this blog, no. I'm not pretending that's good or bad either, but I've never used it here. I have used it in my writings, and I did it recently. I don't really talk or promote some of the other projects I work on a lot, but I did write a short film recently. This one:
I guess, I could probably find the actual short film and post it here, but.... eh,; I'm sure it's somewhere online; I'm just happy it got made and finished personally, it even got screened publicly. Most people who saw it seemed to like it. It's a cute little short. It was shot during something called a 48 Hour Project, where a group of filmmakers work together under a given set of conditions, and they have to make a short film, from writing to filming to editing, all the way through completion in 48 hours. Anyway, I helped write the screenplay with a friend of mine, and the plot was her original idea and basically, and we had to turn this idea about mystery shoppers into a superhero movie. It was the genre we picked, that's one of the conditions; we pick the genre at random. Anyway, at some point, we had to come up with a superhero name for one of the characters, and that's what we used- honestly, I don't even know if it was ChatGPT, but it was one of those sites. It might've been some other kind of name generator, which,- isn't that another version of a.i. anyway, although I've seen name generators, even before I heard of Watson, so...,- but yeah, we put in some descriptions and asked for a superhero name, and if I'm being honest, I don't even remember if we used any of those suggestions or not. I think we did, but, it's possible we saw one of the suggestions and came up with something we liked better. That's literally about the only thing that I even remember trying to use it for. To me, that's kinda what it's there for, to help, or assist in the creative process, or the writing process, if it's not something that's inherently creative. I'll admit when the idea to use a.i. was brought up, I was a little apprehensive at first, but y'know, if that's all it is, and if I can't think of anything better than what a machine would come up with, than absolutely use the machine. It's one part of a much larger thing, it's not creating it entirely, and it's certainly not doing the work for me. In my mind, that's not any different than when I have to use a thesaurus to try to find a better word to use.
Of course, not everybody uses it that way, and, some of the recent stats on how prevalent ChatGPT has become, across everything, honestly is pretty frightening. That's before you look into a lot of the recent plagairism claims that are out there, even before ChatGPT became really prevalent, everywhere from lazy video essayists to people who reached the highest levels of academia and governments.... Business reports, law briefs are being dismissed for being obviously A.I...., if you want to look it up, there's so much where a.i. has reportedly been taking over everything. I'm not the first to bring this up, hell, "The Simpsons" did an episode about how kids are using ChatGPT to do homework and how the teachers have to combat it with A.I.-recognition software..., they're not even the first, or fifth show to even do something about that. Just a couple weeks ago, there was another published book where the "author", left in the writing prompt in their book. (Yes, another, that's happened multiple times too now.)
(Another prolonged sigh)
You know, despite all of this, I was still basically gonna ignore all of this and not write anything about ChatGPT, a.i. or anything else. I didn't really have any strong feelings about it. Like,- people have been finding ways of cheating forever. And sure, some people have to write things for their jobs and that's not their best skill or something, there are times where I don't think a.i. is the worst thing, I don't mind if I a.i. is used to say, create a generic business contract letter or something of the sort of something of that nature that can be tedious to put out, and sure, it can be used to do the things that we can't do some times, right? And on top of everything else that's permeated our media over the years that I've bitched and complained about on here, and elsewhere, like, honestly, a.i. being used, it isn't nearly as close to the list of complaints for me. I mean, if I heard that the next "Spider-Man" movie turned out to be written by A.I., my complaint wouldn't be that it was written by A.I., my complaint would be that we were making a new "Spider-Man" movie at all! Like, c'mon, don't we have more than enough; I'm sick of these things! See, where the energy and the angers should go, not towards, the a.i., right?
The thing is, I did see a tweet somewhere awhile ago. This one, by fantasy author, Carol Maciejewska, I don't know her work, but apparently this tweet went viral enough for me to see it pop up somewhere, and I can't get it out of my head:
"You know what the biggest problem with pushing all-things-AI is? Wrong direction!
I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes."
I know, it's just a funny line, and the perfect kind of thing to randomly throw out into the world; which is how a website like Twitter, should be used..., (And no, I'm not calling it that letter.) but, this kept sticking into the back of my mind every time I heard something about some flagrantly bad use of A.I., and she dismisses as more than a funny observation as well, but the more I think about it, I think she nailed it here. Like, I don't need my jetpack, but, why exactly do we have this instead of, Rosie the Maid?
Okay, look, I'm gonna warn you all now, um, a lot of the rest of this post, is gonna get a little, tinfoil hat-like.... I'm aware of that, so I'm letting you all know that now. I don't dive into, for-lack-of-a-better-term, "conspiracy theories" or anything ridiculous like that normally, and I don't think that's even what this is,- and I do try to avoid making too many giant leaps of logic, especially pertaining to some of the things I'm gonna bring up, even I feel like I'm bordering on turning into a crackpot for thinking about some of this way too long,.... I realize that I'm about to put 2+2 together and coming up with a formula for how the stock market is rigged or whatever ridiculous thing you want to put at the end of 2+2, and maybe the stupid computer algorithms and my general surrounding are putting these observations into my head, it's very, very possible, but, I'm gonna knowingly risk it, this one time. This is my one, grand theory of the modern ways of the world, so forgive my indulgence, if this sounds like the meanderings of that old crackhead at the bus stop who thinks the government's hiding the cure for cancer in the AIDS vaccine they secretly made out of dandelions and alien DNA but still asks you for a dollar and tells you "God Bless" when you get on the bus but that he never gets on,- anyway, if it sounds a little like that, I'm apologizing for that now.
(Long deep sighing breath)
Okay, if you're still with me, thanks for your indulgence..., but yes, why, exactly, do we have ChatGPT and not Rosie?! Not literally, obviously, although looking at my sink full of dirty dishes, yes, I would rather have a robot maid than a tool that would help me write this essay faster; it's literally just four dishes and I feel exhausted just looking at it, but why did the first really huge mainstream advancement in A.I., come in the department of writing and creating.... Like, who benefits from that?
In my experience, the idiots who kept trying to copy my answers during school tests.
Okay, that's a little facetious, sure some people have learning disabilities and struggle with writing in general, I'm not thinking about them, but is it, that facetious though? Like, it's not the people who can't write or can't create that bother me, it's the people who see the mere act of it, as an annoyance. Something that they shouldn't be doing, and shouldn't have to do, something that, some other person should be doing for them, or some machine. The people who could do all the hard work of, actually writing or creating, but don't exactly want to do it, or those want to say they've done it but don't actually want to do it. I mean, people get hired to take tests for people all the time, to get threw school, get into college, to go threw college..., people who just shouldn't be in those positions, but they somehow can afford it. And, I'm not expressly talking about one person here; it's a whole problem with modern society, when you think everything is commodable and disposable...,- like, I'll give an example here, 'cause it's easy to look at politicians or business leaders and see how incompetent and/or corrupt they are, but how many people do you think "passed" the BAR exam, and became lawyers but, didn't actually take the test? Even if it's say, half of 1%, wouldn't that scare you? Or, how about doctors! You don't think it's happened occasionally? Probably not at the same level as other positions, but would it not worry you? Usually people who do that kind of thing, you hope would get weeded out by their incompetence pretty quickly, but y'know, not always I bet. Certainly not at positions that might still hold a lot of power, but might not be that intense.
Okay, let me bring it back to something fun and entertaining to show my point here, you know, I have a friend who we discuss one of our favorite television shows together, "Abbott Elementary". I'm a couple seasons behind admittedly, I'm trying to catch up, but I do have one observation...- see, a few years ago I participated in a poll listing the greatest villains in literature, I posted my ballot at one point:
I don't know if that entire ballot holds up now, and if you look at the actual results of the list, my ballot was not even close to the final results, like, my number one didn't even make their list, but I still like that ballot for the most part, however if I did that list today, there's absolutely one name that I would absolutely find a place for, and yeah, it's from "Abbott Elementary".
My friend tries to defend her, apparently she, "gets better" which I guess is true, but, Principal Ava is fucking evil! One of the most evil characters on television, maybe the most evil. I mean, just think about it for half a second people, she hates school, she hates teaching and learning, she blackmailed her way into a job as a school principal over somebody who wanted the job and was more qualified for the position, she's the most self-centered person ever, and based on how she's built things like private toilets for herself, she's probably stealing funds from the school district, and she's the one running an elementary school! Imagine your kids going to this school, and praying that they're somehow able to learn-, I mean, it's already bad enough there's a lot of idiots and psychos on schoolboards across the country trying to give our kids very bad educations now to lie and manipulate and brainwash our students, and that's even besides every other problem with our modern school system, but here, you have a sociopathic nutjob like Ava, as your school Principal! I mean, we really should be madder at incompetence at positions of authority in general, but this is like getting Frank Burns as your doctor! Okay, it's not that bad, 'cause at least she's not killing the students by being bad at her job and excusing it by saying it was "God's will", (I should've put Frank Burns way higher on that list, especially in the books, he's way worst than you realize.) but here's the person in charge of molding young minds! All, because she wants to be in charge and bully around her co-workers and not do anything substantive, and this is all at the expense of an elementary school, their teachers, their students, a place for learning for those who need the best advantages the most! (Oh, yeah, big fish in a small pond syndrome, all this to have the power as an inner-city elementary school principal! She doesn't even have the grand ambitions she thinks she does!) I love the show and the character is hilarious, Janelle James's performance is magnificent and underrated; she's funny as hell, but I can make a legit argument that she's the epitome of everything wrong with this country. I won't go that far, but I shouldn't legitimately be able to do that.
BTW, it's not easy to get a job as a school principal! I'm sure, at the very best, she coasted through all the classes and credentials needed to even become eligible to be a principal, if she didn't, you know, pay/bribe/blackmail somebody to make her pass all those exams and classes too.... I mean, she probably was a teacher for a few years, I doubt she was a good one, but even with all the blackmail in the world, you need a Bachelor's Degree, years of teaching experience, a Master Degree in Education, several other state-required licenses and exams....- I mean, this is Ava, do you think she legitimately did all this to get this job!? You don't think she'd use A.I. to do this, if she could've!? There were Presidents of Harvard and others in highly-ranked positions in Ivy League school caughts plagairizing, do you think it's not happening on the lowest levels of the education systems in general?! At all levels of society, in general!?
And with A.I., it's so much easier now, for people like Ava, to advance to positions like that. I get chills thinking about that. I mean, it's one thing that it's poisoning the arts right now, and yeah, that does annoy me, but it's honestly, everything else that bothers me about it. Like, how far does this go? The people who are using A.I. to find cures for cancer or stuff like that, I mean, I have nothing but great things to say for that. Even a.i. when it's needed to help improve art, it's fine. Artificial intelligence is never gonna fully replace true talent and skill,- the problem is never gonna be a.i. taking over- all those fears about machines taking over the world and whatnot,- I don't buy that. What I am concerned with is idiots using those machines to take over the world. Or maybe even worst, smart-enough idiots with very ill-intent, using those machines to take over the world. (Yeah, think about that too, sometimes when make something too easy to do, that means that some people who shouldn't be doing things are now doing those things, and that's not necessarily good either. Oh god, can you imagine some of the world worst a.i.-created films from some of the most incompetent of human beings would come with like-, it could make Tommy Wiseau look like a competent filmmaker, Jesus.)
And, for those people, the smart-enough idiots with ill-intent, what's the ideal endgame for them? I'm not saying this is what's ultimately gonna happen, I honestly don't think that, but these are people who aren't skilled enough to actually be in positions of authority, trying to cheat and bribe their way into positions of authority, and like, for the time being, let's ignore all the great things that are coming from a.i. for moment and people trying to use it to genuinely benefit humanking and whatnot, I get the use of a.i. for that, but the percentage that's not interested in that, what do they want society to become? What are they trying to lead us towards? They already are thumbing their nose at academia, politics, arts, and if you want to include all kinds of modern automation that's ruining our job markets-, (and to be fair, not all automation is bad either, like McDonald's had to hire more people when they put in self-check outs 'cause people ordered more food so they need more cooks, and it ultimately benefitted everyone, I get that, but there is a lot of automation that, all it does is kill jobs, and frankly can just ruin things in general) it's like they don't want anybody to do any work of any substance, at all, unless it's in service to them.
Like, that's my conspiracy theory, the incompetent, the rich, the-, as George Carlin once called them, the real "Owners" of our country, the richer and more powerful they get, the poorer and dumber they make us, they're slowly using and manipulating the trappings of modern society in however they can, in order to destroy us, the regular people, and a.i. is another tool for that. They don't really want us to be around, unless they need somebody to go fight a war or tie their shoes, or whatever. Anything that they can't do, or don't want to do/learn or are unable to take the time to learn how to do it themselves, they think it's beneath them, and not something that they should ever be doing and therefore anything that makes that part of their lives easier, they're going to press it onto us, and a.i. is so much another tool in the ultimate goal of that for them, that it makes me cringe a little every time, even when it's perfectly reasonable to use a.i. And the more they take away, from what we can do, not just to create, but to make a living like a regular person, like, what's going to be left? I mean, are we all just gonna end up being OnlyFans models at this point, cause it's either sell ourselves to get what crumbs they give or nothing else? It feels like it, although a.i. has probably penetrated, no pun intended, porn as well,- hell, the industry is probably got the best a.i. technology of everything right now. I mean, it makes sense, if they can't get us humans to satisfies their most bizarre desires and fetishes, you can make the fake humans do it, although they're probably rich enough now that as long as it's physically and anatomically possible, they can probably pay them to do it now.
I know, I'm going off the rails on this, and it's probably bad to talk too much about porn in this but, if you go to a porn website, there's sixty ads for a.i. porn on them, and of course it's the first thing that explodes in popularity; the industry is a better trend forecaster than anybody wants to admit and realize. Also, isn't it freaky, that people are getting so much richer on those model sites? Free porn is easier and cheaper than ever to get and yet, people are paying a lot of money to a lot of those "amateurs" and others on those websites...; who are those people, some of them are giving a lot of money to those performers, and I certainly don't begrudge them for making it, but,.... I mean,...- maybe they couldn't afford a seat on Epstein's plane, but the way they give to some of these performers, unless way more people are going broke by donating to OnlyFans models than we realize, or these are the people who could probably afford to buy a plane of their own.
Yeah, I get it, we don't want to think about it, but I do think about it. I think that's part of why "Anora" hit so hard for me and works for me so well.
It is cliche and all, and I don't know how accurately it portrays the escort or stripper parts of the sex industry, and sure, maybe living in Vegas and working in the service industry effects me too much, but if you've ever had to deal with a lot of these people, especially the younger yuppie people, who can spend thousands on the dumbest of bets without thinking or worrying about it, 'cause they're families are some kind of oligarchs or something, that movie brutally nails everything wrong with capitalism right now. I feel it in my bones, seriously. They're turning us all into hustlers just to get a little ahead, and eventually you buy into your own con because, there isn't anything else you got.
I also think it's that same train-of-thought though, that also made me absolutely despise and hate "Ready Player One" so much too.
Like, that's basically a film that's about how great living and being in an a.i. world is, one created by an eccentric rich billionaire and everybody's in a symbolic power struggle to control this virtual reality heaven, meanwhile everybody lives in fucking trailers and abandoned cars repurpose as crates, everything's run by drones, and everyone's obsessing over famous pieces of nostalgia that they're iconic hero was obsessed with, so like, literally instead of trying to create a better world, or even just, be pissed off that the world around them isn't better, they're stuck trying to make a fake world better...-, a fake world they didn't even design...- God, I hate this fucking movie! And yes, there's some girl in the opening, who's dancing around a stripper pole in that a.i. universe, and sure, maybe she enjoys doing that, or maybe she thinks she does because the world that's evolved to in this universe makes it seem like a quality and productive choice of lifestyle than whatever else she could've been doing? I don't know, it's so annoying and depressing and it's media like this that I believe is sending out all the wrong messages to the populace. Ignore the world's problems and just worry about your own little portion of the fictional world we give you, hell, fight for that fictional world to be better, instead of trying and fighting to make the real world better. (Sarcastic voice) "Don't teach the audience to be critics, or critical teachers at least, just congratulate them on being such big fans of them!" Ugh.
So, is there a greater thing I've come to with my thoughts on a.i.? I don't know? Probably not. Despite my Revelations-level projections of how a.i. is gonna end us, I still think I might be giving a.i. way too much credit honestly. I'm not even convincing myself of these delusional predictions I'm spewing honestly, and frankly, I obviously hope I'm wrong, and there's plenty of evidence to indicate to me that a.i. is a bubble that's gonna eventually burst soon. People will realize how genuinely minimally useful it is, and that it's just gonna be better and easier to do most things the good old-fashioned way. A.i, is only as good or bad as it's user and it's developer. Some are better than others, some are better at some skills than others..., hell,- you want to really get laughs at a.i. and ChatGPT in general, don't try to give it obtuse and bizarre writing prompts, watch competing a.i. play chess against each other.
Yeah, this is what I need when I want to not be afraid of a.i. I know they're not chessbots like Stockfish or Komodo or anything, so they're not designed to know chess, although some have learned and have apparently some of them have gotten better...? But, yeah, 40 years after Big Blue, we have machines that could beat the best at "Jeopardy!" but still some machines that think pawns can go backwards if needed, your queen can jump over a horse, and your bishop can you magical powers to cross the board and turn into a queen to checkmate your opponent's queen, before offering a draw.
And you know, the annual CES Convention was in town last week, and you know what the huge think was this year? Vacuum cleaners! No, seriously, vacuums; they were the big thing.
Look at that? I mean, my sink is still fully of dirty dishes right now, but look here, after everything else, we are indeed taking a.i. technology and it's being used to help make our lives better by indeed, doing the chores that we would've been too consumed with to write stuff like novels, scripts, and yes, blogposts before. And these are way more advanced than even those old Roombas. They're climbing and descending stairs, switching between mopping hardwood floors and vacuuming carpets,- they're moving old socks from the floors, they're identifying how things move on the floor.... Maybe we're a lot closer to having our own Rosie the Robot Maid's than we think, and once we get those things, the more useless a.i.'s like ChatGPT are gonna be gone the way of other old modern programs we thought we once couldn't live without like America Online or MySpace or, eh, whatever civil liberties we lost today?
(Sigh)
I'm trying to smile through this, I swear, but we're never gonna be able to afford any of those machines, right? By the time they're cheap enough and useful enough to actually buy, they're gonna figure out that the mop and the broom are still gonna be so much cheaper and just as good that it won't make the investment worth it, right? That's not part of my the rich want to make us their servants' rant, that's just-, that thing's gonna break, a large kid's gonna step on it or think it's a frisbee and throw it off the roof-, you all see that right? I wish it would work but it's just gonna be easier and cheaper to trick an OCD friend of yours to clean your place for you than to ever use buy or use any of those things, right?
Yeah, those things are cool but it's kinda the same with recreating Al Davis and Pete Rozelle using a.i. technology, just because we can, doesn't necessarily mean we should.
Certainly! I've written a closing passage that calls back to your previous reference to "Al Davis vs. The NFL", as a way of connecting most of the previous prevalent ideas and threads from this blogpost together, to make it appear more coherent, while still keeping it in your trademark meandering and insipid rambling, first-person faux-stream-of-consciousness style of mediocre commentary.
