Daniel Dvorkin @medigoth@qoto.org
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran medic and infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
Not posted for agreement or approval. If you share from my post, please leave my commentary intact. This has been a public service announcement.
This meme, and several others like it, are going around my friends list at the moment. A lot of the people sharing it are fellow #veterans, and I know why: it's an idea with strong appeal to those of us who were carefully trained in the capability for great #violence, and then given the tools to put that training to use. It does things to your head, and one way to deal with those things is to convince yourself that it made you meaningfully better in some way.
Unfortunately, it's crap.
First of all, practically *everyone* is capable of great violence, and has been since the invention of #gunpowder. You don't have to be a hulking armored #knight to mow down your enemies, or those you imagine to be your enemies. All you need is a working index finger. Sir Kittenfeeder isn't as special as you think he is.
(On the whole I think this is a good thing, although the ways in which it's ... not good ... are dramatic and horrible and in front of our faces with grotesque frequency. That's a different conversation.)
Second, yes, there are other levels of violence than the worst, and I think all in all it's good to have some familiarity with them. But there are matters of scale. Once upon a time I was at least a competent martial artist. I could have trained much harder than I did, every single day for my entire young adult life, and still never have been as good at it as the people born with the capacity to reach the top.
A very good but perhaps somewhat overenthusiastic #kickboxing coach told me I had the potential to be a pro. Some sparring sessions with actual pros—not champions, just those who were good enough to make a little money at it—demonstrated otherwise. Man's gotta know his limitations.
Third, and perhaps most important ... if you go around thinking all day about how capable of great violence you are, *you are not peaceful*. Oh, you may want to be. You may convince yourself and others around you that you are. If you and they are very lucky, you'll live your whole life without ever doing anything to break that peace. But you probably won't—and most likely those closest to you will pay the price.
The capacity to do violence, and the choice of whether or not to exercise it, are pretty much orthogonal. There are dangerous violent people, dangerous peaceful people, harmless violent people, and harmless peaceful people. We may fear and loathe the first, admire the second, pity the third, and not think much at all about the fourth because it's most people's default state most of the time. Good thing, too, because otherwise none of us would be here.
But any one of us can be any of the above, in different contexts at different times.
Absolutely, cultivate the capacity for violence if you want. In certain times and places, it's useful. Other times, it's at least good #exercise, and can lead to considerable self-improvement. Even as old and busted as I am, I still entertain thoughts of getting back into some kind of training one of these days. I miss it, and it did a lot to make me who I am.
Just remember it doesn't make you any better as a human being. Doesn't make you any worse, either. It's simply part of who you are, and it's up to the people around you to determine how good that is.
Oh yeah, and stop bragging, because that's not a good look for *anybody*.
I drink lemonade to prove that I can CRUSH the cruelest of all citrus fruits and DRAIN ITS BLOOD and then GRIND THE BONES of sugar cane to make it as sweet as the TEARS OF MY ENEMIES while harnessing the POWER OF LIGHTNING to make it as COLD AS THE DARKNESS OF MY SOUL.
Any questions? Yeah, THAT'S WHAT I THOUGHT.
Oh yeah, I also think it tastes good.
Not posted for approval, if you share from my post please leave my commentary intact ... you know the drill.
"A #darkness in the world you're simply not ready to accept."
I think it's the other way around. The world can be very dark, no question—but that darkness is messy and chaotic and caused by a million different things. #Conspiracy theorists desperately want a single explanation for all of it. They feel like if they can identify and name it, that knowledge gives them a measure of control.
What they're not ready to accept is that there *isn't* a single source for all the pain and suffering, and even if you get rid of one, there will always be more to take its place.
The rest of us understand this. We know we'll never solve all the problems, or even most of them. Just do the best we can, with our own little corners of the world, and try to make things a bit better. Accepting that is a lot tougher, but it's worth the effort.
These people have no idea how badass they're making #Biden look. This may be the best #DarkBrandon meme yet. Keep up the good work!
#Philosophy students who fail to answer this question correctly are in danger of having their #livers devoured by #eagles.
"So what do we have here, Sergeant?"
"Looks like a eucalyptus deal gone bad, Detective."
"All right. Round up the usual suspects."
Says it all, really. #evolution #creationism #transitional #fossil
The usual disclaimers: not posted for agreement (although I did get a chuckle out of the first image), if you share from my post please leave my commentary intact, originally posted by a friend I won't name unless they want me to because I'm not looking for a fight ... etc.
I really hope it's possible to have a middle-ground discussion about this.
On one hand, the idea that #AI-generated #text and #images are purely #plagiarism strikes me as fundamentally untrue. If you prompt #ChatGPT to write you a story, it will give you a combination of words which has never existed before. With a little back-and-forth, those words will be at least a reasonable approximation of the #story you had in your head when you started. Same with #Midjourney and pictures. That is a #creative act.
On the other, it's not just a tool like pen and paper, or word processors, or even add-ons like suggested text. You can plagiarize with all of those—but they don't *push* you toward plagiarism the way ChatGPT does, and although I'm not a visual artist I understand Midjourney is even worse. (I'm using those as the two best-known examples; I know there are lots of others.) My #writing contains turns of phrase from favorite books, and so does everyone else's. But not whole paragraphs or pages with the names changed ... if there's even that much editing.
So it seems to me that neither "nothing generated by AI can ever be true art" nor "stop whining, it's just another way to tell stories" is quite right. One thing for sure is that it's not going away, and things like the open letters urging a halt to AI development strike me as more attention-seeking stunts than serious attempts to solve the very real problems involved. We need to find a way to deal with it that respects *everyone's* rights.
Please tell me I'm not the only human, typing on my keyboard with my normal human hands, who sees it this way?
"ToughVet." Okay, sweetie. I think I covered that here:
Bioinformaticist / biostatistician, veteran medic and infantryman, armchair paleontologist, occasional science fiction author, vaccinated liberal patriot.
Joined Oct 2022
