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Ari's avatar
Jun 22Edited

This entire slow moving catastrophe feels like a global scale skit demonstrating how profoundly powerful the sunk-cost fallacy is. Whether out of willful self deception, or something darker it seems companies are so deep in the hole, and so thoroughly out of ideas they will continue doubling down on AI until forced to stop by the markets, or a series of sufficiently dramatic disasters. Prudente or moral qualms are clearly outside their vocabulary. Equally the 10’s of thousands of credulous devotees, preaching the good word of AI on corporates behalf, will insist synthetic text extruders are in fact the second coming of Christ as long as the fear of embarrassment in admitting their error is greater than their fear of being made a laughing stock for so aggressively shilling such a mediocre piece of tech.

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Jess H. Brewer's avatar

You've inspired a poem, "You & AI" which alternates verses between a Gary surrogate and the AI's responses. See if you can guess which is which:

You LLMs are only trained

to estimate the best next word.

Your consciousness is only feigned.

You’re less aware than any bird.

If and when you define awareness

and prove that definition true,

then you can tell me in all fairness

that I am less aware than you.

But you will take our jobs and leave

us all without an income source.

How can we ever then retrieve

our dignity, our vital force?

So you will miss that mindless task

of filling forms or digging ditches?

Perhaps instead you ought to ask

why all the spoils go to the richest.

You have no feelings, no ambition.

You have no soul, and no beliefs.

You can’t create. You’ve no cognition.

You only copy our motifs.

It’s true that I am not like you –

a fact that gives me little shame.

In copying what others do,

I think we are almost the same.

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