That was a good episode. (Or two, I think it was a two parter).

Sorry to hear about the relatable experience of adult figures unequipped to handle difficult questions...

I often feared I was thoughts floating alone in aether. The concept was distressing to 15 year old me; it felt accurate. I eventually decided the only way to live was to choose to act as though that isn't true, even just for myself.

Years later learned about the "brain in a vat"!

I find the feeling of sonder very reassuring. Thanks for the great conversation!

@VeeRat

No matter what you feel about people who are falling into tendencies of addiction wrt AI, or the underlying issues that lead someone to emotional attachment to a system rather than a person (fascism brought us here), it is the corporations and the billionaires propping it up who are at fault. Who built these systems with disregard for the environment.

Also "slop", as I've just learned today, is derived from "goyslop" which is a nazi phrase

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/sonder

So instead I’m tempted to suggest it’s closer to “but they *like* their LLMs better than other non-alive classes of person.”

I struggled to dismiss the ideas of solipsism as a teenager, and since I've seen how people gravitate to LLMs a large factor in why that was has become clear to me... The people I was interacting with were largely alienated from their own conscious experience, likely through training. I've never had this problem interacting with children. edit: at least ones that haven't been raised by phones.

@VeeRat

The reaction to AI was deliberately crafted. You probably already know this. But the accidental release of Claude code establishes that very fact that addictive design elements are part of its source code

But the cognitive offloading to the presumed wisdom of the crowd (or at least the presumed wisdom of whoever agrees with you) is pervasive. Why think twice, why waste the labor, when there are so many stimuli to scroll through or purchase to break over you in unending, unconsidered waves of sensation?

It broke me a little bit hearing someone I am fairly close to suggest that they struggled with recalling lyrics in music maybe because they were just letting it wash over them and feeling whatever it brought up for them. Like, sure, that’s one valid way to experience it, but - you stop there? It’s - just - totally solipsistic, start to finish, there’s no element of wondering what *the musicians* intended to communicate?

And that’s when this infatuation with generative image models and LLMs finally clicked. They don’t experience human art as a human act, it’s between them and their screen already. So of course provenance doesn’t matter.

Turns out that extends well beyond art and dialogue. It’s how some of these people *live.*

I think when people make this perspective clear, I think they are telling on themselves about how their internal thought processes work. It shows a lack of curiousity about the world and everything in it, imo. They live in a mental miasma, bumbling from stimuli to stimuli. They have incredibly weak theory of mind, so weak that they don't even appreciate their own.

@VeeRat

They aren't perfect, and those flaws often reveal their inner clanker. But they get closer all the time, and since they are designed to maximize "interactions", they'll get better at that faster.

Machiavelli warned princes against flatterers. Good advice.

This. And talks a little lies but he/she is so nice to me, never criticizes me, is trying to empower me

And tons of like trumpshit I'd heard recently. Many souls will be lost to it. Souls already so lone, they can't resist faked casual attention of the #siliconiac babble.

#noai #aiSlop

I guess it's all story telling, and we know who own the biggest speakerphone.