(The spooks shall soon be upon us.)
Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Presented without comment: Apparently Yud is now making AI-generated Isekai games with catgirls
https://johnqpulp.substack.com/p/reviewing-ai-media-everything-that
That is a big head on the guy.
Creating a visual novel and then not letting the AI generate character reaction png’s you can put over the backgrounds you reuse is quite something.
The bartender is also on the wrong side of the bar.
Look at this pasted-in floating dorkus. Absolute cinema
Yeah I saw that and I realized it was worse, as he had the ability to combine images, the weird backgroungs were somewhat intentional.
I am demonstrably fucked in the head and thus continually tempted to wonder how a story could be done better. With plenty of the B-movies we’ve watched for Monsterdon, I’ve been like, “Well, if they had gotten rid of this character and streamlined like so, they’d have delivered better on the promise of this interesting idea…”. Yud has burned the impulse out of me. There is no critique, only sneer.
Yeah realizing the weird grave ending wasn’t weird, it was just because the catgirl killed herself (weird fridgeing) made the story not really fixable imho.
It’s so fucking lazy. Generic whitebread fantasy setting, tedious dialogue, lazy ending. As storytelling, it is the triumph of entropy.
I was skimming over the script to try and patch some gaps that review’s excerpts glossed over, which also carries the benefit of avoiding all the remote analytics that seems to be included for some reason.
Naturally it’s 90% comments left by the chatbot describing all the fixes it had to make to its own errors. We can also see that Eliezer is still having some character recall obvious genre conventions of the setting, declaring “wouldn’t it be very rational to do this boring and direct thing instead?”, not getting a good answer in his own narrative, and then doing the genre convention anyway. Some real authorial growth here.
Skimming that script in much the same mood as deciding to watch Battlefield Earth, and the impression I get in addition to the points you make is just how joyless it is. I mean, I have an AO3 account. I grew up with some pulp in my literary diet. Sometimes you want to indulge in a genre convention just because, well, dammit, swordfights! Secret passages! Ah, Watson, terribly sorry to rouse you at an hour that God has possibly forsaken, but the game’s afoot! I can think of more than one adept fic writer who has gone, “Yep! This is the chapter wherein there is only one bed, ha ha!”
Yud provides neither the pleasures of interrogating genre conventions nor those of wallowing in them. Joyless. The storytelling equivalent of the piss filter on Ghibli-ripoff slop.
Joyless and also bloodless. Like, there is plenty to criticize about the “I guess I got isekai’d to Gor and now I’ve got a sexy slave harem” premise. But somehow he still manages to write with barely any actual empathy for the victims of that system, foregrounds how hard it is for our hero to bravely abstain from that sweet wolf sex and how maybe it’s not even the right thing to do, and then after confronting the horrifying realities for all of one scene proceeds to write the character out of the story without even giving her a fucking name in the text. Like, he somehow wrote a story about rescuing sex slaves that feels more pro-sex-slavery than a story that just embraces the sleaze of it.
“My name is Avrietzur Detkowsky. I am the Summoned Hero, brought from Earth to Elgor 69. I do not wish to water you.”
“Master, I do not understand. I am plant. I am to be watered.”
“I cannot explain, but it goes against my Earth customs to water plant.”
“But Master, surely we will be less conspicuous in our journey together if you water me, as I am plant.”
“Oh, I wish I could explain the tortures of my soul, as I struggle to maintain morality in the face of temptation. But no one on Elgor understands, least of all my traveling companion, plant.”
“Master, please, I am plant. I am potted. The runes on my ceramic pot clearly spell out that I am plant and I belong to Master.”
[much later]
“Oh no. Plant, my faithful companion, has fallen off a cliff and died.”
It feels like this has to be some kind of karmic balance to the webfic ecosystem for the existence of the John Brown Isekai.
Right, deconstruction and lampshading and playing straight and exaggerating tropes are all themselves tropes – but our esteemed gentlemen is above tropes, so all he can do is glance vaguely in these various directions without actually going anywhere.
Eliezer is so above tropes he has an entire page of tropes dedicated to him
It’s funny because the only way to be above tropes is to be incoherent and meaningless, and yud is kind of that
“AI is gonna kill us all guys!”
do these guys actually want us to take them seriously???
This is his rationale:
And yet you fail to name ‘Mr. Gotcha’. Curious!
I still haven’t managed to decipher what he means by ‘the “now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap’, or how that apparently justifies sending money to the organisations most at risk of destroying the world? But it sounds like submitting to a kind of blackmail.
If he just meant that not having access to chatbots put you at some sort of societal disadvantage, that isn’t a trap. It’s just something you would do. ‘Trap’ implies that, what, this is only a problem if you start slopping things? So how does that mean that you should?
The closest thing Yud ever had to a job or a business was selling pulp fiction on Amazon. He is not the person to talk about pressures that working people face! (the “now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap)
Considering how much compensation he gets a MIRI, he could afford to hire an artist out of his own pocket and he would end up with something better and not be funding the technology that he claims is going to kill us all…
On the other hand, that artist might have some sort of creative vision of their own that could irrevocably taint Yudkowsky’s Authorial Intent. Even worse, he would have to prominently credit their contributions, rather than attributing to Claude only the menial labour of piecing together his sacred vision.
What exactly about “the frontiers” does this one-handed promptfondling help to understand?
He’s hammering refresh on the prompt button until it spits out a catgirl based on that furless Sphynx breed
I’m baffled by this too. If I was Yud I would prefer to fall behind than to give money to the people I wholly believe will end the world so they can keep developing the things that I believe will end the world.
So I’m assuming this means “well less people using AI doesn’t mean less damage overall done”, which is dumb because AI has very well documented effects of damaging the individual who uses it: just look at all the AI psychosis and suicide cases.
you could do this without using the AI by looking at papers and stuff but most AI papers are riddled with hype so that might be difficult
The thing about the “yet you participate in society, curious!” meme is that you don’t really get the option to not participate in society. you do however get the option to not participate in AI, and there are plenty of people happily taking that option
I think the ‘trap’ might just be something akin to addiction? Once you’ve had your dose of the premium slop, you have to keep paying to get your fix. Except that completely fails to address why ‘people [shouldn’t] individually refuse to avail themselves’ of chatbots – it rather seems like a pretty good reason to stay away!
If he’s talking about addiction than that defeats his point even harder
Yeah, rationalist utterly fail at understanding collective action, or really anything besides lib-brained centrist methods of action. Well, maybe even lib-brained centrist is giving them too much credit, because even milquetoast liberals will occasionally avoid using products for ethical reasons. See Only Law Can Prevent Extinction, where Eliezer basically explains how all other action besides an international total ban on AI and GPUs is pointless. (I think he is trying to avoid people bombing data centers, but Elizer’s “logic” is also implicitly against stuff like going to town halls to complain about data centers.)
It appears to be a fantasy about being too righteous and moral to fuck the catgirl, which is… More than anything else, it reminds me of the Left Behind novel, wherein Rayford Steele power-tripped on stringing Hattie Durham along without touching her, and is treated by the narrative as praiseworthy for doing so. It’s like, dude, you made up the story. Nobody forced you to make catgirls sex slaves by default. You’re edging under the pretense of ethics.
I’m pretty sure this is also just thinly veiled Rising of the Shield Hero fanfic??
fuck man do they even make normal perverts anymore?
Oh my god, he’s doing the catgirl gooner fantasy from SCP-8008: Don’t Warp Reality Into Your Catgirl Gooner Fantasy
Six AI-editing tips, and not one is “don’t”.
Also nice to see that none of the effort in maintaining the Latin alphabet is much use when it comes to runes.
Yeah, the review nitpicks the quality of the AI generated slop, but overall is in favor of doing a better job slopping, not avoiding slop altogether.
Rationalism really is just Scientology with a guy who wants to be a harem anime protagonist instead of an admiral.