I’ve been thinking a lot lately, and writing only some of it down, while the rest of it remains work in progress.

I also made some interesting pictures:

It’s just that I’m having trouble figuring out what’s going on. The wars seem to be escalating, but contained within a pattern – none of the actors wants to disturb the world that holds the foundations of their power, and yet as the predictable certainties slip away, they seem to be forced into actions that they don’t actually want to make, with consequences they don’t want to accept. America wants to remain in power, but its economy is inherently broken, their soft power is all but gone, and their military is a one trick pony. Europe would want to act based on principles, and yet this sounds so ridiculous when it comes out of the mouths of atheists whose principles are something they themselves made up and is worth less than the paper it’s written on. Based on those principles they act in ways that subvert the foundational architecture that defined them.

Russia and China would want to be powerful and prosperous, and yet they don’t want to pay the price of that, which is to fight America and win. America abuses everybody and says “so, what are you going to do about it?” So far, nobody came up with an answer.

People seem to have found another source of religion. First they followed prophets and revelations of God. Then they followed science. Then they invented social media to receive validation from other humans. Now, they seem to chat with LLM AI, trying to get it to clear their confusion, answer their questions, and be their God. Considering how LLM is merely re-hashing the ideas of their own making and giving them what it sees as normalised results, this newest exercise in navel gazing is as pathetic as it is desperate, and reminds me very much of coprophagy.

But people, stupid as they are, will sooner ask Chat GPT about me, than ask me about Chat GPT. The Great Oracle will tell them what to think. That can’t go wrong.

It’s already very hard to find sources that are not contaminated by AI. With enough iterations, it will become completely impossible, unless you already know what you’re looking for, which makes it moot because searching implies finding new stuff, beyond what you already know. Younger people are destined to ingest the excrement of AI, thinking it’s information. It’s not. It is to information what a turd is to a hamburger that someone else ate.

I’m not saying AI is completely useless. I use it to remove noise from my images, and also for large-object generative cloning. Also, my camera uses it to detect people, birds and insects, and to focus on the eyes. I just don’t ask it for opinions, especially considering how often it fails to identify insects.