I’m not even kidding; with Valve’s AI Disclosures, they really have founded a wholly new mode of expression. You can reverse engineer how a developer feels about the disclosure by a close reading of the text, you can unfold the interior part of their skull and walk around in it. I bet it does suck. I’m honor bound to understand the why, and AI coding is growing normative in the space. It’s hard to truly have beef with such a clannish, propagandized cadre. I mean, my doom is to understand why even a mortal enemy might dislike me; I routinely extend greater humanity to my utter foes than I have ever received in return. It helps that many of them have been cartoon villains, desperate to distract from their own monstrous conduct. Ask Max Temkin, or Scott Gaynor. I know exactly why they did it. I never lifted a finger, and I didn’t have to. Vengeance is mine, saith The Lord.
Never let it be said that I am not conscious of this moment’s strange dynamics. I fully comprehend why a person would use this stuff. That said, I do demand to be understood: opponents of it aren’t simply Cro-Magnons pounding hitting rocks with sticks. Our goals extend beyond the quarter, the day, the moment.
There is a silly, gotcha-ahh rhetorical salvo on Twitter where people will show you a piece of AI art without telling you its AI art and someone likes it, but then when you tell them it’s AI art they don’t like it anymore. They’re really impressed with themselves on this one, but there’s a lot of reasons why a person might not like being lied to, one of them being the manipulative lies. It matters how something is produced. People have opinions on cannibalism. People have opinions on Blood Diamonds. And maybe you might be like, well, that’s going a little far don’t you think? Allow me to decelerate, then. People have opinions on the greatest art theft in history. People who don’t understand people, who say terrifying things about the world they hasten to birth, are in a position to determine how everyone will live and work. It seems kind of bad on its face. Many of the dynamics you can see online are functionally the dynamics betwen a Warlock and their shadow’d Patron.
All the best engineers I know have serious trust issues. After PHP2Shell, ours decided he was done being exposed to such a vast attack surface and started pulling it out by the roots. He had recently learned Rust, and that seemed like the right approach. You learn in order to learn in order to learn. I understand that efficiency is good but it is a virtue. I mentioned that this is what he was doing, and somebody was like, but he’s gonna use AI to do that, and you hate AI. Now what?!? And it’s like, dude. He hates that stuff more than I do.
There are different kinds of haters. Some think that the models don’t actually do stuff. I think they do, in fact, do stuff. I’m more on the side of the Luddites Union: I think we should get a say in how the world operates, what systems we carry forward. I think workers and citizens should be able to enunciate their dispossession without being insulted by this priestly cadre. They saw Terminator, and said hell yeah – a tireless, time-traveling robot that murders women. A lot of the rest of us emerged with the idea that the future is not set. There’s no fate but what we make for ourselves.
Gabe does not like to write. If you ever see him on here writing, he must have really wanted to do it. He doesn’t like to do finish work and he’s not interested in grammar. He wants to draw things, but doesn’t always know what; I can’t draw, but I always know what I would set down if I could. We met in high school, and even though it was difficult we made a little place where we could reach across the gulf. Anything that disturbs that dynamic is existential, and anyone who advocates for it is to be watched.
You need to start asking yourselves who benefits from this level of atomization. It ain’t us.
(CW)TB out.