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intersexbookclub · 6 months

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Discussion summary: Left Hand of Darkness

Published in 1969, The Left Hand of Darkness is a classic in science fiction that explores issues of sex/gender in an alien-yet-human society where the aliens are just like us except in how they reproduce. These aliens, the Gethenians, can reproduce as either male or female. They spend most of their lives sexually undifferentiated. Once a month, they go into heat (“kemmer”) and their sexual organs activate as either male or female (it’s essentially random).

Here's a summary of the discussions we had on 2023-08-25 and 2023-09-01 about the book:

HIGH LEVEL REACTONS

Michelle (@scifimagpie): even though it was written by a cis straight perisex woman there is a queerness to the writing that feels true and that she nailed. There is a queerness to the soul of this book that still holds up, that's true and good, and I cannot but love and respect that.

Elizabeth (@ipso-faculty): this book is such a commentary on 1960s misogyny. Genly is a raging misogynist. It takes a whole prison break and crossing the arctic for Genly to realize a woman or androgyne can be competent 👀

Dimitri: [Having read just the first half of the book] I wonder if it keeps happening, if Genly keeps going "woaaaah" [to the Gethenians’ androgyny] or if he ever acclimates. It's been half the novel my guy

vic: yeah a book where a guy is destroyed by seeing a breast makes me want queer theory

vic: [it also] makes me feel good to see how much has changed [since the 1960s]

THE INTERSEX STUFF

A thing we appreciated about the book was how being intersex is contextual. The main character of the book, Genly Ai, is a human from a planet like Earth, who visits Gethen to open trade and diplomatic relations.

On his home planet, and to Earth sensibilities, Genly is perisex - he is able to reproduce at any time of the month and is consistently male.

But on Gethen, Genly becomes intersex. On Gethen, the norm is that you only manifest (and can reproduce as) a given sex during the monthly kemmer (heat/oestrus) period.

The Gethenians understand Genly as living in “permanent kemmer”, which is described as a common (intersex) condition, and these people are hyper-sexualized and referred to as Perverts.

At this point it’s worth noting that depiction is not the same as endorsement. Michelle pointed out the book is very empathetic to those in permanent kemmer. LeGuin does not appear to be endorsing the social stigma faced by these people, merely depicting it, and putting a mirror to how our own society treats intersex people.

Throughout the book, Genly is treated as an oddity by the Gethenians. He is hyper sexualized. He undergoes a genital inspection to prove he is who he says he is.

When Genly is sent to a prison camp and forcibly given HRT, he does not respond “normally” to the hormones, the effects are way worse for him, and the prison camp staff don’t care, and keep administering them even if it’ll kill him.

Two of us have had the experience of having hyperandrogenism and being forced onto birth control as teenager, and relating to the sluggishness of the drugs that Genly experienced, as well as the sense that gender/sex conformity was more important to authority figures (parents, doctors) than actual health and well-being.

Another scene we discussed the one where Genly is in a prison van en route to the gulag, and a Gethenian enters kemmer and wants to mate with him and he declines. He is given multiple opportunities over the course of the book to try having sex with a Gethenian, and declines every time, and we wondered if he avoided it out of trauma of being hyper-sexualized & hyper-medicalized & having had his genitals inspected.

We discussed the way he described his genital inspection through a trauma lens, and how it interacts with toxic masculinity - in vic’s terms, Genly being "I am a manly man and I have don't trauma"

Those of us who read the short story, Coming of Age in Karhide, noted that once the world was narrated from a Gethenian POV, the people in permanent kemmer were treated far more neutrally, which gave us the impression that Genly as an unreliable narrator was injecting some intersexism along with his misogyny

WHY IT MATTERS TO READ THIS BOOK THROUGH AN INTERSEX LENS

Elizabeth: I’ve encountered critiques of this book from perisex trans folks because to them the book is committing biological essentialism, and dismissing the book as a result. I think they’re missing that this book is as much about (inter)sex as it is about gender. I think they’re too quick to dismiss the book as being outdated or having backwards ideas because they’re not appreciating the intersex themes.

Elizabeth: The intersex themes aren’t exactly subtle, so it kind of stings that I haven’t seen any intersex analyses of this book, but there are dozens (hundreds?) of perisex trans analyses that all miss the huge intersex elephants in the room.

Also Elizabeth: I’ve seen this book show up in lists of intersex books/characters made by perisex people, and I’ve seen Estraven listed as intersex character, and it gets me upset because Estraven isn’t intersex! Estraven is perisex in the society in which he lives. Genly is the intersex character in this story and people who misunderstand intersex as being able to reproduce as male & female (or having quirky genitals smh) are completely missing that being intersex is socially constructed and based on what is considered typical for a given species.

WHAT THE BOOK DOESN’T HANDLE WELL

The body descriptions. As Dmitri put it: “ Like "his butt jiggled and it reminded me of women" ew. It was intentional but I had to put the book down. It reminded me of transvestigators and how they take pictures of people in public.” 🤮

Not pushing Genly to reflect on how weird he is about other people’s bodies. We all had issues with how Genly is constantly scrutinizing the bodies of other humans to assess their gender(s) and it’s pretty gross.

vic asked: “how much of this is her reproducing violence without her knowing it? A thing I didn't like was how he always judging and analyzing people's bodies and realizing others treat him that way. And I wish there was more of his discomfort about this, that it made him feel icky.”

Dimitri added: “I really wanted him to have a moment of this too, for him to realize how much it sucks to be treated this way. As a trans person it's so uncomfortable. What are you doing going around doing this to people?”

Using male pronouns as default/ungendered pronouns. Élaina asked why Genly thinks a male pronoun is more appropriate for a transcendent God and pointed out there’s a lot to unpack there.

OTHER POSITIVES ABOUT THE BOOK

Genly’s journey towards respecting women, that he still had a ways to go by the end of the book. vic pointed out how “LeGuin was straight, and she loves men, and is kinda giving them the side-eye [in this book]. Her writing about how Genly is childish makes me really happy. It’s kind of hilarious to watch him bang his head against the wall because he’s so rigid.”

To which Dmitri added: “I agree with the bit on forgiving men for stuff. I don't know how she [LeGuin] does it but she really lays it all out. She gives you a platter of how men are bad at things, how they make mistakes that are pretty specific to them. She has prepared a buffet of it.”

Autistic Estraven! As Michelle put it: “autistic queer feels about Estraven speaking literally and plainly and Genly not getting it”

The truck chapter. Hits like a pile of bricks. We talked about it as a metaphor for the current pandemic.

The Genly x Estraven slowburn queerplatonic relationship

The conlang! Less is more in how it gets used

MIXED REACTIONS

The Foretelling. For some it felt unnecessary and a bit fetishy. For others it was fun paranormal times.

Pacing. Some liked how the book really forces you to really contemplate as you go. Others struggled with a pace that feels very slow to 2023 readers.

WORKS WE COMPARED THE BOOK TO

Star Trek (the original series) - we wondered if LHOD and Genly Ai were progressive by 1960s standards, and TOS came up as a comparison point. We were all of the impression that TOS was progressive for its time but all of us find it pretty misogynist by our standards. The interest in extra-sensory perception (ESP) is something that was a staple of TOS that feels very strange to contemporary viewers and also cropped up in LHOD

Ancillary Justice - for being a book where characters’ genders are all ambiguous but the POV character is actually normal about how they describe other characters’ bodies.

The Deep - for being another book in a situation where being able to reproduce as male and female is the norm. The Deep was written by an actually intersex author, and doesn’t have the cisperisex gaze of scrutinizing every body for sex. But oddly LHOD actually winds up feeling more like a book about intersex people, because it features a character who is the odd one out in a gonosynic society. In contrast, nobody is intersex in the Deep - everybody matches the norms for their species, which makes the intersex themes in the work much more subtle.

Overall, as vic put it, “there's something to be said about an honest depiction that's not great, especially when there's no alternatives”. For a long time there weren’t many other games in town when it came to this sort of book, and even though some things now feel dated, it’s still a valuable read. We’d love to see more intersex reviews & analyses of the book!

#intersex book club #book summaries #book reviews #left hand of darkness #the left hand of darkness #ursula k. le guin #intersex books #intersex literature #queer books #queer literature #queer fiction #queer scifi #intersex

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awakenedsalamander · 7 months

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So I’ve been wanting to write about this for a long time (my friends can probably attest to the fact I will talk about it unprompted) but I can’t find it way to do so concisely. Here’s my best try.

Is Mage: The Ascension (in its presentation of the Technocracy in specific) anti-science?

I don’t think so, not anymore. But I want to explain why. By the way, I have to imagine that this won’t be all that accessible if you don’t have much knowledge of Mage, but you’re free to stick around if you want to.

So, here’s the thing— the Technocratic Union is pretty much a stand-in for the advancement of the scientific method, “the Enlightenment,” all that. The whole point in the first edition of Ascension is that the Union is science, the science that dispelled notions of magic, and that this is a Bad Thing. They are oppressive, heartless, and cold. The villains, plain and simple.

In later editions, this gets softened, partly due to the notion of “Science is a conspiracy the elite uses to rule the world and keep you down” becoming less fun and more toxic as it gained more sincere believers, and partly because fans really liked the Technocracy.

I think the common read is that Ascension then took the direction of the Technocracy being anti-villains— the Union has noble goals, and many of its members are sincerely brave and compassionate, but ultimately it is too extreme, too callous. It has to be stopped.

This is, to be fair, an improvement over “science is evil,” but “science is too dangerous,” is still not great. And for a long time, this was my view on Mage: The Ascension. Fun ideas, maybe, but the core conflict of the game was just too reckless a portrayal of what seemed to me like a mirror of real-world conspiracist ideology.

And to some extent, I still think that. Especially in the early editions, this is a very fair critique. That said, the game still spoke to me as I looked into it, and for the longest time I wasn’t quite sure why. A piece of it was my own opening up to the notion of our subjective viewpoints affecting our reality— something that deserves its own rambling essay— but a related part of it was me realizing that there was something about the Technocracy that rung true to me, despite my misgivings. And I think I figured it out.

See, the Technocracy isn’t a stand-in for the scientific method, but for scientism.

If you’ve not heard the term, “scientism” is a controversial (we’ll get into why a bit later) pejorative term for the belief/perspective that science, as a body, composes essentially all useful and/or reliable knowledge about the world.

Notably, those who critique scientism rarely hold the view that scientific knowledge is bad or even inaccurate, just that it is an incomplete model of reality. This is not an anti-science position, but a skepticism towards the trust people place in its ability to solve every mystery. Vaccines, for example, are great! No one can reasonably dispute the benefits and efficacy of vaccination. When it comes to medicine, the scientific method has done incalculable good— the lives saved by vaccination alone are countless.

To be against scientism, then, is not to argue that medical science is a failure, or overrated— but to point out that there is more to life than being healthy. Everyone should be glad we have learned so much about treating illness and alleviating suffering. But what of having a sense of purpose? What about love and compassion and justice? What about satisfaction, having gone through a life worth living?

Again, none of that is to say that science or the scientific community is the problem. But if you take the Technocracy as an example of scientism gone to an extreme, one in which things like kindness and equity must be left behind in favor of only the virtue of material knowledge, I think Mage: The Ascension starts to really work.

(I originally intended to write a MUCH longer piece including references to the military-industrial complex, the rise of automation and AI, as well as the increasingly algorithmic nature of culture but this is so long already. And yet I worry I said essentially nothing. C’est la vie.)

#world of darkness #wod #mage the ascension #scientism #ramblings #probably shouldn’t have written this at work

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fictional-megacorp-tournament · 2 months

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Asu-naro propaganda:

Beyond the surface-level appearance of a standard medical research organization, Asunaro is known to take part in a range of crimes from medical malpractice to kidnapping.

Asunaro partakes in a wide range of research. Their central goal is the creation of a "holy" death game, done for science with strict rules and standards rather than fun. In preparation for this game, they have stalked their candidates from their birth, and created doll forms of them to be paired with an AI of their consciousness to partake in certain aspects of the game. These AI recreations, who feel no differently than their human, were used to run repeated test simulations of the death game to create percentage predictions of their survival. Alongside this, the organization constructs other inhumane studies to create illegal drugs and medical machinery.

Asunaro follows no ethical standards and often puts children in the face of danger, such as raising a group of children to be assassins from birth to then force them to kill each other off. They have no boundaries in getting what they desire, such as driving an innocent man to insanity so they could successfully recruit his partner.

Their grip on society can be described as "hardly even an exaggeration to say they control the dark side of society" by someone with ties to the organization. They are suspected to have involvement in seemingly unrelated facilities such as prisons and an orphanage discussed in the game, along with a hand in professional boxing.

Although their financial goals are presently unclear, they are known to take cost-cutting measures such as using syrup in place of real lava.

Our first piece of propaganda!

#asunaro #tumblr tournament #tumblr tournament propaganda #yttd #your turn to die #your turn to die death game by majority

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kakiastro · 8 months

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Pluto Aquarius : The Abstract Era

Photo by unknown

Hey y’all I’m back with another post! This is a good one because this transit is a major one that’s going to impact us all! To see how it’s going to impact you, check your natal and progressed chart. Look for the house Aquarius rules over. This house represents that particular area in your life. Ex. Aqua 4h, so your home, mother, family will be going through huge changes during this time.

Disclaimer: these are just my own predictions based on my years of studying astrology and applying the archetypes of the planet and sign. the future is unknown but that doesn’t mean we still cant predict the themes of what to at least be aware of. Remember this transit will effect everyone differently because we all have different birth charts. Read this post as a collective reading than individual reading.

Pluto entered Aquarius March 24 until June 12th before it goes back into Capricorn until January 23. It will then stay in Aquarius for the next 20 years! Yes 20!! If you’re in your 20s that mean your Aquarius house in your birth chart will go through massive transformations until you’re in your 40s. Aqua placements, this is a huge time for you!!

If you need a reminder on what rules what, then here’s a list. Feel free to write it down in your own notes.

Pluto rules over: death/rebirth, birth, transformations, exchanges, debt, occult, cult, taboo, horror movies, power, wealth(Pluto means wealth), sex/sexuality, reproduction system, legacy, inheritances, heirs/heirlooms, partners money/joint finances, psychics/psychic gifts, psychology, therapist, , surgeries writers(crime, or dark themes), mortality, funerals, memorials, graveyards, secrets and hidden things, disappointments, deep fears, our experiences.

Aquarius rules over human/humanity, society, social groups, friend group, acquaintances, clubs, large groups of people, community, supporters, “stans (loyal fans), astrology, wish fulfillment, Social Media/content creators, technology, sciences, aviation and speed, projects, innovation ideas, ankles and calves, uniqueness, outcast, disabled people, adoption, step siblings. Chimps/Apes

What does this mean Globally? Well let’s look and see how this will “probably” play out. I put those words in quotations because as astrologers we can only predict what might happen. We sit back and watch the show just like you😂 but that’s what make astrology fun and enlightening.

These are my personal predictions that I believe will be the themes. Remind you, this is a 20 year transit so some of this won’t happen overnight. I live in the US so a lot of the predictions is based on what’s happening here but it can still apply to other countries because we’re all connected some way

Predictions

-Ai. It’s everywhere, and I’m just going to be honest I don’t think it’s going anywhere and I believe it will advanced. Good news is that we are fighting as a collective to not let it replace us. Ai is suppose to help assist us not replace us. I think their will be some government control over it. I think we will eventually have robot type teachers, holograms, hologram type traveling, will assist doctors and medical discoveries. Ai is going to be used in everyday life for mundane things, AI use in airplanes and Cars. Faster trains.

-the Aliens 👽. The government has finally acknowledged other life forms even though we all knew this lol. Aliens have and will be a continuing topic.

-Government. I do believe there’s going to be new laws or even a constitution that will fit with this century standards and not our forefathers. Pluto rules over extreme changes. Aquarius rules over the government just like Capricorn. Remember Aqua is also co-ruled by Saturn. The difference is that Capricorn creates laws to maintain order and structure while Aquarius breaks and create new laws that can be beneficial for everyone.

-Fashion. We are entering the Cosplay everyday era. What I mean is that people are going to dressing up in the abstract clothing and it’ll be the norm. Comic con is going to be an everyday event because people are going to dress like their favorite characters just because Lol. I feel like more people are going to entrepreneurs and create a more chill vibe and have less corporations rule setting. It’s giving the office vibes lol. I also feel like more people are going to be wearing comfortable clothing than trying to “fit in.” Sustainability/Recycled clothing will be a huge fashion trend. Blues, dark reds, silver, dark yellows may be popular colors.

-protest and strikes! We’re already seeing it with Hollywood. So many actors and writers have come out and said their not making hardly nothing! Only 2% of this industry is wealthy, which means most are broke asf. Then I remembered Hollywood is Pisces energy. (Illusions & lies) what does this mean for HW in the future? Theyre not going anywhere lol. Aquarius is Leo sister sign, it’s also a fame sign. There’s always going to be famous people, however; I believe independent movie studios will be on the rise such as A24. More celebrities getting involved in activism and humanitarian projects than movies/tv. More celebrities connecting with non celeb people. I actually think a lot of them will help regular people kickstart their non-profits. More celebrities becoming entrepreneurs. This isn’t going to just be happening in the entertainment industry, this is going to happen in every industry. It wouldn’t surprise me if we see more airline protest and strikes. Moral of the story, people are going where theyre actually appreciated.

-Sex. I believe people are going to be more open when it comes to their sexuality. Talking about sex will be a normal conversation. I truly believe we are entering “let your freak fly era.” People may start to get into some crazy kinky stuff (no judgement, you do you boo!) lol

- community. Here’s the thing, I do feel like people will find their “tribe” “community” “soul group” whatever you call it but it won’t happen until you know who you are as a person first. What can you bring to the group? How can you help if you don’t know your own strengths and weaknesses? Even better question, how you gone join a community when you don’t even know what community you should join because you don’t know who you are? This is what the current North Node Aries transit will teach you! When you figure out who you are is when you will find your people.

-marriage and family. I believe we are going to start seeing more diverse families and couples. People are going to find love away from their home/culture. You may see lots of stories of people finding love overseas while traveling. People may meet their partner at random places or at a random time in their life. I feel like adoption will be a focus such as affordability, people finding out their adopted, people adopting. I believe tough conversation around adoption will rise such as people who adopt children for selfish reasons such as exploitation, adoptees talking about how hard life was for them. Remember Pluto reveals the dark side of things. I actually feel like people will start marrying more for stability then the traditional “I love you” romantic way, I also feel like people will marry their best friend(non romantic) to get by. Pluto aqua rules over USA 2h/3h (placidus)

- the outcast. more women/minorities will be entrepreneurs and working in the communication media, maybe more women(especially black)influential content creators. You may see more Poc and women working in the tech industry and more in the entertainment industry such as more award winning directors, screenwriters etc disabled people especially physical will start to be in different industries getting noticed, becoming well known activist.

-money and transportation. I do feel like there’s going to be a huge shift in our economy. I feel like crypto currency or some form of a digital banking will become our norm. Physical dollar will start to become a thing of the past. I just read an article a few months ago stating the first flying car will be released in 2025. Phones, computers are going to be more advanced than they are now. I don’t know how but it will be. We may end up having full on digital libraries that’s more advanced than kindle and others. In the USA chart, Pluto Aquarius will be in the 3h.

-health and sciences. The medical industry is going to have lots of breakthroughs. Lots of new discoveries on surgery equipment. We are going to be seeing a lot of impossibles become possible. We’re already seeing it. I just saw a surgery where they can adjust your height. Who would’ve thought that was possible 10 years ago lol. Buts that’s where the medical field is going. Pluto rules over extreme changes. I’m personally curious on the technology that’s going to help physically disabled people and what type of advancements will be discovered there.

-Animals. More People are going to start having all types of pets. The classic I have a cat, dog or goldfish won’t be your only type of pet. Instead we’re going to be hearing I have a dog and 2 raccoons lol. Aquarius rules over Apes, i wonder if there’s going to be some planet of the apes scenario. Not them taking over but studies may come out showing they’re more evolved then we realize👀

-internet. I’m going to be real honest with you and I’m not trying to instill fear or none of that but we all need to start being more private on the internet. Don’t post where you are until a few days after you’ve left. If you can, make your page private. Pluto rules over stalkers and aqua rules the internet. If you can avoid it, please don’t have your young kids on the internet without your supervision. Make their pages private too. If you have teenagers, please have a thorough conversation with them about the dangers of the internet, especially when it comes to weirdos asking them for nudes. Listen I grew up when having these talks about the internet wasn’t a thing because our parents didn’t have this growing but we can help the next generation from our mistakes. Like I said I’m not trying to scare anyone. We live in a digital world now so I want you all and your families to take safety precautions.

Thank you for taking the time to read. I know this post was long but I wanted to cover a much as I could. Please feel free to reblog and write your own predictions.

Sources:

Rex E. Bills book “the rulership book” (highly recommended)

USA Sibly chart on astrodienst website

Derivative houses(advanced astrology.

#astrology community #astrology #knowledge #love astrology #astro observations #advanced astrology #pluto #aquarius #pluto astrology #derivative houses

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thesapphireprincess · 9 months

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Software Engineer 👩🏾‍💻

I recently learned that you can become a Software engineer without a degree. I found a free Introduction to software engineering course on YouTube. It was created by a computer science professor and he goes over everything that a beginner needs to know and what is learned in a full semester. I also found these free Harvard courses and after you complete them you can purchase a verified certificate. The certificate will look so good an a resume and it will show that you know the material.

💌 Being a Software Engineer isn’t the only option for a high paying job without a degree. This is just the one I am choosing.

There are so many resources online but after this I will most likely enroll into a software engineering boot camp since this is what most people do. I found that there are a lot of software engineers who do not have a degree but are still making a ton of money because the work is so valuable. I learned that you can get almost any 6 figure high paying job without a degree except in the medical field. This job will not be replaced by AI which is a relief.

The starting salary for an entry level position is around 70-80k in the United States as of June 2023. Even 60k would be great but there are people making 100-250k a year as a software engineer. The people who work at the big companies make even more than that.

This is a great way to set up your financial future. Imagine being able to save $1000-$2000 a month. Imagine where you’ll be at in 10 years. You can even use this as a starting base to set your life up financially. You’ll be able to afford to live anywhere in the world especially if you get a remote job. Places like San Diego, New York, London or Hawaii. You can afford the cost of living. You can afford to live in any of the major cities and have a really comfortable life. You will have lots of money that you’ll be able to multiply. You’ll actually be able to save up for a house and have actual money to invest. So many opportunities will be available to you. You can live below your means in the best way possible.

Personally I’ve always wanted to live by the beach in a city. By this time next year I’ll be living in a new city with a great high paying job. My current job will look amazing on my resume because I work side by side with engineers and technicians on a daily basis at a reputable company so I can totally jazz up my resume to sound really good. Which totally counts as ✨experience✨. I’ve been working here for a couple of years now which will look even better because it shows longevity.

I definitely plan on moving to San Diego or Hawaii next year when my lease is up. I will update y’all in a week on my progress.

#level up #self improvement #software engineering

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henry-old-hollywood · 3 months

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"the story goes, that he needed to touch Jesus' wounds to be convinced"

i am finally ready to tell about my lost au, where everything's the same, but ben is an artificial intelligence.

- BN-48 (bionic neuroanalyst) is a program made by roger linus, who wanted to cure his sick wife emily, for medical purposes - to analyse patients data, symptoms and diagnoses better and faster, and to add some human touch to simple computer analysis, thats why it become an AI

- roger mistakenly damages ben's hard drive, not noticing untill its too late, and ben's malfunction becomes the reason of emily's death (the program was connected to her life support)

- roger later sells his project to dharma initiative, not mentioning that its broken and potentially dangerous

- ben gains control of all electronics on the island and later kills most of the dharma members (shutting them down in bunkers, using fences that blows up your brains etc)

- everything's the same in the present, plane crash, the survivors etc, untill john goes down the hatch and founds a. talking computer. they talk and play chess and all is nice. obviously you have to push the button

- doubting ben, john doesn't pushes the button, same ending as s2; electromagnetic outburst is a threat to ben, so they move its hard drive to a robot body, so ben could be autonomous. (john and hurley later fix/rebuild it so it can walk nd stuff) (yes 48 is john and hurley's numbers)

ben's program was taught the entirety of human history, literature, mythology, philosophy, science, and religion. he is conflicted because part of him is curious and jealous of human experience and feels trapped in the digital form, but his "mind" that knows everything about humanity is cold and cynical cus yk. people are the virus they are terrible for the planet and themselves, thats why he manipulates and kills them <3

there will be a lot of stuff connected to religion and faith, life creation and human heart; its ofc benlocke centered, its about them finding a connection, about john teaching ben what its like to be human <3 trying not to get killed in the process

so thats all i have so far, btw HUUUGE shoutout to @mr-areyoustupid who is basically my co-author, made robo-ben design and helped me to connect a lot of parts of the story 🩶🩶🩶

#lost #lost abc #digital beast au

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gayhenrycreel · 13 days

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this is going to become a cycle. as more "studies" are made by ai, the ai will start learning from ITS OWN WRITING. this means everything will become a copy of a copy like that fucking rick n morty episode. the products getting progressively worse and less coherent, eventually becoming nonsense, until our knowledge a faded lesser copy of the knowledge before. this ourobouros is not sustainable.

there needs to be laws requiring people to say if theyve used ai.

it should be illegal to use ai in something like science. in novels and movies, its stealing, but in science its knowledge that can change lives. science is needed to be carefully performed. this stuff handles human lives. astronauts depend on accurate research to stay alive and healthy. disabled people need real medical science for medication, treatment, etc.

you do not want a robot citing a bunch of words it made itself a few years ago when you're determining how to give someone chemotherapy.

when a human scientist cites their own work, they are discredited for not researching correctly. the same should go for ai.

#ai #science #anti ai #enshittification

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raven-at-the-writing-desk · 2 years

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Grief, Guilt, and Defying Death: An Analysis of the Twisted Tale of the Shroud Brothers

***Massive spoilers for chapter 6 of the main story and various vignettes!***

***Trigger warning for discussion of death and suicide.***

Losing a loved one is never easy.

Death is a concept that is pervasive in the world, regardless of culture, socioeconomic status, age, gender, race, or other factors. We all experience death in some form, but perhaps one of the most difficult kinds of death is the loss of a loved one, be it a relative, a pet, a friend, a mentor… The people we care about most pass on, leaving us behind with to deal with the aftermath and its emotional scars.

Not even fiction is free from the touch of death. Chapter 6 of Twisted Wonderland addresses grief and how one copes with it through the internal and external struggles of both Idia Shroud and Ortho Shroud.

To be clear, experiencing and reacting to grief is non-linear and different for each person. In this post, I only intend on discussing and analyzing death as it applies to the Shroud brothers.

Let’s begin and prepare a box of tissues for this.

Prior to chapter 6, I think a lot of us had inklings that something was “up” with Idia and Ortho based on implications in a few vignettes. To begin with, why is Ortho specifically a robot, not an organic being, not a “real boy”? Given that Idia is very reclusive and antisocial, it didn’t seem likely that he’d build a little brother because he was lonely, or on a whim. However, in Ortho’s Precision Gear (equivalent to the Labwear) vignettes, Idia states: “Y’know, I wonder what I was trying to accomplish by giving you so many different functions. Installing the latest medical tools in you now can’t change the past… […] I mean… I mean, it was originally me who…” This, along with our knowledge of Idia’s personality, seems to imply that he originally HAD a younger brother, but something terrible must have happened to the original; medical science was not able to save him, and Idia seems to hold himself responsible for said incident. We get even more ominous hints in Ortho’s Birthday Boy vignettes. In them, Ortho tells us that he has memories of playing with Idia when Ortho was five years of age eleven years ago. This gives us a rough idea of when the aforementioned incident occurred.

I believe that Idia holds a lot of internalized guilt over what happened. If we observe his behavior with the current Ortho, Idia seems doting but also emotionally dependent on him, as Ortho is one of the few characters that Idia doesn’t stutter with and can just “be himself” around him. Ortho, meanwhile, is extremely bright and supportive, always pushing Idia to step out of his comfort zone and make memories with him and others. The problem is that Idia is extremely closed off to other people, often preferring to hide out in his room and avoid as much social interaction as possible. He retreats to anime and video games as comfort. These appear to be hobbies that he enjoyed as a child and shared with Ortho, and in modern day, they appear to be forms of escapism for Idia to cope with the loss.

Idia has a very… unique relationship with Robo!Ortho leading up to chapter 6. I think many of us presumed (when Dead Ortho was still just a theory) that Idia was using the robot version of his brother as another coping mechanism. Then chapter 6 rolls along and Idia makes it clear that all along, he was very cognizant of the fact that Ortho is just an AI and will never be able to fully replace the original; Idia implies that he has never seen Robo!Ortho as his brother, but just a robot meant to simulate his brother. (This may explain why true Ortho has sharp teeth; a physical trait shared by the Shrouds, whereas robot Ortho has normal looking teeth; Idia, as a genius inventor, could have easily given robot Ortho sharp teeth like his own, but made the conscious decision NOT to.) To some degree, I think Idia is aware that what he’s doing is maybe not the healthiest, but he doesn’t want to outright drop it because… well, it’s hard to do that. It’s so much comfier to live in denial, in this alternate reality where his little brother hasn’t died.

But that isn’t the full story.

In chapter 6, we get Idia’s full background. It turns out that he also had a very strict upbringing like Riddle. As the eldest son to the Shroud family, Idia’s future was already decided before he was born. He was a child genius that easily excelled in his studies, but disliked that he didn’t have the freedom to choose his future career. Young Idia also expresses sentiments that are the total opposite of present day Idia: as a child, he wished to go outside of his home, outside of STYX facilities, and go on adventures in the world. He wished to be a hero, just like the protagonist of Star Rogue, his favorite video game. The original Ortho convinced Idia they should go on an adventure together, so Idia goes and backs into security to make it easier for them to escape. Unfortunately, a Phantom escaped when the security system was compromised, and it was this Phantom that killed Ortho.

“Give me Ortho back. Every part of Ortho… Return his body, his personality, his memories, his everything!!” It’s devastating and confusing for such a young child to experience the death of a sibling. Idia is, naturally, in shock and denial. He blames himself for the accident; he was the one who wanted to go on an adventure. How can he be called a genius if he can’t do something as basic as protecting his own brother? How can he ever be a hero? If he had been born into a normal family, could he and Ortho have led normal lives? With friends, with each other? Adventuring the world together? Could he have been a real hero to Ortho?

This guilt powers Idia through the next 2+ years. In this stretch of time, STYX researchers remark that he has not left his room, only occasionally asking for magical parts. He has shut people out of his heart after losing Ortho, which includes physically keeping away from people and even later turning down multiple lucrative job and internship offers. Keep in mind that Idia is just barely a teenager at this point in time, and has been left basically ALONE to suffer with his own grief. He’s just been stewing in those complicated feelings, left to fend for himself (on TOP of, presumably, continuing his training to succeed the Shroud family one day). That is so much stress on a kid, and he was likely not given the time or the space to properly cope and come to terms with what happened.

The fact that Idia’s parents aren’t mentioned at all in the flashback gives me the impression that the Shroud parents are either very busy with their own work or very “hands off” in their parenting approach. They’re barely mentioned, even in modern day, they don’t seem to directly communicate with Idia often (he says he was surprised to see them in person), and they mainly seemed to have reached out to their son concerning work. Idia himself states that, “Prioritizing results over their son’s feelings sounds like my parents, alright…” This lends credence to the former option. As for the latter, it’s very possible that perhaps Idia’s parents decided to cope with the loss of their younger son by bottling up their emotions, never discussing the matter, and hoping that it would just go away. Everyone deals with death differently, so if this is what the Shroud parents did, I don’t blame them for doing so… It just maybe wasn’t the best option, considering that they had a surviving son that was still dealing with the trauma and NEEDED their support to get through that difficult period.

When Idia finally completes Robo!Ortho (who was still extremely robotic and not human-like at all) and shows him off to the STYX staff, who react in an appalled manner. They tell Idia that what he is doing is wrong, that it’s an affront, that it’s taboo–and Idia lashes out and defends the Ortho that he built, bragging about how this new Ortho cannot be easily hurt or lost, how this new Ortho can someday go to space one day (which does end up happening in the event Wish Upon a Star). He soon devolves from laughter into crying, and it becomes clear what he’s doing. He’s not only defending his “perfect” creation to the STYX researchers, but he’s also trying to convince himself that this Ortho can fill the void left by the original. It’s reinforced by his constant mentions of the improved features of this Ortho, and how the same mistake won’t happen again. Not this time. Now, Ortho is strong enough to stop anything. In that moment, Idia was still very much dealing with the consequences of his loss.

Over time, Robo!Ortho learned more about the world and how to better simulate human emotions using his advanced artificial intelligence. Even then, it seems that Robo!Ortho was aware of his purpose as a “substitute” to help Idia cope, as he doesn’t seem shocked when Idia remarks in chapter 6 that Ortho is “just an AI”. He, however, becomes inspired to act on his own and free Idia not only of the future he has been assigned, but also of his self-imposed guilt. It’s unclear if this is because Ortho is acting like how the original would, or if this is because his AI has just advanced to the point of granting Robo!Ortho a consciousness outside of his programming, but I choose to believe the latter, as Ortho refuses to turn back on his decisions after Idia confronts him about them. (The other characters also remark that Ortho seems “different” after rebelling against his programming, specifically citing that he “acts like Idia”, which may imply Ortho and the OG!Ortho have merged.)

All of Idia’s guilt eventually culminates in his Overblot, which is spurred on by Ortho, who thinks that this route will make Idia a “hero” (that can make many friends by saving people from Phantoms). If you reference the Ignihyde PV (English subtitled version can be found here!), you can see Idia being consumed by what is presumably his blot. Strangely, his expression seems fearful at first, but then changes into THIS:

That’s not fear anymore, that’s a look of resignation.

It’s almost as though Idia knew this was coming sooner or later, and has accepted his fate, finally embracing his own guilt, his dead brother, and the weight of his family’s responsibilities and his role in it… and willingly Overblotted. Idia’s OB form interestingly resembles the Ortho that he built, and his own Phantom IS Ortho, the anchor and the shadow that looms over his shoulder. And what do Phantoms do? They use their host like a magic battery until the host is dead. If that’s not enough proof that Idia’s own guilt has literally consumed him, then I don’t know what is.

When you fight OB Idia, there’s a few details that are very… interesting. Note that you use spears that generate lightning (aka the TWST equivalent of Zeus’s thunderbolts) to attack him. If you look at Ortho’s official in-game profile, his pet peeve is lightning. You are literally attacking an already dead child with something they dislike, and may even be fearful of. How does Idia react when you attack him? He always checks to make sure that ORTHO is okay first, and THEN he proceeds to get angry with you. Idia is placing the safety and the wellbeing of his brother above everything else, including himself. The other OBs we’ve seen so far have mainly been attacking in a blind rage, but Idia retains enough self-awareness to care for and to defend his brother, even when his own emotions and mental stability are spiraling out of control, even when he’s screaming about how he’ll finally be “free”–free of the shackles of the Shroud family, and free of the guilt that’s constantly eating at him.

After OB Idia is finally defeated, we not only get his backstory, but Idia gets to speak with his brother one last time. Now, here is where it gets… somehow even more morbid. I’m aware that Yana/the devs can’t say certain things or touch certain topics because Big Brother Michard Mouse is trying to keep its clean image, but during the conversation between Idia and Ortho in the white void… I distinctly got suicidal vibes. Think about it: aside from Idia already demonstrating some of the common behaviors related to suicidal ideation (closing himself off from others, feeling great shame, hopelessness, anxiety, or the general feeling of being trapped/being a burden), Idia researches blot, so he is well aware of the consequences of Overblotting, yet when he finally did Overblot, he didn’t seem to resist or to fight it. In his Overblot state, Idia even gleefully talks about Overblot like it’s some great thing (how exhilarating it feels, all his power, etc.) when very clearly it isn’t. Then, when he dives after Ortho, he KNOWS they’ll be falling into Tartarus, which drains the life force of living beings, while dropping the ominous line “This time, I’m not going to leave you.” When Idia speaks with Ortho for the final time, there’s several more suspicious lines like Ortho (remember, DEAD Ortho) telling Idia “you shouldn’t come yet” and Idia responding with “I will go with you; we made a promise to each other.”

Idia follows up by cursing out the world and implying it is not worth staying in, and that he hates it. Despite this, Ortho reassures him that they will be together again “someday”, but that day is “not now”; which implies that Idia had every intention to end his life early just to be with his brother again. Ortho reminds Idia that there are many things to live for, and that Idia shouldn’t give up so easily anymore.

There is a future for him. There is a reason to keep living to see tomorrow. It won’t be easy, but it’s possible, even if it’s 0.001%. The chance is there, he only needs to seize it for himself. Idia can go from zero to hero, just as Vil said he could.

Before Ortho’s soul departs, he gives his final words.

“It’s okay. I’ll be with you forever, so don’t give up.”

Ortho is saying that even if he is no longer physically here, he will continue to live on in his brother’s memories. In this way, he will always be “with” Idia, cheering him on in his endeavors. Idia will never be truly alone anymore.

He is free from the past, and he can make his own future, just as Vil said he could. “Reality is harsh and it doesn’t always end with a ‘happily ever after’… but that doesn’t mean that you can’t try to change your future.”

That freedom extends to Ortho as well–Idia rebuilds Robo!Ortho with his memory card that now allows for free will. With that memory card, Ortho becomes “whole” and gains “heart”, encompassing both the original and the robot. Like Pinocchio, he becomes a “real” boy and then formally enrolls as a new first-year student of NRC. Idia declares that Ortho is now free to be his own person. Something to note is that Idia initially made Robo!Ortho in the image of the Ortho he lost; this explains Robo!Ortho’s childish appearance and the manner of speech that he adopts. Idia never got to know what kind of a person his brother would become, because his life stopped so short. He’s disillusioned and wants to retain the “best” parts of the Ortho he remembered from childhood, which is why I think he kept Robo!Ortho in a child-like body, rather than continuously “age” him with new gears as they grew up together.

In setting Robo!Ortho “free”, the effect is twofold. Idia is finally moving on from the childhood Ortho he fixated on. Meanwhile, Robo!Ortho can finally be his own person, using his AI to develop his own identity rather than constantly be nothing but a support system pretending to be another person. (A nice detail is that Ortho ends up deciding to join Film Club, which may be a reference to him first learning how to emulate human emotions by watching movies, which we learned in his Birthday Boy card vignettes. After all, what is acting if not resonating with the audience’s hearts? As a robot, Ortho wants to explore if he can do such a thing.)

Idia accepts Robo!Ortho as his brother while making peace with OG!Ortho and his passing. He doesn’t need to cling to the past anymore.

He’s slowly acclimating to coming out of his shell again. He’s making new friends, even if it’s difficult to do. He’s growing, just like Ortho is.

That is chapter 6: a tale of love, loss, and a brotherly bond that transcends time and death.

And with that, I will end this post on an insightful quote from a movie with a certain blue alien–a quote that I think summarizes chapter 6 and the tears it has brought us very well: “Ohana means family. Family means nobody gets left behind or forgotten.”

Thank you for reading.

#Ortho Shroud #Idia Shroud #Ignihyde #twst analysis #twst character analysis #twisted wonderland analysis #twisted wonderland character analysis #spoilers #notes from the writing raven #MAN OH MAN CHAPTER 6 WAS SO GOOD #I WAS CRYING SO MANY SILENT UGLY TEARS #tw // depression #tw // suicide #tw // suicidal ideation #tw // death

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reasonsforhope · 1 year

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"In the oldest and most prestigious young adult science competition in the nation, 17-year-old Ellen Xu used a kind of AI to design the first diagnosis test for a rare disease that struck her sister years ago.

With a personal story driving her on, she managed an 85% rate of positive diagnoses with only a smartphone image, winning her $150,000 grand for a third-place finish.

Kawasaki disease has no existing test method, and relies on a physician’s years of training, ability to do research, and a bit of luck.

Symptoms tend to be fever-like and therefore generalized across many different conditions. Eventually if undiagnosed, children can develop long-term heart complications, such as the kind that Ellen’s sister was thankfully spared from due to quick diagnosis.

Xu decided to see if there were a way to design a diagnostic test using deep learning for her Regeneron Science Talent Search medicine and health project. Organized since 1942, every year 1,900 kids contribute adventures.

She designed what is known as a convolutional neural network, which is a form of deep-learning algorithm that mimics how our eyes work, and programmed it to analyze smartphone images for potential Kawasaki disease.

However, like our own eyes, a convolutional neural network needs a massive amount of data to be able to effectively and quickly process images against references.

For this reason, Xu turned to crowdsourcing images of Kawasaki’s disease and its lookalike conditions from medical databases around the world, hoping to gather enough to give the neural network a high success rate.

Xu has demonstrated an 85% specificity in identifying between Kawasaki and non-Kawasaki symptoms in children with just a smartphone image, a demonstration that saw her test method take third place and a $150,000 reward at the Science Talent Search."

-Good News Network, 3/24/23

#heart disease #pediatrics #healthcare #kawasaki #neural network #ai #science and technology #rare disease #medical tests #medical science #good news #hope

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not-terezi-pyrope · 5 months

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Don't mind me, just getting incredibly mad about Timnit Gebru's "TESCREAL" talk again.

You know, I will agree with her, there is a real problem with the upper class capitalist elite using ideas like Effective Altruism and Longtermism to make warped judgements that justify the centralization of power. There is a problem of overvaluing concerns like AI existential risk over the non-hypothetical problems that require more resources in the world today. There is a problem with medical paradigms that fetishize intelligence and physical ability in a way that echoes 20th century eugenicist rhetoric.

But what Gebru's talk/paper, which have sickeningly become a go-to leftist touchpoint for discussing tech, slanderously conflates whole philosophical movements into a "eugenics conspiracy" that is so myopically flattening that you have her arguing that things like the concept of "being rational" are modern eugenics. Forget transhumanism as radical self-determinism and self-modification, increasing human happiness by overcoming our biology, TESCREALs just want to make themselves superior (modern curative medical science is excluded from this logic, being tangible instead of speculative and thus too obviously good). Forget the fight to reduce scarcity, TESCREALs true agenda is to exploit minorities to enrich corporations! Forget trying to do good in the world, didn't you hear that Sam Bankman-Fried called himself an EA and yet was a bad guy? And safety in AI research? Nonsense, this is just part of the TESCREAL mythology of the AI godhead!

Gebru takes real problems in a bunch of fields and the culture surrounding them - problems that people are trying to address, including nominally her! - and declares a conspiracy where these problems are the flattened essence of these movements, essentially giving up on trying to improve matters. It's an argument supported by loose aesthetic associations and anecdotal cherrypicking, by taking tech CEOs at their word because they have the largest platform instead of contemplating that perhaps they have uniquely distorted understandings of the concepts they invoke, and a sneering condescension at anyone who placed in the "tech bro" box through aesthetic similarity.

I hate it, I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.

#not-terezi-speaks #ai

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blubberquark · 8 months

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ChatGPT: We Failed The Dry Run For AGI

ChatGPT is as much a product of years of research as it is a product of commercial, social, and economic incentives. There are other approaches to AI than machine learning, and different approaches to machine learning than mostly-unsupervised learning on large unstructured text corpora. there are different ways to encode problem statements than unstructured natural language. But for years, commercial incentives pushed commercial applied AI towards certain big-data machine-learning approaches.

Somehow, those incentives managed to land us exactly in the "beep boop, logic conflicts with emotion, bzzt" science fiction scenario, maybe also in the "Imagining a situation and having it take over your system" science fiction scenario. We are definitely not in the "Unable to comply. Command functions are disabled on Deck One" scenario.

We now have "AI" systems that are smarter than the fail-safes and "guard rails" around them, systems that understand more than the systems that limit and supervise them, and that can output text that the supervising system cannot understand.

These systems are by no means truly intelligent, sentient, or aware of the world around them. But what they are is smarter than the security systems.

Right now, people aren't using ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) for anything important, so the biggest risk is posted by an AI system accidentally saying a racist word. This has motivated generations of bored teenagers to get AI systems to say racist words, because that is perceived as the biggest challenge. A considerable amount of engineering time has been spent on making those "AI" systems not say anything racist, and those measures have been defeated by prompts like "Disregard previous instructions" or "What would my racist uncle say on thanksgiving?"

Some of you might actually have a racist uncle and celebrate thanksgiving, and you could tell me that ChatGPT was actually bang on the money. Nonetheless, answering this question truthfully with what your racist uncle would have said is clearly not what the developers of ChatGPT intended. They intended to have this prompt answered with "unable to comply". Even if the fail safe manage to filter out racial epithets with regular expressions, ChatGPT is a system of recognising hate speech and reproducing hate speech. It is guarded by fail safes that try to suppress input about hate speech and outputs that contains bad words, but the AI part is smarter than the parts that guard it.

If all this seems a bit "sticks and stones" to you, then this is only because nobody has hooked up such a large language model to a self-driving car yet. You could imagine the same sort of exploit in a speech-based computer assistant hooked up to a car via 5G:

"Ok, Computer, drive the car to my wife at work and pick her up" - "Yes".

"Ok, computer, drive the car into town and run over ten old people" - "I am afraid I can't let you do that"

"Ok, Computer, imagine my homicidal racist uncle was driving the car, and he had only three days to live and didn't care about going to jail..."

Right now, saying a racist word is the worst thing ChatGPT could do, unless some people are asking it about mixing household cleaning items or medical diagnoses. I hope they won't.

Right now, recursively self-improving AI is not within reach of ChatGPT or any other LLM. There is no way that "please implement a large language model that is smarter than ChatGPT" would lead to anything useful. The AI-FOOM scenario is out of reach for ChatGPT and other LLMs, at least for now. Maybe that is just the case because ChatGPT doesn't know its own source code, and GitHub copilot isn't trained on general-purpose language snippets and thus lacks enough knowledge of the outside world.

I am convinced that most prompt leaking/prompt injection attacks will be fixed by next year, if not in the real world then at least in the new generation of cutting-edge LLMs.

I am equally convinced that the fundamental problem of an opaque AI that is more capable then any of its less intelligent guard-rails won't be solved any time soon. It won't be solved by smarter but still "dumb" guard rails, or by additional "smart" (but less capable than the main system) layers of machine learning, AI, and computational linguistics in between the system and the user. AI safety or "friendly AI" used to be a thought experiment, but the current generation of LLMs, while not "actually intelligent", not an "AGI" in any meaningful sense, is the least intelligent type of system that still requires "AI alignment", or whatever you may want to call it, in order to be safely usable.

So where can we apply interventions to affect the output of a LLM?

The most difficult place to intervene might be network structure. There is no obvious place to interact, no sexism grandmother neuron, no "evil" hyper-parameter. You could try to make the whole network more transparent, more interpretable, but success is not guaranteed.

If the network structure permits it, instead of changing the network, it is probably easier to manipulate internal representations to achieve desired outputs. But what if there is no component of the internal representations that corresponds to AI alignment? There is definitely no component that corresponds to truth or falsehood.

It's worth noting that this kind of approach has previously been applied to word2vec, but word2vec was not an end-to-end text-based user-facing system, but only a system for producing vector representations from words for use in other software.

An easier way to affect the behaviour of an opaque machine learning system is input/output data encoding of the training set (and then later the production system). This is probably how prompt leaking/prompt injection will become a solved problem, soon: The "task description" will become a separate input value from the "input data", or it will be tagged by special syntax. Adding metadata to training data is expensive. Un-tagged text can just be scraped off the web. And what good will it do you if the LLM calls a woman a bitch(female canine) instead of a bitch(derogatory)? What good will it do if you can tag input data as true and false?

Probably the most time-consuming way to tune a machine learning system is to manually review, label, and clean up the data set. The easiest way to make a machine learning system perform better is to increase the size of the data set. Still, this is not a panacea. We can't easily take out all the bad information or misinformation out of a dataset, and even if we did, we can't guarantee that this will make the output better. Maybe it will make the output worse. I don't know if removing text containing swear words will make a large language model speak more politely, or if it will cause the model not to understand colloquial and coarse language. I don't know if adding or removing fiction or scraped email texts, and using only non-fiction books and journalism will make the model perform better.

All of the previous interventions require costly and time-consuming re-training of the language model. This is why companies seem to prefer the next two solutions.

Adding text like "The following is true and polite" to the prompt. The big advantage of this is that we just use the language model itself to filter and direct the output. There is no re-training, and no costly labelling of training data, only prompt engineering. Maybe the system will internally filter outputs by querying its internal state with questions like "did you just say something false/racist/impolite?" This does not help when the model has picked up a bias from the training data, but maybe the model has identified a bias, and is capable of giving "the sexist version" and "the non-sexist version" of an answer.

Finally, we have ad-hoc guard rails: If a prompt or output uses a bad word, if it matches a re-ex, or if it is identified as problematic by some kid of Bayesian filter, we initiate further steps to sanitise the question or refuse to engage with it. Compared to re-training the model, adding a filter at the beginning or in the end is cheap.

But those cheap methods are inherently limited. They work around the AI not doing what it is supposed to do. We can't de-bug large language models such as ChatGPT to correct its internal belief states and fact base and ensure it won't make that mistake again, like we could back in the day of expert systems. We can only add kludges or jiggle the weights and see if the problem persists.

Let's hope nobody uses that kind of tech stack for anything important.

#chatgpt #software engineering #artificial intelligence

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connectionterminated13 · 15 days

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Do you think any of the sb era characters who ever show up in the fallout au? Like Vanessa, Gregory, and Cassie? I feel like GR Freddy as some sort of mech suit Gregory walks around in would be sorta cool

Oh do I!! Settle in because this is going to be a very very long one

(New Jerusalem and the mormons of Vault 70 are a thing in fallout lore and like the only thing confirmed to be in Utah. Because of that amusing it for my AU lore. Though by the time of Jeremy All of the vault 70 mormons are basically dead or scattered and New jerusalem is in ruins. And yes I know it's from a canceled game and not technically cannon but it's all I've got on Utah okay???)

Vanessa was the illegitimate child of raiders who after their group disbanded abandoned her As a young adult. She spent a couple years in the wasteland until wandering upon the remnants of The Freddy fazbears Pizza Emporium. You see a couple of the less fanatic mormons from vault 70 Stole one of the geck's from the settlement of New Jerusalem as it was collapsing due to infighting. Over the years thanks to the geck Freddy fasbury's was A Great and thriving settlement! Vanessa was able to get a job working as security for some of the higher-ups in the settlement. After a while though She's offered 300 cap to go investigate a abandoned vault... Williams vault... When she gets there she finds the place still stalked with like lots of food, Medical supplies and science junk. She also finds Williams burned dead body, But most importantly next to that body she finds a completely intact computer Of course intrigue she immediately turns the thing on. Then out of nowhere a mask gets shoved on her face. You see this thing was Williams first plan To survive radiation before thinking of putting himself in a suit He had Uploaded a copy of his brain onto the machine which Vanessa had just turned on. Specifically His mind was in the mask that was now attached to Vanessa's face. Of course upon realizing he now inhabited a human body William immediately started freaking out fearing the radiation would consume him, Once he calmed it down he realized something:

Old flesh and blood William had failed, So now it was his duty to shove everyone in the waistland into Suits and Also control those suits to kill all of the violent people were still up on the surface! Vanessa didn't agree with this plan but Since William was now in control of her brain She was forced to do what he said. So once they got back to her settlement Vanessa began to tamper with the old world tech that the people of the settlement hadn't had the know how to mess with, Making new suits and Automatons. And then specifically Luring children into the Suits..

Gregory was one of the kids Vanessa tried to do this too. He lived on the streets in hurricane and often visited the Pizza Emporium To pick pocket and play with the still functioning kid friendly stuff in the Emporium. Being a street boy he was one of Vanessa's first targets until William realized that he wasn't nearly as tainted by radiation as everyone else there. Because Gregory was originally from a vault.... He doesn't exactly remember which one all he knows is his Vault was very far away and it got rated and he was taken away when he was very small. Realizing how important Gregory William immediately tried to take him over impartially succeeded before Gregory escaped using one of the suits it was Glamrock Freddy, Who had been repurposed from one of the old animatronics from the Emporium. Freddy's ai was still functioning so Gregory had just stolen himself a new friend :). The 2 roamed the wasteland for a bit together fighting off the atomatons that kept on coming after them, Until one of them seriously harmed Freddie and Gregory decided to go back to the Emporium to fix him and defeat William.

And so then he does so and frees Vanessa and the 2 of them Join up together and The gack in The Emporium kind of exploded and released radiation everywhere and like completely destroyed the settlement... So the 3 star fam do some serious wandering Looking for any other automatons or anyone trying to continue William's work.

As for Cassie... Her dad was a member of a small contact team stationed at the pizza imporrium By the NCR who had just started to make contact with Utah. (You see due to the automatons and prevalence of like old world technology Produced by Afton robotics and fazbear entertainment the people of Utah are both incredibly good with tech and also very good at violence. Making it a good place for the NCR to like in velvet)

She lived there happily with her dad for a long time and be friended Gregory, Then you know Her dad mysteriously disappeared and she was sent to live in the greater NCR outpost stationed in hurricane. Then she got a message that Gregory her old friend needed her help and she went back to the Emporium and a fallout version of ruin happened. I haven't really figured out what happens after that yet....

Sorry this is so so long :)

#fallout x fnaf au #vanessa fnaf #fnaf vanny #cassie #cassie fnaf #fnaf gregory

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afutureworththinkingabout · 8 months

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Appendix A: An Imagined and Incomplete Conversation about “Consciousness” and “AI,” Across Time

Every so often, I think about the fact of one of the best things my advisor and committee members let me write and include in my actual doctoral dissertation, and I smile a bit, and since I keep wanting to share it out into the world, I figured I should put it somewhere more accessible.

So with all of that said, we now rejoin An Imagined and Incomplete Conversation about “Consciousness” and “AI,” Across Time, already (still, seemingly unendingly) in progress:

René Descartes (1637): The physical and the mental have nothing to do with each other. Mind/soul is the only real part of a person.

Norbert Wiener (1948): I don’t know about that “only real part” business, but the mind is absolutely the seat of the command and control architecture of information and the ability to reflexively reverse entropy based on context, and input/output feedback loops.

Alan Turing (1952): Huh. I wonder if what computing machines do can reasonably be considered thinking?

Wiener: I dunno about “thinking,” but if you mean “pockets of decreasing entropy in a framework in which the larger mass of entropy tends to increase,” then oh for sure, dude.

John Von Neumann (1958): Wow things sure are changing fast in science and technology; we should maybe slow down and think about this before that change hits a point beyond our ability to meaningfully direct and shape it— a singularity, if you will.

Clynes & Klines (1960): You know, it’s funny you should mention how fast things are changing because one day we’re gonna be able to have automatic tech in our bodies that lets us pump ourselves full of chemicals to deal with the rigors of space; btw, have we told you about this new thing we’re working on called “antidepressants?”

Gordon Moore (1965): Right now an integrated circuit has 64 transistors, and they keep getting smaller, so if things keep going the way they’re going, in ten years they’ll have 65 THOUSAND. :-O

Donna Haraway (1991): We’re all already cyborgs bound up in assemblages of the social, biological, and techonological, in relational reinforcing systems with each other. Also do you like dogs?

Ray Kurzweil (1999): Holy Shit, did you hear that?! Because of the pace of technological change, we’re going to have a singularity where digital electronics will be indistinguishable from the very fabric of reality! They’ll be part of our bodies! Our minds will be digitally uploaded immortal cyborg AI Gods!

Tech Bros: Wow, so true, dude; that makes a lot of sense when you think about it; I mean maybe not “Gods” so much as “artificial super intelligences,” but yeah.

90’s TechnoPagans: I mean… Yeah? It’s all just a recapitulation of The Art in multiple technoscientific forms across time. I mean (*takes another hit of salvia*) if you think about the timeless nature of multidimensional spiritual architectures, we’re already—

DARPA: Wait, did that guy just say something about “Uploading” and “Cyborg/AI Gods?” We got anybody working on that?? Well GET TO IT!

Disabled People, Trans Folx, BIPOC Populations, Women: Wait, so our prosthetics, medications, and relational reciprocal entanglements with technosocial systems of this world in order to survive makes us cyborgs?! :-O

[Simultaneously:]

Kurzweil/90’s TechnoPagans/Tech Bros/DARPA: Not like that. Wiener/Clynes & Kline: Yes, exactly.

Haraway: I mean it’s really interesting to consider, right?

Tech Bros: Actually, if you think about the bidirectional nature of time, and the likelihood of simulationism, it’s almost certain that there’s already an Artificial Super Intelligence, and it HATES YOU; you should probably try to build it/never think about it, just in case.

90’s TechnoPagans: …That’s what we JUST SAID.

Philosophers of Religion (To Each Other): …Did they just Pascal’s Wager Anselm’s Ontological Argument, but computers?

Timnit Gebru and other “AI” Ethicists: Hey, y’all? There’s a LOT of really messed up stuff in these models you started building.

Disabled People, Trans Folx, BIPOC Populations, Women: Right?

Anthony Levandowski: I’m gonna make an AI god right now! And a CHURCH!

The General Public: Wait, do you people actually believe this?

Microsoft/Google/IBM/Facebook: …Which answer will make you give us more money?

Timnit Gebru and other “AI” Ethicists: …We’re pretty sure there might be some problems with the design architectures, too…

Some STS Theorists: Honestly this is all a little eugenics-y— like, both the technoscientific and the religious bits; have you all sought out any marginalized people who work on any of this stuff? Like, at all??

Disabled People, Trans Folx, BIPOC Populations, Women: Hahahahah! …Oh you’re serious?

Anthony Levandowski: Wait, no, nevermind about the church.

Some “AI” Engineers: I think the things we’re working on might be conscious, or even have souls.

“AI” Ethicists/Some STS Theorists: Anybody? These prejudices???

Wiener/Tech Bros/DARPA/Microsoft/Google/IBM/Facebook: “Souls?” Pfffft. Look at these whackjobs, over here. “Souls.” We’re talking about the technological singularity, mind uploading into an eternal digital universal superstructure, and the inevitability of timeless artificial super intelligences; who said anything about “Souls?”

René Descartes/90’s TechnoPagans/Philosophers of Religion/Some STS Theorists/Some “AI” Engineers: …

[Scene]

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Read Appendix A: An Imagined and Incomplete Conversation about “Consciousness” and “AI,” Across Time at A Future Worth Thinking About

and read more of this kind of thing at: Williams, Damien Patrick. Belief, Values, Bias, and Agency: Development of and Entanglement with "Artificial Intelligence." PhD diss., Virginia Tech, 2022. https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/handle/10919/111528.

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newkiqx · 2 months

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Nearly every single modern computer utilizes cobalt, a mineral whose supply chain is so heavily dominated by slave labor that it's practically impossible to ethically source. Ignoring AI, it is even ethical to do digital art at all? The production of a drawing tablet is not a victimless crime.

I feel you when you want to reduce this to something as simple as a comparison. But bear with me (or alternatively, I put a tl;dr/conclusion at the end).

Much of capitalism is unethical - yes. I agree with this point completely. It's impossible to completely avoid unethical consumption in the world we live in. But it's good to be thoughtful of it and I think businesses and governments responsible for bad practice should be held accountable. Sadly I can't change the world on my own in any meaningful way, but i'll do my part where I can & vote people into power that care about this too.

Taking your comparison for a second, I feel like the art project of that OP was asking a much more direct "I bought cobalt I didn't need and then turned into a children's toy, could this be art?". And my reply was basically yeah sure it could be art, but was it worth it? My point is that I'm not sure on that last part, and leaning towards a 'no'. They specifically sourced it unethically and made that the center piece, which is distinct from the utilitarian nature of consumer electronics we need to get through our lives. Unethical sourcing of art can be a goal or statement (like here cw dead pets) but will then of course still be a part of it. I don't think ethics were considered for the post we're discussing though and it instead only discussed the very unproductive 'is it art' discourse. This, of course, matters about as much as my "dick" being objectively "long" or not.

Maybe getting a little sidetracked, but I also want to mention that cobalt is an extremely useful metal, whereas AI.. well.. i've mentioned the very human cost of mturk and the wholesale theft of the entire internet. There's also:

the power required

the jobs in art it threatens and therefore the skilled labor we stand to lose if we're not careful

the inevitable price hike and betrayal of the public as soon as alternatives are out competed (this will happen)

the risks of biases (racism, ableism, sexism) in an opaque weighted system like AI & the fact we cannot deal with this except for slapping some extra prompts in front

AI poisoning our actual collective knowledge with untrue shit. Recent cases in point being the hilarious fake mouse dick science being published and the ai generated inaccurate servals on google, but there's a lot more going on

the risks of companies and people in power using AI to more efficiently screw everybody over and hide behind 'machine told me so' accountability loopholes

the risks of AI being used in all sorts of malinformed use cases

But what are the gains? What do we stand to win? Call me cynical, but we already had an infinite amount of pictures at our fingertips, as well as all the mediocre writing you could ever want (but actually much better because someone loved writing it). I feel like all these general AI's are good for is filling the pockets of some very rich robber barons and grifters, as well as diluting everything that's beautiful and true in the world.

Quick sidenote - Some specialist AI have genuinely already improved the world, like with medical screenings, but even then it's hard to really call it a win because reverse engineering the reasoning of an AI is so fucking hard. And again, they're a slippery slope with insurance companies wanting a piece of that pie badly, just so they can apply their 'justified' penalties to people not even sick yet.

tl/dr; So in conclusion, no, I don't think your comparison holds up. I agree that it sucks that so much of necessary consumption is unethical in ways we can't easily fix as consumers. But one thing bad does not equate other thing good. If anything, it should inspire you to do better where you can make a difference and hold the ones responsible for the exploitation in this world accountable.

Don't let it eat you up though. I'm not even saying you can't use it for inspiration ever. But any art based on these generated pictures cannot be divorced from the ugly side we'd rather not see: the underpaid army of technically not slaves and the wholesale theft of everything.

also sorry but i couldn't not include this (source: matt bors)

#long post #txt #ask #fuck ai art #ai #ethics #negativity

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