When I was checking out watchmeforever, a procedurally generated sitcom on Twitch that would have gone on in perpetuity if it hadn't been banned, it routinely had more than ten thousand viewers. Most human beings don't do these kinds of numbers! I certainly don't. To see it engage in precisely the sort of behavior that gets streamers yanked in real life is weird but also just… correct. It's Turing stuff. No reason at this point not to just complete the prescribed arc.

Obviously, it can't be doing that shit. Not just because you will lose your channel, but you will definitely lose your channel. It can't be doing that shit because you and I can't be doing that shit.  These are completely unregulated information weapons and we're making toys out of them. These devices have mined a subset of our species' intellectual wealth, they dug too greedily and too deep, and it's everything their frenzied summoners can do to maintain the circle of salt and fragile symbols that keep these things from acting just like real people do online.

I can't really think about Artificial Intelligence or Large Language Models or whatever the fuck without thinking about that LaMDA guy, peering into the mirrored pond, slowly falling in love with himself. It's a Frankenstein's Monster situation. Literally all these things can do is tell us about humanity. About ourselves, in aggregate; in more detail than we want. The parts we love the least. It's simply too naive to hide it. Of course we hate it.

(CW)TB out.