For the benefit of Arcadians new and old, gay and… I guess… not a hundred percent gay, somewhat less gay at any rate, our revels in Penny Arcade's ancient past continue apace. Time has passed everywhere, even inside Mork's purty pitchers he duz all them scratchin's on. I was startled by his suggestion for this strip and I suspect others may be also.
I'm confident that we will traverse large portions of the list presented at the outset; personally, I'm excited for the return of fan-favorite character "The Food Court Dragon."
When I think of AI theft, I think of it in terms of training data - but what TikTok (and I assume other short form media sphincters) reveals is that these same tools can steal the stuff once it's all live, denature it to file off the serials, and then repost it in channels of its own making and provenance. If we commingle AI crafted videos with AI Automated duplicates, it's such an assumption of these platforms that I think we need to consider them lost. What do you call it when a computer gentrifies a space?
This calculation doesn't even include people who simply outsource their cognition to write their scripts. Similar to "streamer voice" or "influencer voice," it's impossible to determine if they're aping others or if this hideous cadence has simply become a default mode. It's maddening. The pace demands of content creation must make it seem so necessary. But there are also robots reading things over videos it has stolen or compiled. As soon as I identify it, I have to immediately purge the buffer - listening to nobody read words that no one wrote is a cognitohazard for me. It's not information, but it has information's shape.
I have written to the best of my ability about how these Theft Machines, their acolytes, and the essentially feudal substrate they're operating from are ugly and dangerous in obvious ways. My fantasy is and has been that if I can put the right words together they will fashion a kind of spell; it is the dream of a Wizard. I'm done with it because we didn't reason our way into this and thus cannot reason our way out. It's not a rhetorical battle, it's an aesthetic one. I'm delighted to move the conflict into an arena for which they are so profoundly ill-equipped.
(CW)TB out.
