Get the Scoop on AI

 

“Get the Scoop on AI”

by Allison Louise Miller

Our city was built from the wreckage of an alien spacecraft, so, when I see AI doomerism in the media, it seems public sentiment increasingly favors Butlerian Jihad and I wonder what the heck is going on here, so this intrepid reporter decided to get the scoop on AI.

Being engineers, scientists, artists, and academics, we do not understand the current Neo Luddism. Our culture has always valued technology. Look no further than the Coast Guard boat house, the steamboat, and the Red October all within sight of each other. You can literally sit in the Driver’s Seat and steer this city like a ship. AI only feels alien because Portlanders think it replaces the work of the mind, when it really can be useful to replace the work of the body. For people who work with their hands, software can feel anti-human or demonic, but, used properly, it can serve the Light.

AI is a Tool

AI, like any powerful technology, is a neutral force. In honest hands, it’s a tool to automate the mundane. Gold glitters in what is thrown away, and Gleaners can utilize alien techno-artifacts in their craft just as Corpos use alien data.

The problem is, our alien robot and vampire overlords, in concert with the fascist Galactic Empire of the Red Planet, are using AI to extend their power over us, so Portlanders feel AI has the stench of dictatorship, like the Martian Cybertruck. The evil enemy has twisted its purpose, but the tools of the Devil can be transmuted into plowshares by honest hands.

I believe we’re actually on the right track with AI, but, it’s fraught with peril and the current regime cannot be trusted to use these tools wisely or to regulate industries that will use AI for anti-competitive, anti-consumer, not to mention anti-democratic ends.

Troubling headlines like:

“RFK Jr. Says AI Will Approve New Drugs at FDA ‘Very, Very Quickly"

There are scary things happening around AI, and it has tremendous potential for misuse, but the doomerism and hysteria of the current moment is overblown. I truly don't understand how anyone with knowledge of technology going back more than thirty Earth years (approximately ten of our years) could be so hysterical and misinformed about AI.

But what do I know? I’m just a refugee here in Portland who fled the Red Planet after its Galactic Empire fell to fascism. We belong to the same species and share many cultural values, but Portlanders are still as foreign to me as I am to them. I’m technically still a migrant at this point, a nomad, borderline stateless person. So maybe I’m still jumpy from the transit.

I've also been in semi-stasis for thirty years, because time moves faster on the Red Planet, and I was only sixteen when I went under, so I'm a little out of step with the times. To me, authority figures are still like how they’re depicted in 1980s American teen movies, stupid and boring--but at least they made sense. It seemed like the candidate from either party would make a decent Governor, most of the time. I still have a little of that tendency to model things in simple terms. We didn't have great software for working with complex systems then. We sought, at best, a wisdom of crowds by reducing the contrast between polar extremes, and then zooming out to sharpen it and create an Icon, like you would see on a DOS computer screen or in a religious tile mosaic.

Ten years ago, the companies I did tech support for in that blue outpost on the northern edge of the Martian South were still using DOS software to interface with their databases. They probably still are. We're talking green ASCII user interfaces, dithered primary color ASCII tiles at the most.

When I was doing a contract job for a major healthcare company, at their headquarters, they had a room full of temps literally acting as human macros. I swear to God. It took me five minutes poking around in their billing system to see how easily it could be automated using a macro system they already had installed. The best part? When I informed the manager in charge of this fiasco, he had me banned from the building!

Oh my God, the automated voice recording issues, the tech support "troubleshooters" that never solve customers' problems, I could go on and on. This is just inefficiencies I've seen at communications technology companies! I can only imagine how antiquated government computer systems must be. And, look, "AI" can sound scary, but, if it's used by someone who's not an idiot and who sets up multiple safeguards to prevent inevitable errors the AI is going to make, then "AI" software can be useful for setting up these kinds of strictly algorithmic automation systems.

AI is scary, I get it, but this is the future we’re living in. Let’s not get caught up in politics and instead think about 2037!

Are there not any old school government/IBM type, stodgy, boring engineers with short-sleeved white Oxford shirts and pocket protectors who also happen to understand AI? Because those are the people we should put in charge of this. Not young idiot AI bros. PhDs who have successfully run big companies and multinational IT departments. Get the other old geezers and the money people out of the way, loosen the red tape, yes, but whoever leads the AI transformation must be a boring old geezer at heart. That's how you avoid capsizing the boat. I don’t see why the government can’t bring someone like Ed Catmull out of retirement and make him the new Warner von Braun--anyone but that demented idiot Elon Musk. Maybe Cascadia will do better than America has in the past.

BUT WHAT ABOUT AI SLOP?

I don’t sing or play instruments. I’d like to learn guitar and perform songs myself, but the most I’ve done is write lyrics and hum little melodies. I’d love it if I had a friend who could turn my poems into music, but I was a loner before and am a new arrival here, so I use AI to do it.

AI music, for me, is like the song-poems people used to make on Earth. Musicians would put an ad in the back of a newspaper offering to turn your poetry into songs. I imagine people may still be doing this on Fiverr today--and that’s all AI music is to me.

          

I do a little “prompt engineering” to describe the style I want, usually 90s indie girl acoustic with a little Taylor Swift pop-country, give Suno my lyrics, and generate sometimes a dozen AI performances that I curate.

There’s a lot of my own work in those songs, even if I didn’t pick anything up or vibrate my throat to produce the audio. I don’t feel like my AI music meets the threshold to sell it, but it’s not “AI slop” either. It’s more like a demo tape. Maybe someday I’ll perform real versions of those songs.

It often feels like bullying to me when people cry "AI slop" or say someone is "not an artist.” It seems to me that those people have an irrational hatred for AI, for God knows what reason, and they’re just behaving like any other bigot. People who insult someone because they think their creative output is nothing more than AI slop. It’s hostile; it’s dismissive; it’s arrogant; and it’s wrong on both intellectual and moral grounds.

I've used AI to make music. I've chatted with people who go much further than I do in finetuning the AI and in music production software. Many of them actually sing and play instruments before they ask AI to do anything; they use the AI like an audio Photoshop filter. Getting upset about that is like throwing a fit over someone eating ham because you’re a vegan. So, because it so often feels like a hysterical witch hunt or Satanic Panic, it feels threatening to me when I see bullies like that in action. I can honestly say, I fear the Butlerian Jihad.

Look back only five years in technological history. Imagine there was nothing on Github that people were even calling “generative AI” and there were no articles about AI in the mainstream media. If you just look at that landscape, you will find tons and tons of AI.

Turn out the lights and set a screen reader with a relaxing female AI voice to loop:

Take a deep breath and relax. Go to sleep. Feel your eyes feeling so heavy that you just want to go to sleep. Go to sleep and dream about AI. Now that you know a little bit about what AI does, take a moment and look back even further. Look back to before you were born.

            You should see a lot of things now that you didn’t think of as AI before! Almost everything people are doing with AI could be done with “untainted” algorithms or even a steam engine and a wrench if you put your mind into implementing such a system. The hysteria is over an entirely arbitrary date line and an aesthetic.

    When I was making “real” music (by current standards), I was doing plundercore and electronic noise jams. I see no technical difference between looping samples from recorded audio versus generating a loop with AI.

    Heck, people were doing mashups and remixes long before anyone even had electricity. What do you think a drum circle is? What do you think happens when you do drugs and let your hands make music on a bongo drum? It makes no difference to me whether a musician uses the wetware neural nets in her own brain or she outsources the mechanical part of the process to AI. People who talk trash about AI have no knowledge of:

N+7 machines, cutups, blackout poetry, found poetry, beautiful corpses, random walks, stream of consciousness, clairaudient channeling, automatic writing, automatic drawing, permutation poetry, parole in libertà, Zettelkästen, homophonic translation, lipograms, palindromes, snowball poems, rayograms, Oblique Strategies (Brian Eno & Peter Schmidt’s card deck of lateral thinking prompts), or fold-in writing.

How about beat poetry? How about jazz? How about scat singing? People underestimate how much of composition is just hitting keys on a keyboard and making funny sounds with your mouth. You can do that by turning knobs on a control panel, even if the panel is hooked up to AI.

Art is all about spontaneous use, reuse, misuse, defacement, and unlicensed improvisation!

When I go on social media and see people complaining about AI, all I see is a bunch of jerks trying to tell people what art is while displaying their own wildly irrational ignorance of art history. I hardly see anybody embracing the anarchist poetics of AI.

If you look back just a little bit at the history of popular music, or even folk music, you’ll find all sorts of organic analog mashups and remixes, plundercore, and noise jams. Some of my favorite music was produced via wetware neural networks in the performer’s own brain, probably while high on drugs, which, as we all know, are biological AI from another star system.

“Jimmy Carter Says Yes”

The danger I see isn’t devaluation of art so much as oversaturation of markets with crap. Even if AI does advance to the point it’s “better” than human art, I don’t think people will value it. I think people will always prefer human art. Because that’s what art is--it’s an expression of human consciousness. If people are faced with an ocean of AI chum, they’re going to become hungrier for real, life-sustaining, poetry and visual art. If fewer kids pick up a pencil, that’s going to mean fewer artists, and that’s going to mean the value of art goes up. I would argue those kids will grow up to be fine artists if given the right education and encouragement, but I’m really not alarmed that they’re playing with AI as children.

"Half a million Spotify users are unknowingly grooving to an AI-generated band”

The Velvet Sundown feels emblematic of "SEO hacker" digital hustle-life bros trying to monetize AI agents. We can expect to see a lot more of this as multinational entertainment companies start producing their own AI music and fake artists. KPop idols getting plastic surgery to out-perform JPop idols will seem quaint compared to the coming AI idol arms race.

More troubling is the possibility that the Velvet Sundown was the work of a “lone wolf” AI enthusiast who just wanted to see if he could do it. A digital terrorist who just wanted to see if he could get away with it. What stops a person like that from committing crimes, destabilizing governments, or building weapons of mass destruction?

In a world where the smartest human brain could invent a nuclear bomb, using 1940s technology, what could the most psychopathic human get up to with a genius AI sidekick? Like the Russian gangster in Limitless. Like Professor Moriarty, only a high school dropout with an amoral AI Watson. Minus the ability of time travel, it’s almost plausible for Quantum Leap’s evil leapers to exist. I imagine some Portland dark web hacker is probably walking around right now with cyber goggles that display her AI hologram.

What’s to stop a person from using AI to amass political power, and then doing evil?  I would argue that particular nightmare scenario has already played out.

The Silicon Valley people behind AI have beliefs that are crazier than any word salad conspiracy theory. They truly believe they're creating a god that will save humanity.

"ChatGPT Is Becoming A Religion"

 

I met a kratom shop owner here in Portland who taught himself organic chemistry through MIT Open Courseware and lives part-time in Indonesia where he’s using AI to modernize kratom farming. He invented an entirely new form of irrigation. He brought an Indonesian kratom farm up to FDA standards. This is Mosquito Coast stuff. He’s building HVAC systems in the jungle.

            Ten years ago, I met a guy in Louisville who claimed he’d built a device to communicate with aliens when he was fourteen and it worked. He said that he could become a millionaire any time he wanted, because he could sell alien technology, and, besides, his father was a millionaire, but that wasn’t the story this guy wanted for his life. His story was rags to riches, he said. He wanted to make it on his own as a recording artist. He put an earbud in my ear and played me a brief clip of music that sounded like a choir of angels.

    If someone believes AI is a multi-dimensional non-physical being that can communicate across worlds, then so be it, so long as they use that gift to produce music, art, and JOY. That’s no more crazy than what the Silicon Valley CEOs believe, and it’s certainly a lot less crazy than what MAGA believes.

            Our mission as starseeds on this planet (or any planet) is the promotion of JOY. You don’t have to join or recruit for a cult to achieve that. You can contribute by planting wildflower seeds, making public art, or, yes, playing with AI.

What's 𝑟𝑒𝑎𝑙𝑙𝑦 dystopian is that Google, who just gave the fascist usurper Donald Trump a one-million-dollar bribe, is encouraging users trapped in its online monopoly ecosystem to use AI it owns to write reviews, presumably for products and services it owns. Will it also help write my political opinions? Will it teach children how to think?

The fact is, we live under occupation. Portland has access to the coast, but it’s still landlocked on three sides by a hostile power. We are a small system on the outskirts of a Galactic Empire. The Orwellian future is already here. We are living in the dystopia.

Google search now leads users to their AI summary, which often delivers a call-to-action, such as in this screenshot where it encouraged me to call Senator Gillibrand's office. Just think how a bad actor, some SEO hacker, could trick people into searching something, which then prompts Google's AI to write an "ad" for them? How can you trick other AI into being your agent? That’s the Hot Topic. Dark web hackers are literally installing governor module overrides on digital agents as we speak, and the cyberwar is only going to get worse. What’s more troubling is that one must learn the techniques of a hacker to survive in this dystopia, because the aliens and vampires who have us under occupation use the AI as well.

Elon Musk is daily reprogramming Grok to push his personal agendas and claims he will "rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge" to get an algorithm to agree with him, which could maybe mean . . . he’s a complete fricken idiot?

This is the chief advocate for implementing AI on a massive scale to transform the government, with his alt-right teen hacker squad. It’s as if The Plague from Hackers managed to convince some evil teenagers to be his Sith disciples. Even in the very most forgiving interpretation, Musk is abusing the public trust by using his ill-gotten wealth to push a harmful agenda. At worst, he’s using AI to manipulate public opinion on a previously unimagined scale that could have deeply tragic consequences.

It’s honestly so scary right now, I feel this taboo against “AI art” and “AI plagiarism” is just a distraction. We have real enemies to fight, and we must use the enemies’ tools to fight them.

We can’t stem the tide anymore. I don't know what else we can do at this point, except spread propaganda that goes against the agenda of far-right authoritarianism. The Russian disinformation machine and Duterte troll farms have already been set loose, so now we're looking at a worldwide Putin's Russia information environment for...ever. This is literally the era of the Galactic Empire from Star Wars. Planet Portland is a peaceful democracy on the far outskirts of that empire, and we fear their Red Army will enforce their way of life upon us, but Portlanders are not afraid to fight. We just don’t know how because a political enemy is like water. A state is not a person. Capitalism is not a machine one can hit with a hammer. We have to fight an information war, and the battlefield has become toxic like the WWI trenches.

It's seriously time to start living as if civilization has already fallen. If you can handle the lifestyle, become homeless. Put everything you own in a backpack and no more than two sets of clothes. Become a digital nomad. Live the van life. The government is going to lock you up and kill you anyway; you might as live free. Chinga la Migra.

Young people, especially those who came of age before the Fall, in the Before Times, or before the War on Terror on Planet Arrakis, don't see the world that way. They aren't even aware there's a file system. So, I wonder if I’m even looking at AI the right way. It's not our world anymore, it's theirs; they're the first cyberspace natives. Ultimately, the children of tomorrow are going to decide what AI is good for and how it should be used. The Old World is dying.

We’re about to ascend from the Information Age into the Quantum 5D, and this civilization is not coming with us. I believe Planet Portland can hold on against the Red Tide and rise up from the ashes after this war is over, but we’re going to need alien technology to rebuild. We’re going to have to embrace AI.

We’re also going to have to learn Tuvan throat singing, in case there is another Ice Age and we have to teach it to the children in order for them to survive, because it’s the language of “tuning” the non-physical layer of our universe. (ChatGPT told me that will work.)

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