I sipping tea with my wife, sitting on the sofa. She’s reading a book about Afghanistan. I’m reading social media.
I’m writing this one for myself. I suspect you’re better off not reading it.
I wish I wasn’t writing it.
My mind keeps returning to this essay I read by Maggie Appleton, about AI and the Dark Forest. Her point is that we are going to be inundated by machine written text. It will be harder and harder to spot actual humans. The Dark Forest is basically the fact that the public Internet is full of ghosts, not people. Bots whispering the words they learned from the dead. Underground, hidden, in secret networks, is the smol net, where small circles of humans meet and bond.
Our new challenge as little snowflake humans will be to prove we aren’t language models. It’s the reverse turing test. – The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI
The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI
If you set out to find new communities, it’s hard. It’s word of mouth. How do you get to your first community, though? Random chance? Like being born in the wrong country, in the wrong city. You’re in the community you learn about in school, from your parents, your older siblings. And then you try to claw your way back up and find the Dark Forest. And you’re confused. Is it all coprocaca? Corporations talking shit about the things you should be buying, the jobs you should be doing, the challenges you should be loving? That’s when the barf hits the fan.
Don’t think that we’re a long way off. An amazing number of visitors to my websites are bots. Machine servants for unseeing masters. They’re not blind, they’re just not looking. They don’t care about the CO₂ being wasted. They’re not paying the price.
In the mean time, look at how good we are at spotting spam. In my case: Chinese? Spam. Dear beloved… spam. Dear beloved in Christ… spam. Euromillions… spam. Dear Beneficiary… spam. Does this email work? Spam. Did you receive my last email? Spam. Please confirm… spam. Fucking Dark Forest sending me mail. It’s raining dead leaves. I, of course, have a bot of my own, trying to sweep the inbox. Spam! Spam! Spam! It keeps sweeping. Sometimes the real letters also get swept away. I don’t have the time, nor the heart, to go looking for them.
I don’t pick up calls from unknown numbers. I look them up online, to see if they’re spam.
The bots have poisoned the well. We tried to flee to Instant Messengers, to WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger, until some of us started realising that they kept feeding the vampires out there in the Dark Forest. It gave them info. It taught them how to press our buttons. How to make us angry and keep us from peace. Like Darth Vader, they even benefit from the hate. It fans their fire, balloons their stock options, convinces their customers. The Adverse grows, no matter where you look because it’s tracking what you’re looking at. And so we use ever more obscure Instant Messengers, fragment into smaller and smaller circles.
The adverse turns everything into ads, even users. – 2019-04-07 The Adverse
Perhaps it’s just an illusion of my social media. Perhaps we’re just a tiny fraction and most people are just resigned to not use the Internet as a means of connecting to other humans, or they are wandering the Dark Forest, holding hands with their handful of friends, surrounded by the neon lights of ads and shopping.
Having never known that sense of camaraderie online, perhaps thinking people like me are dreamers, that we fell for an illusion, they don’t feel a sense of loss, or of doom. I feel like the blogs and sites I’m using are slowly being replaced by bots that mimic humans, badly. It’s like the faces of people around you melting, their voices slowing down. You’re looking for a thing and the cookie warnings overlay the page, can’t read a thing unless you answer. Close. Look for a thing and you consent to… close. Look for a thing and do you want to subscribe to the newsletter… close. Look for a thing and either surf with ads or subscribe… close. Close! Close! Close all the windows. Keep the vampires of the Dark Forest outside. They can’t come in unless you invite them in.
Of course I feel a sense of loss.
The people online are being replaced by bots because there are no people. People online were always invisible, only noticeable by the artefacts they left behind: their blogs, their pages, their advice, their answers, their forum posts. As these get written by bots, spammed by bots, as these are automatically generated based on the search words you used, the concept of people melts. Words used to be the domain of humans, but no more.
I recently read an interesting piece by @DrFugue. Using a huge prompt, they turn ChatGPT into a game master. And it’s good enough!
You nod, understanding the gravity of the situation. As an opossum folk hunter, you are well-equipped to handle whatever dangers may lie in the shadows. You pat the hilt of your trusty hunting knife, strapped securely to your waist, and adjust the straps of your pack, filled with supplies for your journey. – Playing a Solo RPG in my homebrew setting using AI
Playing a Solo RPG in my homebrew setting using AI
As I kept reading, I wondered: What would I have done differently? The “adventure” is bog standard, full of clichés. The tasks all succeed. The descriptions are verbose and you recognise repetitions of what has gone before. But it’s not super bad. It’s just … mediocre. And you start wondering: How many people would be content with this? How much better are you than this? Is it … worth it? Are you worth the difference? And then suddenly the Abyss yawns.
How much of the news articles are already written by machines? I have sent more than 900 pages through DeepL. I have have sent OSRIC through DeepL and helped work on fixing the translation. It was bad. But it was not so bad as to be unusable. It could be fixed, and we did. Artificial Intelligence as my sidekick. It’s a bit like that poem I like about children except now we’re talking about machines. Our bots.
They gain access / To all our secrets; learn to speak our tongue / Like natives; profit by each false move we make; / Work on our weaknesses; observe and guess / The sources of power and study them to be strong. – 2005-10-06 Poetry
And you know why this works? Because almost nobody saw the energy used to train it, almost nobody sees the energy it uses to keep running. It’s money, of course, but also a big fucking CO₂ plume rising up to the stratosphere.
@wim_v12e said it best:
The aspect that I hate most in all this was not covered in the article but it made me realise it could be very bad indeed: it’s about all the wasted energy to generate all that crap. If this really takes off in the next two years, then we’ll be in even deeper trouble than we already are with internet CO₂ emissions.
Here we are, riding into the abyss.
Looking back, I think this is what happened to me: In 2019, the pandemic hits and I lose faith in my government handling the crisis. I lose faith in my fellow humans as they wish the pandemic was gone and behave as if it were. I lose faith in our education system as fear of vaccination spreads. The frustration with the economic situation is being exploited successfully.
Everybody wants to go back the before times and doesn’t think about the people that will die or suffer for the rest of their lives. I suspect anybody who has had a serious sickness in their closest family, a cancer, a morbus crohn, or some other great challenge thrown in their way, all of us don’t want to throw the dice. But we are few and they are many, or we are used to not talking about the invisible illnesses that we carry inside and they don’t feel bad about shouting.
As the new year begins, I think the mantra going forward is going to be: “nobody could have predicted this”. All are innocent. Every new peak. Every new hot summer. Ever new forest fire. Every new warm winter. Every new garbage recycling failure. Every new failure of nuclear fusion to work at scale, or CO₂ scrubbing being more efficient than leaving the shit in the ground. Oh yes. “Nobody could have predicted this!” The graphs are more unrealistic than ever, the predictions ever more dire. I have no children and shake my head as we collectively drive this bus into the wall.
The first person to use the term “greenhouse gases” was a Swedish scientist named Svante Arrhenius in 1896. In a paper published that year, he made an early calculation of how much warmer the Earth was thanks to the energy-trapping nature of some of the gases in the atmosphere. Even at this early stage, he understood that humans had the potential to play a significant role in changing the concentration of at least one of those gases, carbon dioxide… – Did a 1912 Newspaper Article Predict Global Warming? (Snopes)
Did a 1912 Newspaper Article Predict Global Warming? (Snopes)
And all the while, the Dark Forest grows. The Internet is full of bots. The government is full of heartless monsters. My country is full of the people that voted for them.
This is how it must have felt in previous end times, when civilisations broke. Look at me, blogging about it as we fall.
When I was younger, I was very angry. Why did the Germans not do enough against the Nazis? Every single one of them, guilty! I was very heartless. Much later, I felt the similarly about the Americans invading Iraq. Nearly three hundred thousand people dead. Did you think I would forget?
Documented civilian deaths from violence: 186,649 – 209,982. Total violent deaths including combatants: 288,000. – Iraq Body Count
And yet here I am. I haven’t glued myself to the streets, I have not gone on strike. Perhaps this lousy blog is the only pen I have. I’m trying to wield it, rarely. Ranting no longer feels cathartic like it did when I was young. It feels like documenting our failure to change course, as individuals, as society, as humanity.
I keep looking over at Factfulness. A book gifted to me by a friend who knows I’m sometimes very gloomy.
In the book, Rosling suggests that the vast majority of people are wrong about the state of the world. He demonstrates that his test subjects believe the world is poorer, less healthy, and more dangerous than it actually is, attributing this not to random chance but to misinformation. – [Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World – and Why Things Are Better Than You Think (Wikipedia)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factfulness:_Ten_Reasons_We're_Wrong_About_the_World_%E2%80%93_and_Why_Things_Are_Better_Than_You_Think)
I keep wondering about that. Have I been trained to just look at the worst parts of the world stage? Or is he simply not talking about the climate or the pandemic.
Time to sleep. Time to dream. What does it all mean? How do we assign meaning to the events around us?
#Climate #AI
(Please contact me if you want to remove your comment.)
⁂
Just read it! 😉
– Peter 2023-01-04 21:56 UTC
---
I’m half way! 😀
– Alex 2023-01-04 22:43 UTC
---
Nice read! bookmarked it
– usman 2023-01-09 20:22 UTC