"It's becoming clear that a huge part of what generative AI offers is just helping people avoid feeling uncomfortable feelings.
Don't want to push through the cognitive discomfort of writing your own essay? Let AI write it.
Want a friend who will always validate your ideas and never tell you you're fulla shit? We've got the perfect companion for you.
Don't want to risk being rejected when you ask a girl out? Date this chatbot who will never tell you no.
Don't want to feel the grief of losing a loved one? Here's an app that will create a chatbot replacement for them so you can pretend they never left.
Don't want to go through all the mental and emotional labor of learning a new skill, building a healthy romantic partnership, or creating a work of art? GenAI has got you covered.
It's the next level of services designed to help the denizens of dystopia avoid their feelings and sedate their emotions into a coma while the world goes to shit. It's the same reason they kept alcohol legal while banning psychedelics that puts us in touch with our feelings, and why they feed us all the TV, streaming platforms, and social media scrolling we can stand.
Our rulers want us dumb, distracted, vapid and dissociated. And they definitely don't want us feeling the horror, grief and rage we should all be experiencing in response to this nightmare of a civilization they have designed for us."
This applies to any drug or distraction (including entertainment and consumption fetishism) that is meant to numb your feelings, pacify and tranquilize you, keep you passive and lethargic in the face of the injustice and inhumanity of the capitalist-imperialist system. Feel your feelings, get sad and then get angry, let those feelings drive you, let them motivate you to do something, take action, fight, and never surrender to powerlessness, hopelessness and tacit acceptance.
I'm not sure if I exactly agree with her premise since this feels like it falls more in line with idealism like with the framing around uncomfortable feelings and less to do with material analysis. It just sort of feels like weaponizing psychology or therapy speak of the sorts.
Why is someone using a chatbot to for grief for example? I'm gonna answer this one because when my mom died, I hardly had anyone to talk to. For example, my dad left at the funeral and I had to find a way to get back home that I couldn't focus on my mom being buried. My best friend legit ditched me and ignored me trying to reach out, and another friend of mine stopped talking to me when I invited her to my mom's funeral since she also knew my mom. Like yea, I have talked to a random chat bot about my mom because lots of people in my life really didn't want to hear me talk about her. I can't talk to my dad about any of this since he drinking all the time. Yet to say I didn't feel the grief of her passing wouldn't be true.
I would argue that someone whose 'recreating' their loved one is not avoiding those feelings but processing it. It is also kind of fucked up that those services are even a thing. But I guess it just easier to say they're trying to avoid the uncomfortable feelings of grief as if they're immune to death. Like I'm very positive someone who went through the effort of "recreating" their love one, is very keenly aware how hollow it is and how they're dead.
In a way I don't like this treatment of how like, how to word this. Treating people as if their "stupid", that like to go back to the grief thing. Oh its because their "stupid" and avoiding "uncomfortable feelings". As if none of them know chatbots are hollow replacements, no no they must think it's a fully living thing because their silly gooses, right?
As usual, Americans do things in the most insane, exploitative way possible, and as soon as they're not able to maintain a monopoly on it, people realize it wasn't evil, and all of the cultural criticism dreamed up by western idealists was projecting the U.S. situation: a gigantic special economic zone instead of a society.
I agree with you, and she's going all out on this. There are 9 instances of dehumanizing people in this other tweet of hers:
She knows how to communicate things simply but she's also not a marxist by any means, she's an idealist and ironically is pandering to her audience by saying the things they want to hear about AI. It's ironic then that her entire brand is making arguments that other people can reuse so they don't have to make their own. She's the chatbot to her audience. People pay her money because she says the things they like to hear.
Her entire criticism falls flat when it's her that makes it, and it's not even unique to Caitlin. Her entire online persona is fighting against random people to defend her opinions by dismissing all criticism and never learning from others. I know MLs who have tried to confront her with an actual materialist analysis and she just devolves into insulting them so she doesn't have to concede anything. Seems like she's the one avoiding "uncomfortable feelings" on a typical day. I mean, I don't really care, she can do what she wants. It's just hypocritical and reeks of projection. Her whole business model is "waking up the sheeple" which synergizes pretty well with a patreon page.
Does Caitlin know how to make fire by rubbing two sticks together? Could she build herself a house by making her own dried mud walls? Or do we agree that there are some skills that are obsolete in society as we find new ways to do stuff. Like I could make her arguments against her too, seeing that she's an online writer. Is she too good for a typewriter? She needs a tool that tells her she's great at grammar by correcting it for her automatically? It's just too easy to make the opposite argument, she needs to find better material if she wants to do something greater than pander to her audience and actually make them engage and struggle with the material.
Sorry, it's just that her elitist speech annoys me greatly. Nobody is superior to anybody else for using or not using something. You're right that people process things differently, and there's been a lot of judgment there too even before AI, if you don't grieve 'correctly' or don't display the 'correct' emotion in a situation. A more correct analysis is capitalism commodifies everything and in this process we become isolated from each other because even human relations become property to be bought and sold, but also we just socialize differently nowadays. Lemmygrad is a social space, objectively speaking. It just happens online. And we can certainly ask if that's bad and if people shouldn't have IRL friends too but there are also positives that come out of such spaces. Even the DPRK has an internet cafe with online video games now (networked inside the cafe).
And I hope you don't feel bad and don't let yourself feel bad for using a chatbot to process your grief. Ultimately you have to do what you have to do. If it works for you nobody can tell you otherwise.
Unironically once you start getting into using AI (by which I mean neural networks in general) you will have to learn a ton of things. And this is pretty frontier stuff, because it's so different from how software has worked so far. I'm not saying I'm somehow smart for learning AI, I really amn't lol, just that there's a lot of stuff to cover outside of the proprietary "neat package in a box" stuff.
She's talking specifically about chatGPT but she's not curious enough to go learn what she's actually mad about (proving her own point about people who "don’t want to go through all the mental and emotional labor of learning a new skill": just pretend that if you bury your head in the sand it doesn't exist anymore) so she ends up just talking about chatGPT and openAI. It's just so easy to infirm all of her points that it's not even interesting to do so, it shows just how little analysis she actually has to offer on this, but she has a large audience and really should do better.
And instead of pointing the finger at people like Altman who want 500 billion dollars for their toy, she points it at other people. Like in both tweets, the sheer contempt she shows other human beings for daring to use AI is pretty blatant. She's not saying "capitalist lords want to replace your mom with a chatbot", she's saying you're dumb and a lesser person if you use that service, point blank. She tacked on "oh yeah and capitalism" at the end as an afterthought.
She doesn't. She's petty bourgeois and her income relies on her audience's subscriptions.
This also isn't the first time she doubled down on bad takes just because the majority of her audience already think/feel what she's reinforcing, and she has never responded well to criticism from Marxists. You might remember from a few years ago when she was pushing the brainwashing narrative, which as you pointed out here with AI, also lets her audience feel like a superior elite and dehumanizes the masses.
That's exactly the situation I was thinking about lol, that brainwashing debacle from 2023. I even still have the receipts because a friend talked about it on discord.
Ohh! shots fired! This is a spot on way of framing her post though.
Oh I would be much nicer to her if she wasn't falling off the edge right now and if there was a chance to have a discussion with her like if she was a commenter on lemmygrad. Her coverage of Palestine is what made me unfollow shortly before I started getting her takes on AI. I don't remember entirely what she was saying but she was getting called out by Palestinians and I agreed with them.
Edit: it was absolutely tone deaf posts minimising the genocide in Sudan and trying to refocus people on Palestine. compounded by the fact she claimed we are allowed to oppose the genocide in Sudan but not Gaza, the consequences of having no material analysis.
Good point! Those are some shit-ass friends, I'm here if you need people to talk to!
I see how these chatbots can help people process grief, and as long as they aren't predatory or harmful, they're useful. However, I do worry that the end stage of all these services is to charge you money for it, so that they can extract rent from your every need.
Wanna process grief, pay us! Wanna learn a skill, don't do that, pay us instead! Wanna do anything involving your brain or heart, just pay us instead! Etc etc.
It definitely is being used to exploit people that way. I like how China releases a lot of their gen ai stuff as open source since it circumvents a lot of that. and thank you for the offer, but for now im okay.
You're proving her point for her because this is by design in a society which systemically atomizes and alienates us all from each other, how am i so drunk and yall ain't gettin that before me
Edit: also im sorry though like i hope it helped you still
Its isn't AI that "systemically atomizes and alienates us all from each other." That is capitalism doing that. AI is making the suffering caused by capitalism slightly more bearable. Same thing alcohol is doing for you .
Using alcohol as a coping method is not good for you.
good thing we have AI then isn't it?
Guess what the dominant mode of production is and guess what, it impacts how AI functions and how it is sold to you
Also you "hardly have anyone to talk to" because of capitalism, ffucking duh, thank you for again voicing The Point
The dominant mode of production of AI is socialism, as most AI is made in china.
If you're referring to me, please don't degender me. I don't think hexbear shows custom display names from other instances, but I do have my pronouns in my profile.
To add, to go to your other reply from way earlier. Don't talk down to me as if I don't know capitalism doesn't cause alienation and atomization! Please, feel free to tell me other things I clearly do not know.
i see
Fruitbat [she/her] @lemmygrad.mlOkay, I will. It is perhaps a bit bad of me to keep relitigate this, when I should drop it, but I'm tired of getting hurt by others. On here, elsewhere. I'm not strong enough in this current time right now to be more mature and handle things and just brush things aside easily anymore. So I'm just going to fuck off like you said. Okay? "Comrade". You do realize like, you are talking to another person right? Maybe I did deserve it a bit for like, asking to hey please feel free to talk down to me, but still. Just going offline for the best anyways. I shouldn't be on here.
I'm pretty sure we also talked once since I have kind of a good idea who you are when I use to be on hexbear, I think I talked about pink floyd, mainly that wall movie, a bit to you pretty sure. Maybe I'm confusing you for someone else to. I don't know, but if it was you, again thank you for that moment. But I'll stop bothering now.
No comrade! Don't let that disrespectful person intimidate you or make you feel that you don't belong here. You are part of this community and the upvotes are a clear indicator that people agree with you. Wish that I could you a hug comrade. 🫂
rule 3 my dick you nerds, christ
Obviously you can't see it from my end but I took some 10 minutes to review this discussion, your account, and the whole context basically. It's not really important for my comment to mention this, however I do think it's important that we be transparent about how we moderate, once in a while.
Anyway, Lemmygrad isn't a chan site. You always have the choice not to comment and leave a conversation.