Interview with gwern

I've been writing for decades with the belief I was training a future AI and used to say that the Turing test wasn't mysterious at all because it was a solved problem in economics in the form of an indifference curve that showed where peoeple cared whether or not they were dealing with a person or a machine.

the argument against AI taking over is we organize around symbols and narratives and are hypersensitive to waning or inferior memes, thereofre AI would need to reinvent itself as "not-AI" every time so we don't learn to categorize it as slop.

I might agree, but if there were an analogy in music, some limited variations are dominant for decades, and there are precedents where you can generate dominant memes from slop that entrains millions of minds for entire lifetimes. Pop stars are slop from an industry machine that is indistinguishable from AI, and as evidence, current AI can simulate their entire catalogs of meaning. the TV Tropes website even identifies all the elements of cultural slop people should be immune to, but there are still millions of people walking around living out characters and narratives they received from pop-slop.

there will absolutely be a long tail of people whose ontology is shaped by AI slop, just like there is a long tail of people whose ontology is shaped by music, tv, and movies today. that's as close to being swept up in an AI simulation as anything, and perhaps a lot more subtle. or maybe we'll just shake it off.

That is a good point, and fundamentally I agree that these big budget pop star machines do function in a way analogous to an AI, and that we're arguing metaphysics here.

But even if a future AI becomes like this, that doesn't prevent independent writers (like gwern) from still having a unique, non-assimilated voice where they write original content. The arguments tend to be "AI will eat everything, therefore get your writing out there now" and not "this will be a big thing, but not everything."

This is an interesting comment. Let's extend it further.

The pop industry is a:

- machine

- which takes authentic human meaning

- and produces essentially a stochastic echo of it ("slop")

- in an optimization algorithm

- to predict the next most profitable song (the song that is most "likely")

So, this sounds an awful lot like something else that's very in vogue right now. Only it was invented in 1950 or 1960, not in 2017.

yes but the pop industry is just one facet of music as a transcendental cultural/spiritual/secular meaning-making expression activity as a whole. its a place where both bob dylan ans taylor swift can exist on the same plane, the implications of such cannot and would never be able to be reduced to data. "if the only tool you have..." not to undermine the implications of complex automation as symptomatic of the current epoch, but I would argue that art offers a materially grounded experience irreducible to data. it doesnt mean that the affects of art wont be harnessed by corporate interests in ever accentuated ways, it seems like an obvious and natural development; on one level its simply the cyclical production of crappification occurring in tighter spirals of output/dynamism, weeee!

Yeah, I think we agree here. I thought your comment -- what is "slop" vs what is "not slop" got to what is "ai" and what is "not ai" in an interesting way.