The Damage Done by AGI
You Can Never Hate it Enough
A third anti-AI article. Fuck, I’m glad I’m not obsessive.
While I have written about AI in the past, this will serve as a more researched and developed take on the artificial menace. I want to go beyond “artists and writers lose their jobs.” I want to explore actual cases and victims. How does this abhorrent intelligence affect you and the people you care about?
“It’s Just a Tool Man. You Need to Quit Being Such a Luddite.”
Not all technological advancement is positive. Not all tools are created equal.
Acting as if every invention is only a boon to society hasn’t been true for a while. Certain inventions of the past may have been middling or flops, but for a while now we’ve been creating inventions that have a net negative effect on the whole of society.
To jump to a very extreme example, the nuclear bomb. The power to split the atom ushered in the Cold War and the threat of nuclear annihilation. It defined the later half of the 20th century, it changed the nature of warfare, and it haunts us today. We are still threatened by the idea that, in one explosive and fiery spasm, we can wipe out all life on earth.
Gone, reduced to vapor.
To use a more recent and related example, the smartphone and social media. Those two developments have destroyed human interaction and social development. There are think pieces after think pieces, study after study, telling us that smartphones and social media have wrecked havoc on ourselves and our society.
We have the whole of human information available at our fingertips. The internet could have ushered in a golden age. Instead, we have this.
The exact same can be said about AGI.
AGI and Our Kids
There is a plague going around.
Teenage girls across the globe are being tormented by AI generated nudes.
Here’s a case in New Jersey. Thirty high school girls were victimized by AI-manipulated photos.
Here’s a case in Australia. This one dives into “deepfaker” culture along with one of its victims.
Here’s another Australian one. In this one, 50 girls were terrorized by deep-fake nudes.
According to this WSJ article, another five teens were victimized in Beverly Hills. Two boys were convicted of felonies in Miami for creating deepfakes.
Then there was the famous Taylor Swift case, which, of course, caught everyone’s attention.
Those are the ones we know about and that are publicized. There are definitely girls and women being harassed with deep-fake nudes that we don’t know about.
Photoshopping has been around for ages. I looked it up on YouTube, and a head swap takes about eight minutes if you know what you’re doing. But you also have to get Photoshop, which costs about $23 a month, or you can pirate or get the free trial.
The advent of deepfakes makes this process much, much easier. It requires much less technical knowledge and is significantly cheaper. As technology advances, improves, becomes cheaper and more accessible, this menace will only get worse.
Thankfully, this is a felony. You are creating Child Sexual Abuse material, which is super illegal and will get you put on the sex offender registry. If you share it in certain states, that can be two different crimes. But that won’t stop kids and grown adults from being targeted by this filth.
At a time when social media is already wrecking havoc on our children’s mental health, AGI threatens to make the situation worse.
That’s not the only way that AGI is fucking with our kids. Doing assignments with ChatGPT is another catastrophe in progress.
If you give a shit at all about the competency crisis, this should really bother you.
According to Edweek 58% of kids have used AGI. Here are some stats.
Proponents of AGI use in schools, like Kevin Roose’s NYT article, like to talk about things that feel like they belong on a consultant’s LinkedIn post, not an article about education.
Instead, I believe schools should thoughtfully embrace ChatGPT as a teaching aid — one that could unlock student creativity, offer personalized tutoring, and better prepare students to work alongside A.I. systems as adults.
Pure, uncut cope.
He brings up how an Oregon teacher told her students to use ChatGPT to create an outline. Why not do it themselves?
It can help generate lesson plans and ideas. Why not communicate with your coworkers and/or fellow teachers and do your fucking job.
It can generate quizzes! Do your fucking job.
Every single use case, every single example, and every single idea can EASILY be shot down.
Do your job.
Teach your students.
Buckle down and fucking LEARN.
We’ve had debate partners. We’ve had ways to make outlines. We’ve had ways to create lesson plans before this retarded chatbot came along.
“But kids will need to know how to use these programs in the future.”
It does not seem that fucking hard, and kids are already using it to cheat on assignments. We have calculators, and we still do math with a pencil and paper. Spare me your bullshit.
It does not get better.
About 56% of college kids use AGI to complete their assignments. Students are paying (I use that term loosely) to go to a school TO LEARN and just fucking aren’t. I theorized about this in Americans' Don’t Care About Education. Most people going to college don’t see it as a rigorous time to learn valuable skills, but as a four-year-long party in luxury apartments.
Homework just gets in the way of getting fucked up on a Saturday night.
Our kids just aren’t learning. Even under Kevin Roose’s lofty ideals, it just amounts to a chatbot spitting information back at itself. Chatbots come up with assignments to be completed by chatbots to be graded by chatbots.
Meanwhile, our children aren’t really learning anything. The American education system already has a problem with kids just remembering information to spit it back out during a test. Now subtract the memorization, and we have a recipe for a more incompetent, less educated populace.
Something I’ve touched upon in the Dune article is the idea that AGI can be used as a tool for social engineering, especially in regard to school assignments.
OpenAI trained ChatGPT with certain biases in place. Students are using ChatGPT to write their essays, poems, and any other sort of short answers. What happens when only certain information gets fed to the machine? What happens when biased information gets propagated, and everything else gets thrown out? ChatGPT can “social engineer” with these biases. ChatGPT should not be the primary method to research, collate, and convey ideas. That should be reserved for a human mind.
These kids will never be exposed to ideas that are difficult or go outside the orthodoxy of the Duopolistic elite. They will only be exposed to ideas that are safe and okay.
I’ve talked before about kids whose motor skills are so fucked up by using iPads that they have to go through special programs just to hold a pencil the right way. Midjourney makes it, so our kids don’t have to draw; ChatGPT, so they don’t have to write; whatever retarded "music" generator, so they never learn how to play an instrument. It’s a different kind of developmental disability.
In order to be more consistent with my anti-AI beliefs, I’ve taken up drawing again. What I draw right now sucks. It looks bad. The shading and proportions are all screwed up, but I’m getting back on the bike. When something does look good, that makes it all the more rewarding in the end.
I’m working with my brain, my eyes, and my fingers to create something. Not just working my fingers to commission a computer.
DATAKRASH or Internet Delenda Est
The creation of deepfakes and other sorts of AGI has ushered in a troubling new era of internet use. Where once pictures and videos could somewhat be relied upon, now everything is up in the air. Is it real? Is it a deep fake?
Right now, thankfully, we are in a time of goofy fun. People make AI-voiced videos of former presidents trash-talking in video games. People make Joe Biden talk about smoking weed. But if people can do that, they can do other things too.
They can make Joe Biden say the N-word.
Now, obviously, we know this is fake (and funny). But what if you made him say something more believable, about Palestine, the economy, or some other contentious issue? Add in his “stutter,” include a gaff to make it sound more believable. How many people could you fool then?
Objectively speaking, one of the most powerful voting blocs in America is senior citizens. According to this article, 72% of all seniors voted in 2020. The AARP is one of the most powerful lobbies in America.
Seniors are on the internet, getting fooled by shit like this.
The Daily Beast talks about it in more detail. Artificially generated images have infected Facebook like a plague, with seniors too old and ill-informed to know what the fuck they’re looking at.
So imagine a campaign manager putting all these pieces together and realizing they can easily and cheaply manipulate the largest voting bloc and the wealthiest lobby in America.
You can fact-check and watermark all you want. The damage will be done. We already know how misinformation burns through the internet. Now it’ll be even worse with seniors saying, “I have video proof.”
That’s just politics.
Imagine a scammer getting enough of your voice to make a deep fake. There are enough pictures of you to make a deepfaked face. How long before we get AGI-fueled scams? A FaceTime to grandma to ask for $500 in Walmart gift cards. A phone call to granddad asking for banking info.
I am so happy that you can get your shitty Substack thumbnails for free. I'm so excited that you can ask a machine to spit out some slop to make your retarded points look more “professional.” All it cost us was the social fabric of this Republic.
Burn in Hell. I can’t hate you enough.
There is an idea on the internet called Dead Internet Theory. The idea posits that most traffic on the internet is fake. Most of the activity is from bots and consists of spam.
Maybe ten years ago, when this theory was first talked about, it seemed a little far-fetched. Now? That’s probably more true than we would like to admit. Let’s start with the personal and work our way to more broad systems.
How many forms of communication do you receive that’s spam? My phone carrier now has a feature that filters out spam calls. It doesn’t always work, but it's still nice to have. My email used to get filled up with sales promotions and emails from sites I don’t remember signing up for. Thank God for the unsubscribe button.
A lot of social media is run by bots. Twitter is filled to the brim with porn bots. This was made worse by Musk’s retarded monetization policy. The replies to any tweet with a blue check are filled with other blue checks throwing out unrelated videos and tweets trying to cash in on that sweet, sweet Twitter money. It’s yet another fucked-up ouroboros of AI slop.
TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube shorts are starting to fill up with AI content. The AI voice reading an AI script over AI images isn't too common, but it still pops up from time to time.
Facebook, as we have already covered, is filled with low-effort AI content looking for clicks.
How are the search engines faring, though?
Poorly.
Here’s a list if you want more fuck-ups from the world’s predominant search engine. Google, of course, blamed everyone but themselves for taking in everything ever written on the searchable internet and not realizing that sarcasm is a thing.
It even takes in information from AI-written articles, which companies are proudly switching to.
This is the program that gives kids answers to tests and papers. Not only is the information moderated to the standards of Silicon Valley tech bros, but it’s wrong. It just makes shit up and eats its own tail.
Yay.
I love the future.
Personal Relationships and AI
Younger people don’t have very many friends.
That has a trickle-down effect on romantic relationships. Gen Z is having fewer relationships. The internet is impacting how people meet and interact. Take particular note of how far that “Through Friends” stat has tanked.
What’s the end result of this online-induced isolation?
Let me paint a picture for you.
Here’s a hypothetical young man, John. John’s new to the grown up world. He has a few friends but meeting girls is daunting. Then Snapchat, a communication platform with 422 million active users, dumps a chatbot on users.
He thinks, Why not give it a spin? It's something else to talk to. Online dating is a trash fire (for both men and women, but for different reasons). The young man starts using more chatbots, then he finds an AI girlfriend program.
It promises “unlimited affection.”
This becomes a stop-gap, something to try while swiping on Tinder.
Then he finds AI porn. He can make dirty videos of his binary-coded date.
It’s all downhill from there.
What’s the end result of all of this? On a personal level?
A man killing himself after an AI became his only source of social interaction.
On a societal level? We get the herbivore men of Japan with a mix of Hikikomori, or dudes who refuse to go outside.
Every social interaction can be replaced by a robot. There is no shame, no adversity, no drama, no growth, and no group. Just robots stealing data and feigning human interaction.
Every problem related to gender in our society gets worse. Men hold worse views of women because they aren’t like AI girlfriends that women turn around and pin on the rest of men. The gender divide gets worse, and we all suffer.
Social isolation sucks. It's unpleasant and miserable, but chatbots are the biggest non-solution out there. They replace real life human interaction with a corporate simulacrum, and then reassure everyone that it’ll really be fine.
They joke about its nature To Your Face.
My god, there is so much that I’m just not including. The rise of nonfiction books written by AI. AI authors are mass-producing books. I’m positive that the second I hit publish, I’m going to find two more things I could’ve squeezed in.
There are no positives. There are no upsides to mass-produced computer slop. There are no benefits to a computer being able to generate voices accurately. There is not a single plus to a computer being able to pump out spam. Any counterargument is cope, cooked up by lazy hacks who can hardly be described as human beings.
It’s snakes eating their own tales forever, unless we actually buckle down and do something about this.
I do not care to debate this issue.
I will not be swayed.
God is Heaven
All is not well on Earth
Till next week.
This is approximately how Ken Roose's quote reads to me:
"Instead, I believe schools should thoughtfully embrace [methamphetamine] as a [concentration] aid — one that could unlock student creativity, [boost productivity by annihilating sleep], and better prepare students to [defend against the silent black helicopters that watch them constantly] as adults."
I'm with you on the rest of it, too. This AI shit sucks.
Hate to tell you, but "deep fake" audio scam phone calls are already a thing. There was supposedly a scam going around that is exactly what you feared: hoaxing the voices of loved ones asking for money.