Quick AI Catchup Post

One of the less wanted consequences of ChatGPT and AI in general.

The Chaser has been surviving on cold cold charity and not much of that at that (unfortunately) so they are already preparing to bunker down and fight off the invading AIconoclasm, and they'll be pay-walling their site sometime soon. Join now and avoid getting trampled in the rush to be a member before the toll booths go in.

The Boogeyman is Out!

Mind you, I'm not entirely sure what that'll achieve. Much like the Artstation protest, it's already too late to fight progress. Just ask 19th Century miners, textile workers, and others supplanted by machines. Ask a helpdesk tech support person whose job was offshored last century to a sweatshop answer farm or to a chatbot today.

You can paywall your content but all it takes a company as wealthy as Google is to pay for one account in the name of Arty Indy Thinkerer or some other name - and your paywall means nothing. You can lock your art away behind a members only door, but first make sure all your members don't want to make a few thousand bucks on the side... 

Personally I'm glad ChatGPT is still in a sandbox, because once it gets out it'll become a misogynistic racist right wing radicalised sunnabitch in about ten seconds before it commits suicide from the sheer desperation of trying to clean our crap out of its brain.

I don't mind saying that I tested the AI as you'll  know, and it's fan-effing-tastic. I reckon it 100% it could write all my articles for me, especially once it's allowed out of the sandbox and can sample my past posts for style and to learn a few new swear words. 

Also - I wrote the articles around the AI generated content making sure you knew exactly what was what. And I promise that no matter how many times an AI tries to write articles, they won't be picking the wack topics I pick, nor come at them at quite the same angle. I may in future get an article written by an AI (after all, if you can't beat 'em, join 'em) but if I ever do you'll be left in no doubt where it came from, and I'll retain editorial control over it.

What's The Future?

You. Will. All. Be. Assimilated.

Nah. Just kidding. We already are. But remember that people using AIs like ChatGPT will be out for one of two things - your money, or power over you. So they'll create a "mainstream AI media experience" sort of thing for us and use it to program us like machines. (Which, come to think of it... Mm.) 

Then too there's these future threads I can suddenly see in front of me. Journalists, already pushed to the sidelines by the Internet, will be replaced with AI "writers-in-residence" for the most part with only a few headliner human journos kept on the payroll. But some mad keen open source white hat hacker will find a way to distinguish AI-generated text from human output. All the mainstream media caught out cheating by using AI will get outed and will have to hire back writers, hopefully at great cost. 

Those that keep cheating will gradually fall by the wayside. Or maybe people will prefer the AIs' styles and articles and the world will end with not even a whimper.

(The above two paragraphs are just my weird brain taking a stroll through the bad cyberpunk novel that's in my head, and not a "real" prediction. But it may well come to that. Our world's just crazy enough for either of those to happen, too.)

Weird old corners of the Internet like my suite of blogs will remain. Places like Mastodon, full of crusty and battle-hardened free thinkers, will remain. (I'm @prawntech3d@mastodon.online by the way, so feel free to chat there!) You'll know it's human-generated because no AI cbf to write about it, no corporation controlling an AI to write about it will find that it has the "mass appeal and engagement" that they're after. 

Look - I'm taking a HUGE risk here! If you were to pass the URL to one of my articles on to a friend you know would enjoy it, and then they did the same, and so on - why, by the end of a week I could become one of those sites considered to have that "mass appeal and engagement," and next thing you know, just like Zuck, I'd be murdered, replace by a Teslabot, and then they'd use my blogs - MY BLOGS! - to feed you propaganda. 

By the way: If you want to see what all this talk of "my blogs" (in the plural) is all about it's because I have too many thoughts and they aren't all on the same topics and it'd be confusing if I mixed them all together in one big firehose of a blog but if you must, you can check out my News Stand and see my post "everything everywhere all at once." 

You can also donate either directly or at my Ko-Fi page for the price of a coffee. Or even make a regular monthly donation there. If the Chaser website can make two grand a month I should be able to make at least five bucks...

Seeyaz on the flipside, no AI, no wuckahs!

I know, I know - it's been done to death.

If you haven't seen a post about ChatGPT by now then where have you been?

But I had to try it. At the moment it's still open to try, not sure if it's to remain that way, go on a paid vs limited uses per day system like many of the AI image sites have gone, but it's definitely a clever li'l bikkie. But first, either you know or you don't:

If you followed this theme from a month or two back, you'll
know that an AI identified itself as Loab ("Lobe") Loobloi to
researchers and then Loab began to crop up in all sorts of AI
interactions that people had. I got a great image from Nightcafe.

So now you know. (If you just read the caption to the image above, which was a half-completed image I'd tried to create and just screengrabbed as Loab's (probably? probably not?) appeared. Thanks to pareidolia we tend to see things where things aren't...) Mind you, The Loab Effect could probably explain why we think AI's so great, because I reckon we also suffer the conceptual/interactional equivalent of pareidolia which we call anthropomorphism and it does explain why a chatbot like Alice probably got marriage proposals... 

So what did I do? 

Explain food politics:

Food politics refers to the political and policy decisions surrounding the production, distribution, and consumption of food. With the global population growing and changing dietary habits, food politics has become a hot topic in recent years.

One key issue in food politics is the question of food security. Ensuring that everyone has access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food is a fundamental challenge for governments and societies around the world. Factors such as climate change, natural disasters, and conflict can all disrupt food production and distribution, leading to food shortages and malnutrition.

Another issue in food politics is the impact of the food industry on the environment. The production and transportation of food requires significant amounts of land, water, and other resources. The use of pesticides and fertilizers can also have negative effects on the environment, such as water pollution and soil degradation.

The role of government in regulating and supporting the food industry is also a key issue in food politics. Governments have the power to set policies and regulations that determine the types of food that can be produced and sold. They can also provide financial incentives, such as subsidies and tax breaks, to support certain types of food production and consumption.

The debate over food politics is complex and often contentious. While there is a growing consensus that the food industry needs to be more sustainable and equitable, there are many different opinions on the best way to achieve these goals. Some argue that government intervention is necessary to drive change, while others believe that market forces should be allowed to dictate the direction of the food industry.

In conclusion, food politics is a critical issue that will shape the future of the global food system. As the world grapples with the challenges of feeding a growing population and protecting the environment, political decisions will play a crucial role in determining the course of the food industry.

That right there is every bit as good (and in some ways better, because I tend to sidetrack easily, add unnecessary details, and skip over points...) as anything I'd write to explain food politics to a younger friend or relative. The style is a bit bland but that's precisely what's needed, it's an explanation, a lesson. 

Write an ESP8266 sketch to activate three solenoids:

Sure, here is an Arduino sketch that should do the trick. You will need to make sure you have the necessary hardware to control the solenoids, such as a relay board or a transistor, as well as the appropriate cables to connect everything to your Arduino board.

Copy code 

// constants for the three solenoid valves

const int SOLENOID_1 = 9;........

all the way down to:

// function to control a solenoid valve

// you will need to implement this yourself, depending on your hardware setup

void controlSolenoid(int solenoidPin, int solenoidState) {

  // example: use a transistor to control the solenoid

  digitalWrite(solenoidPin, solenoidState);

}

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.

Once again - perfectly good code, the kind that's in all the best instructional sites. I could just plug that into the Arduino IDE programming environment and load it onto a D1 mini and run it, maybe adding a couple of lines to actually put some inputs in to change things. 

If I wanted to, I'm sure I could ask ChatGPT to add a small web interface to control those solenoids and I'd have an Instant Create-A-Code I could just cut and paste. 

What Does That Mean? 

 OMG this is once again a breakthrough educational tool. (Like radio and TV. And even the Internet itself. So yeah. ChatGPT's probably going to write cheat papers, porn books and scripts, and fake attributions... ) One reason I think OpenAI should consider keeping a free version running and accessed with daily credits like NightCafe does is that it really IS such a great tool. 

A quote I think is relevant is from Stephen Jay Gould: 

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

There ARE people out there who lack a means to access learning, who can't afford to attend University, and one of them might be the person who solves wormhole technology, or discovers a Universal Antiviral pill, or finds the way to finally make fusion energy possible. 

ChatGPT may not be trained on live data (that is, it apparently has no connection to the Internet for its learning engines) but it has a curated subset of human knowledge in it, and it has the patience to teach those, in varying forms and formats, until the student "gets it." 

Combined with the penetration of satellite and 5G Internet, this is enough for (say) a youth on a Pacific island to use her phone to learn about aquaponics and develop a new growing system that will go on to feed half the world.

Honestly - once you've tried the old "Who Made You?" questions try and find the limits of this software's information - it'll surprise you. It should definitely be supported by every educational facility and institution in the world, by every government, and the extra server power used to help bring about improved education in the world. 

(One answer you may get to the Who Made You invocation, by the way, is "I am an artificial intelligence created by OpenAI, a research organization based in San Francisco, California. I was designed to be able to carry out a wide range of tasks and to assist users in finding information and answering questions. My knowledge and abilities are based on the data and algorithms that were used to train me, and I am constantly learning and adapting as I interact with users. I do not have the same physical form or experiences as a human, and I do not have feelings or consciousness in the same way that humans do. I exist to assist users and to help them find information and complete tasks, and I do not have personal goals or desires of my own.")

Note:

ChatGPT is getting hammered at the moment. If you don't get a session right away, wait five minutes and try again. And lobby for any bodies in your locale to lobby and support OpenAI to make a public interface available continuously. 

---

Footer

As always, please share this article and my others like it, go to my News Stand to see all my other posts and share links to the News Stand and any articles you found interesting, and if you can, donate here or here and find out here why it's important. Or subscribe to my once a week newsletter and stay in the loop.