I guess it’s okay that most of our plant and animal species are headed toward extinction, because there are all sorts of new ones coming on board, and they’re plumb adorable. They live only on the internet, and they reproduce by Sharing.
About once a week, when I get cranky, I feel compelled to point out that the adorable picture or video someone posted is created by artificial intelligence. I could do it ten times a day but I hold back, mostly. It’s not a popular move.
Do you want to educate people even though nobody asked you to, Murr, or are you just an asshole who doesn’t want anyone to have any fun?
Hey, now. Two things can be true at the same time.
Well, why should I care if people enjoy fake plants and animals that are being passed off as real? Maybe it’s art! Although none of this was created; this was…ordered up. But it’s harmless, isn’t it?
Beats me. But we’ll ignore for now the observation that AI is a voracious operation that is rapidly consuming land and energy at a wildly unsustainable rate, and instead of it being used to solve the problems of the world, it is feeding us adorable baby fantasy birds that deaden us to wonder. Hey. Everything on this marble is a freakin’ miracle. We don’t need monkey-face orchids with nostrils and eye makeup when we have real monkey-face orchids that you’d think were really cool if there weren’t a fake one that looks like it is about to throw poo on you. There are flowers that look and smell so much like female wasps that male wasps pollinate the fuck out of them, or the other way around. There are caterpillars that avoid being eaten by looking like bird shit. Perfectly ordinary songbirds in your backyard punch out of a half-inch egg looking like a sentient booger and fly away from the nest two weeks later. We do not need the Magical White Baby Peacock when we have reality, if we can still recognize it.
That damn peacock is my Education Bird. An education bird is one that has been brought in for rehabilitation but was not able to be released back to the wild, so it is making the rounds of the schools and parks and whatnot helping teach people about its kind. Look at the peacock prancing on my hand! It has weird little pink toes and no wings. That sucker won’t fly. The precocious dickens is already fanning out its fuzzy tail feathers like an adult male on the strut and has a matching tiara. Here’s another: a bright speckled bird with breast feathers that bounce and flutter like sequins on a prom dress. Who is buying this shit?
Everybody! Thousands of commenters are swooning over it; it’s presented with the caption “Who knew baby peacocks were so cute?” and “Nature is so amazing!” and “Look at what God hath done.”
Here’s what God hath done. He hath whompetted up a primate with more brains than sense and that critter has evolved over a million years to create Artificial Intelligence, which could be used to solve the huge problems of the world—if it’s as smart as they say it is, it will eliminate us entirely, and I’m told that’s not out of the realm of possibility—but instead it is used to create fantasy objects to entertain us and anesthetize our souls, and probably sell us something, and in any case utterly blind us to the true wonders of Nature, which we might otherwise protect if we learned to love them.
Check out this whale video! There’s a few of these. Evidently whales get so encrusted with barnacles that they come up to ships hoping some fine sailor will scrub its back with a power washer and brush, and I’m a sucker for stories like that—many animals have been known to approach humans for help, plus who wouldn’t want a good scrubbing from a sailor? But do whales really suffer from barnacles? Just how sedentary ARE they? Oh—look. The whale has rolled slightly for a better camera angle, and—can it be? Yes! The whale is languidly lowering its eyelids to half-mast in a porny expression of pleasure and satisfaction. Right after the video ends it lights up a cigarette.
Bite me.
Now we can’t trust what we hear or see, even in civic life, and so we slide into a stupor of confusion, and we quit paying attention, and we reward ourselves with sugar hits like the Impossibirds. If we’re so easily taken in by a fantasy animal that reminds us, weirdly, of a human baby, what else are we missing? We’re being soothed. We’re being trained to ignore important things. We’re being trained to give up. And to trust that those who have acquired power have our best interests at heart. They don’t.
Meanwhile, the actual monkey-face orchid is nearing extinction from habitat destruction and collectors are scooping up the now-famous remainders. Thank goodness there’s a digitally manufactured version to replace it.
Artificial intelligence is designed to be smarter than us. It does that a few ways. One is by making us dumber.
I hate AI. Also not very fond of 3D printing. I once made a modest amount of money selling casts of my three dimensional reconstructions of dinosaur, pterosaur and early bird skeletons. Now anybody with a sculpting program and a 3D printer can pop out a skeleton (which is nowhere as detailed and accurate as mine) for a fraction of what mine sold for. Museums buy them because hey, the public is stupid and they don’t look that closely.
I’ve been seeing AI generated stories in my Facebook feed lately and am trying to figure out who is putting them out there and what the purpose is.
They’re all feel good stories about a retired person or a kid who has found a niche and is doing good deeds for free, which inspires their neighbors to do good deeds for free. But then some government flunky comes along and tells them they can’t do whatever they’re doing for free and they’re going to be fined.
I forget if there’s a third act, but I’ve gotten three variations on this story.
Oh, I’ve seen things like that too, and it didn’t occur to me that they were AI, although I did think they were at best apocryphal. I’m sure you’re right. The versions I see do not have the anti-government bias because hey. They know me.
Well, I have some confidence this is really Murr, but with AI who knows? If I’m asked for my bank login or cc code in the next day or two, I’ll know for sure.
I strive to be irreplaceable by AI! But I guess you could feed my stuff into the thing and ask it to do some topic in Murr style. Huh.
I did, and to your relief and mine, they have never heard of you. They tried Alanis Morissette to see if that’s what I meant.
One more reason to hate and avoid AI.
I feel the same way about religion. The stories it tells can never be as amazing as real life.
Hi Susan: Agreed. I attended a Bible college for two years. It was little and evangelical, but hired professors who actually were critical in their thinking and interpretation of the Bible. I learned that parts of the Bible had been crafted for specific audiences and that maybe only two of the Gospels were written by Jesus’ disciples and all decades after his lifetime. It’s interesting that the further removed the writing was from the time of his life the more miracles and bizarre occurrences are written. The most florid of the Gospel writers is Luke, who writes himself into Acts of the Apostles as a friend of Paul, who was very interested in minimizing the teachings of Peter, who wanted Christianity to just be a sect of Judaism and for the Jews only.
There were very arbitrary choices made about the canon and one of those gave us the book of Revelation because the council wanted the New Testament to have some apocalyptic, prophetic literature to mirror the Old Testament. And now we’ve got a bunch of Conservative Christians influencing foreign policy based on that arbitrary choice.
I’m not sure that animals need to have barnacles removed from them. We think that whales rub against things to clean their skins and there are some whales that seem more likely to have barnacles in them. Certainly right whales have great big rugose patches that are good attachment sites for barnacles. But other whales don’t have any. Maybe it’s a commensal relationship?
There are videos showing people finding sea turtles that are covered in barnacles which they then remove by scraping and digging them out with knives. I look at that and cringe because it has to do damage to the keratin scutes covering the bone of the shell.
There are species of barnacles found exclusively on whales and sea turtles, indicating a very long relationship. Sort of like the relationship between humans and pubic lice (which interestingly enough are identical to the pubic lice of gorillas, suggesting that our ancestors were at the very least sleeping in gorilla nests and possibly were having sex with gorillas or our ancestors were having sex with their ancestors).
Sea turtles, like all turtles shed the outer layer of their scutes on a regular basis, along with the barnacles attached to those scutes. If a sea turtle is burdened with barnacles it suggests that the turtle isn’t shedding like it should. Scraping the barnacles off may not be helpful at all.
John Oliver had a very interesting Last Week Tonight episode this weekend on AI. Apparently most of Pintrest is now AI generated. All sorts of things in our newsfeeds, based on algorithms. A lot of “true stories” that are very long, and very pedestrian. Always narrated by the same almost monotone voice. Very amusing and informative episode. I highly recommend it if you are interested in this subject.
Also, Murr– I know you are a “fangirl” of Pete Egoscue. I don’t know if you know this, but he wrote a previous book before Pain Free. It’s called The Egoscue Method of Health Through Motion. I found it in of all places, one of those “little libraries” that people have in their yards. Good find! I’m enjoying it.