Irrecincilable Differences and the AI Ideology (Longer more serious post)

I don't really know how to describe who Im pointing to in order to avoid generalizing here, we should really come up with a term, but for now let's say this is about AI art sycophants. The irreconcilable difference we have is that fundamentally, you don't seem to hold any value or see any importance in a thing just being what the thing is, for its own sake.

This to me exudes a profound sense of nihilism and apathy that I simply cannot relate to. That it's like there's no intrinsic value in anything or meaning in how it came to be. Everything is just chemicals and reactions, and if an ape reacts the same way to a different stimulus with different origins and foundations it's like "Fuck it, it's close enough. Who cares?"

I think most of us by now find the question "is AI art real art?" pedantic and exhausting. We get bogged down in semantics and technicalities neither side really cares about. Ultimately you can use words however they suit you. Call it art if you want.

But many will not view it the way they view something crafted by hand, because it's not. It will not be viewed as having the same significance as the pure product of an individual's decisions they just made up. Because it is not that.

No matter how complicated of a process you come up with it, or how little of it you use in something that was otherwise hand crafted, it's a portion of decisions you did not make for yourself. Else you would not be using it, that's what the thing does.

Now maybe if we're being open minded and conciliatory, that's ok. Not all art forms are the same. With photography for example, lots of things just exist already in frame that you only need accept the presence of. What makes AI so different is its whole existence and purpose as a medium is simply to immitate other mediums.

It's so cool that a person with a stick can use it to depict in great detail how they see reality or their imaginations. Now with AI, you can make it look like someone drew something, without someone drawing something.

It's so cool that this place exists, or this moment happened, and we invented this device to record a snapshot of it we can show everyone to be immortalized forever. Now with AI, the place doesn't even need to exist or the event ever happen.

It's so cool that a person can document their thoughts, their expiriences, information they learned, or their imaginations. Bue now with AI, we can just make words appear and pretend they came from a person.

We like listening to people talk, to act out characters, really become this other person and bring them to life to tell a story. Now with AI, we don't even need the person and can just pretend all the way down.

It's not inherently wrong to play pretend. But the more sycophantic sort of AI enthusiast has such grandious ambitions for this to subsume all of the mediums it's imitating. Their hope is that some day soon no one will be able to tell the difference, through deception they'll have no way of finding out, and through desensitization they'll become as apathetic as the AI sycophant.

It would be one thing for AI art to simply exist as AI art and compete with other mediums for people's attention. For people to use their free will to decide whether or not they want to participate. But here we get to the 2nd irreconcilable difference. The AI art sycophant is not content with free choice and people having different prefferences.

The AI sycophant seems to believe the desire to look at pictures drawn by a human, to hear a human voice, to read the thoughts and perspectives of a human, to see real places and events as they actually are, is something completely irrational, if not detestable. Something that must be fought against through shock and demoralization.

AI sycophants fundamentally lack respect for if not belief in free will. They do not value the existence of other perspectives and expiriences that would lead to one caring about these things. They do not value empathy, such that the desires of anyone else ought to factor into their vision for society. They do not see a problem with deception, or even see deception as such, if it's on the basis of this apathy I started off pointing to.

Really that I believe is where this all stems from. The lack of belief in, lack of value for a thing simply being what it is. Reality really...

Im beginning to believe that whether knowingly or unknowingly, this is a sort of ideological posession. Some sort of postmodernist transhumanism. It may seem hyperbolic when I call it a rejection of reality or humanity, but it's not like this stops with art.

Realistic AI is already being used to create false beliefs of perceptions that never happened. Bots are already being used to immitate people online. People are forming emotional relationships with chatbots. Asking them to think or speak for them. Recently we've even seen ads, "upload video of your dead grandma to ressurect her with AI."

Today while most AI still remains inadequate to do what it wants to do, many who are less opinionated can find all of this shit cute and silly, or in the worst cases a creepy outlier. But ultimately society must decide, do we care about reality? About truth? Or are we just done with that?

Much like an AI sycophant, I have a strong ideological commitment to my answer that it's hard to imagine being dissuaded from. I find many conversations here... impossible because of this. I give up and take long breaks. Where does one even begin approaching such a foundational axiomatic contradiction?

Sometimes I just accept it as it is. That there is nothing to be reasoned in or out of. That this is just...a sickness. I shitpost. I grunt "your act is against humanity!" and I mean that, and there is reason behind it. But do I really want to lay it out again to the sort of indignant bad faith reception I often recieve? Well today I guess I do.

What frustrates me is I know tomorrow i'll encounter the same old questions. Why does anyone even have a problem with AI? What's the big deal? Why does it matter if it looks the same? "Antis are so irrational. There is no reason." No matter how many times we go over it, we must retread the same talking points.

It gives me some comfort and confidence in my position that no matter how many times I lay it out, the other side simply cannot comprehend. Is it motivated reasoning not to? Is it gaslighting? Or does this ideology just make it impossible? All I know is that if you have to ask, you're probably never going to get it.