Mad Dogs and Englishmen

“Shane, how does it feel to be back on Montreal ice?”

Quatre Raberba Winner + Gundam Sandrock chibis

To us, International Cat Day is every day. ₍^. .^₎⟆

Send your scholarly cats our way! Bonus points for posing with books.

Carb starts your engine, protein keeps it going.

Cookie

Fruit (canned or fresh)

Chips

Piece of bread

Popcorn

Crackers

Easy protein add on:

Nuts

Spoonful of nut butter

Cheese

Roasted chickpea snacks

Glass of milk (dairy or non dairy)

The one that ends, "You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur."?

LEVEL 0: People exist

LEVEL 1: "Man" and "Woman" roles are constructed; posed as a strict binary with discrete and disparate traits and roles.

LEVEL 2: Man wields power; Woman relies on Man's approval. One role is perceived and valued as better, stronger, smarter. Requiring Man's approval, Woman cultivates inner "man" in order to see herself from Man's perspective as a tool to better anticipate Man's desires.

LEVEL 3: Man perceives Woman's "inner man"; Man perceives anticipatory and appealing behavior as deceptive and manipulative. The potential ability of Woman to manipulate and deceive Man places Women in a position of power above Man, which Man perceives as a threat. In response, Man cultivates "inner woman": a tool which he uses to perceive the "inner man" who Woman uses to predict and appeal to Man.

LEVEL 4: Man "sees" the caricature of "Man" further distorted by the caricature of his conceptualized "Woman" and feels threatened and inferior, but at the same time trapped by the binary which generates this power struggle. Inside of him is a deceptive and threatening "Woman" who he rejects; inside of HER is the Ultimate Man, who this image of Woman supposedly desires the approval of.

If Woman can predict Man, then Woman is an opponent who leverages power through engagement with Man. The only way for "Man" to escape the Threat that Woman poses is to cease engagement. He retains "victory" (escape from woman) by maintaining distance from Woman, and because explicitly admitting the possibility that Woman could ever hold power over Man is Losing, has no option but to tell himself that this is not Fear of Losing Control, but a natural consequence of Posessing Control.

Man rejects any but the most surface-level engagement with Woman, but because "Hiding From Woman" means "Woman Is Threat", and BELIEVING "Woman Is Threat" is unacceptable, Man attempts to cut Woman from the narrative.

LEVEL 5: Man, possessing the "inner woman"'s "inner man" but determined to escape the influence of "woman", mentally erases "Woman" but retains the caricature's caricature of "inner man", who is desirable to BE.

Man possesses exaggerated image of Man, who now exists solely as the Ultimate Desireable Form. In order to achieve this form, Man must constantly see through his eyes, but in order to remain safe in his position of power over Woman, he must erase any trace of evidence that he is DOING this for Woman.

Man must Be the Ultimate Man, because [redacted], who requires Man's Approval.

Mixed results from the Americans because this shit is legal in only 30 states and almost impossible to get past a zoning committee so while they exist, they're extremely localized. Lots of yelling at Ohio.

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Saskatchewan: "What's insane to me is that you have these with the population density you have. What am I going to hit in Turtleford?"

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Bahia and Sao Paulo: "I'm stunned we don't have these tbh."

Prague: "We have these in my city, but only for boats."

Manaus: "My uncle has one of these! He also has a window on the other side so you can drive your boat up too :)"

(much Brazilian and Czech high-fiving)

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Brisbane: "There's an astonishing level of trust being displayed that people aren't just going to open a beer immediately"

Tallahassee: "Oh no, there is 100% cop camped like half a mile down the road to arrest people who didn't stow the booze correctly."

Brisbane: "Oh it's an invasive policing operation! Yeah, that's the USA."

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Newcastle: "No, this looks correct for the country that has bears breaking into your house". (The Australians and Africans have a bit where every time someone mentions their wildlife, they mass @me (who had a bear in my house) and the guy from Singapore whose mom adopted a wild water monitor and says it's her favorite son now)

The aforementioned Singaporean: "How am I exposed to an onslaught of your media and culture at all times and you STILL find new ways to horrify me?"

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Vatican City: "You can ride your bike through the brewery to get beer but the abbot in charge doesn't like it"

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Jakarta: "We don't have this because we're Muslim but we do have drive-thru Marijuana"

Kyoto: "We don't have these because we have public transportation. You can buy liquor from vending machines at the stations though."

Munich: "We don't have these because we are disciplined enough to pack our beer with us if we are going somewhere that drinking is acceptable, or there will be beer at that location when we arrive."

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India: "Why have drive-thru Liquor, when you can have liquor delivered to your vehicle? GET ON OUR LEVEL" (no less than nine different images from across the country of people in trucks that have been specifically modified to operate the business of driving up to other vehicles in traffic and selling them liquor)

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Pudasjävi: "...I should open one of these."

Everyone: "NO!!!"

However, I do think this case is great example of what happens when smart people decide they can use these systems “responsibly.”

Let’s put aside the plagiarism and the energy use for a second (not that these don’t matter, but they’re not relevant to my point at the moment) and pretend these systems were made with entirely properly obtained info and ran on only solar, but otherwise were entirely the same. If you’re a person, you might think “okay, I’m going to only use this to come up with ideas for my next paper: I’m going to do all the research myself and the writing, I’m just gonna brainstorm topics.”

The thing is, even if you’re trying to limit use to just “brainstorming” the chatbot isn’t going to limit itself to just brainstorming. You might ask it “what should I write about involving Greek history” and it may suggest “the plague of Athens” but it’s also going to suggest some “basic info” on the plague of Athens that you might end up picking up and deciding your topic is. It’s going to provide you with “research.” And even if you decide to check that research yourself, that’s still setting you down a specific path you might not have picked organically.

And speaking of double checking its “research”, fact checking is a time heavy process. Not only now do you have to read the original text the bot provided, but you also have to compare it line by line with the summary the bot provided. That’s more time than it would have taken to just read the article by itself. And with any time heavy task, people are going to get lazy. And in original research being lazy might mean skimming a paper or an abstract, chatbots allow you to be lazy without looking at the article at all.

And soon enough, despite telling yourself you were only going to use it for brainstorming, you have offloaded topic generation, research and eventually even drafting because that’s what these bots are intended to do. They are not meant to serve as research tools or help brainstorm or serve as a bouncing off board: they are built to encourage maximum engagement. And that means if you go at them with the best of ethical intentions, they are built to tempt you to use them as much as possible, regardless of whatever line you drew in the sand for yourself.

Obvs, Hank’s situation is not the same as the scenario I laid out but I think the snippet above gets back to my main point which is these tools are built to encourage interaction and that’s a hard thing to avoid, regardless of intentions.

Some other notes:

1. As stated, I don’t bring this up to add to a pile on, just to use this as an example of something I’ve seen happen with folks trying to engage in this tech with an ethical framework. This is because-

2. Frankly, I think shame is a shit motivator. I bring all this up to try to draw attention to something I find under discussed which is what these LLMS are meant to do, and what they are advertised for which are often very separate lists. (I didn’t even get into how they’re meant to train off user data but that’s another can of worms). If you want to discourage AI use, it’s a far better strategy to listen to why the person is engaging with AI and then address that reason.

3. I don’t want to come off as someone trying to scare folks that they’ll get addicted just by touching the stuff: my point is merely that is it critical to know what something is made for before engaging with it. This actually goes for a lot of tech besides AI like Google or social media (which are also designed to 1. Capture your attention and 2. Show you advertisements). AI isn’t a special kind of evil in this way, merely a continuation of a tech trend where a product is sold to a consumer with the goal of the time of the consumer becoming the source of revenue.

oh.