if anything i find "free will" as philosophical principle far more dehumanising than determinism; if you contest that i, being me exactly, in my exact circumstances, could have made a different choice—it's like saying there's an ineffable extracausal random number generator rattling about up there, like i'm no more defined or agentic than a goblin with a 1d6 behaviour table. like i obviously understand the necessity of the conceit as a heuristic tool in a world where understanding is necessarily limited and many choices are for all intents and purposes unpredictable, but all the philosophical arguments for it being actually real fall back into the big soul shaped hole
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something incredibly funny about dnd trying to get in on the cute animal of the week trend with a popular raccoon and, because this is how dnd works with regards to animals, doing so by releasing a statblock so you can fight and kill it
putting "don't you dare" in the XP count but still explaining how one would go about fighting jimothy the raccoon, a random animal with a spinal condition, is killing me
Rachel relented. She pointed at where the two trees rested against one another by the cliff face. “When the weather was warm, there was a bee’s nest there. The buzzing doesn’t bother me as much as you’d think.”
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if you've followed me for a while, you've probably seen me mention Underside, my dark cape TTRPG inspired by deconstructive superhero stories like Worm, Astro City, Watchmen, and the first season of Gen V.
it's a project i've spent a lot of time on, trying to build a system that tells the kind of superhero stories i like; the shit that treats them as a subculture with a body count, that digs into the dissociative tension of the secret identity, that asks what it means to feel so completely ejected from regular society that you can only go out in a mask and costume.
for a while now, a playtest edition of Underside has been available on my patreon; now, as it's slowly become more and more complete over the course of a year, i'm putting the most recent one up on itch.io
i want to be clear: while this playtest edition is enough to play a full campaign and contains all the mechanics that are going to be in the finished book, it's still a playtest. there's no fancy layout and an entire section (guidance for the Administrator, the game's GM-equivalent role) hasn't been written yet. but for a while, every time i talk about Underside i get the question: "where can i get my hands on it?". so here's an answer to that question; right now, while it's still in beta--if you want to support the project and help me get it over the finish line, or you just can't wait until it's out For Real, you can get it here.
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"he would not fucking say that" but about injuries. he would not fucking recover that quickly. those scars would not fucking heal like that. he would not be fucking able bodied after that. he would not be fully lucid after that.
villain character who has a last minute change of heart and sacrifices their life to defeat an even bigger bad but it entirely does not land as a redemption with the heroes. the heroes are just like "oh hell yeah two birds with one stone. thank fucking god i really didnt wanna have to deal with that guy anymore. good riddance."
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NGL if I was a parahuman I would NOT self-actualize and recover from my trauma. I'm going full steam ahead losing myself to a false mask to hide from my own inadequacies and dying within 3 months of getting my power.
In a strange position where I think there are massive, massive social harms to the proliferation of AI (misinfo, deepfakes, predatory 'companions', surveillance, labour rights) but also feel the mainstream arguments against it range from unconvincing (water) to actively harmful (copyright; "soul").
Like, I often hear "plagiarism machine that's killing the planet" but I'm very convinced that the copyright panic is actually harming artists far more than helping them. Strengthening Disney and Getty's IP rights in the name of "protecting artists" is a very bad thing, I think!
People often compare "AI bros" to "NFT bros", rightly so (often the same obnoxious people). Yet in the same breath, many will also essentially say right-click-saving an image is theft. I can't stand the spread of slop either, but I think that argument could set a dangerous precedent in other ways.
Or, you frequently hear "well, analytical AI is good, but generative AI is bad", but there isn't really a hard difference between the two. They often share identical underlying architecture. Like, transformers power both BERT and GPT. Vision Transformers handle tumour detection and image generation.
Moreover, tools classified as "analytical" are frequently used for facial recognition that automates surveillance & discrimination, and tools considered "generative" like diffusion models are also used in medical imaging for anomaly detection and classification. There isn't a hard "one good, one bad".
tl;dr on this one: the loudest AI criticisms are the ones that serve existing power structures, and yet its most serious harms are the ones that don't.
And it's a frustrating thing to see, because it's like, who benefits from the messy conversation around this stuff? The copyright panic benefits Disney/Getty/Adobe/etc. The analytical vs generative framing benefits companies selling surveillance tools. Presenting environmental stats taken wildly out of context benefits people who want to dismiss AI criticism entirely by making critics look innumerate. Meanwhile, the actual harms—like predatory companion apps targeting lonely teenagers, facial recognition enabling police harassment of Black neighbourhoods, algorithmic benefit denial systems destroying families, labour displacement without social insurance—don't have wealthy institutional advocates the way "protect our IP" does.
And then, I don't know, the criticism also becomes weird and individualistic. Like I have a dear friend who is a disabled artist who writes her own code for image gen and gets torn apart for it on the regular with straight up ableist disability porn ("X person drew with their feet, why can't you?").
Like, to be clear I think these companies are by and large straight up evil. Sam Altman releasing 4o is like. Practically criminal. Musk actively removing safety guardrails as a selling point, deploying it on a platform that's already a misinformation vector to generate racism and child exploitation.
But I just worry the current way these things are spoken about ends up actually obfuscating those harms. I might roll my eyes at some rando using an LLM to write their emails, but like I don't buy that they're doing something any more evil than taking a flight or eating meat or leaving the lights on.
And this kind of individualized critique is just the "ecological footprint" thing again, literally invented by BP's ad agency in the early 2000s to shift responsibility from fossil fuel corporations to individual consumers. The impact matters, but I wish it wasn't being discussed on Shell's terms.
AND I think that framing prevents good regulation. If your position is 'this shouldn't exist at all and I won't tolerate anything less than the technology not existing,' it's harder to advocate for 'here are the specific features and practices that should be required/prohibited.'
I strongly look forward to there being less of this shit everywhere. Every product suddenly has an AI feature nobody wants. LinkedIn AI-generated posts. Google AI overview and its wrong answers. Facebook flooded with Jesus made of shrimp. That viral UberEats fake Reddit post from the other day!!!
There's so much marketing hype; all the hype and some of the hate are often doing the same work of avoiding talking about its biggest dangers. I'm sick of AI bullshit everywhere, afraid of its worst applications, and also disillusioned with the way it's being talked about in many of my circles.
Anyway, one of these days I'm going to do an effortpost about Ethnically Ambiguous Homer Simpson. A truly fascinating look into training data and messy slapdash attempts at mitigating AI bias.
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