AI Panickans will never lear

Here's an interesting article: https://aicentral.substack.com/p/verified-human

And here's another: https://sigmagame.substack.com/p/why-deltas-hate-ai

And here's one of my AI generated character portraits for Dominic Clevenger, using a Hero Forge model that I made as a reference. I'll make another post sometime later showing all of the variants. Clearly I'm not afraid of using AI. I have used it to generate images of ... OK quality for my campaign setting. I've used it to help generate first (poor) drafts of fiction text. I haven't even gotten around to really seeing if they're sufficiently decent to be used as a basis for editing it into something workable, or if I should just ignore what it generated and write it the old-fashioned way. I'm not one of those AI panickans who is terrified that AI will make me obsolete. My job is unlikely to be successfully rendered obsolete by AI, and while AI can be a shortcut to some of my hobby endeavors, it's not likely to be a suitable replacement for a person there either, except in limited manner, like I can get mediocre images to use on my blog posts and in my pdfs. I could possibly get a passable book cover from AI. With a lot of effort. The propaganda that AI is going to replace people's jobs really only applies if your job is a make-work busy work job that... honestly, probably doesn't need to be done at all. There's a lot of those. SWFs hardest hit. 

To get any good results out of AI, you still need a lot of human shepherding. Those who are capable in their fields will inevitably find that AI can be a useful shortcut and time-saver, but that it won't literally replace their need to manually intervene in the results. Those who are fearful of all of the propaganda about AI coming for their jobs will—mostly—discover that propaganda is just propaganda, I'd guess. They're either adapt what or how they work a bit, or the whole thing will fizzle anyway. 

Because I also read Ed Zitron. Here's one example: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-subprime-ai-crisis-is-here/ The AI bubble is just like every other bubble; a lot of hype, a lot of shady claims by shady people, leading to a lot of transfer of money to said shady people, leading to an inevitable failure to be able to deliver on the shady promises. AI isn't completely a scam, of course. It can do a lot of pretty cool things. But I'm pretty skeptical about a lot of the narratives that we're being fed about it at the same time. 

Anyway, the main point of all of this is that I find the AI panickans at places like reddit and ENWorld extremely tiresome. Of course, people at those places are tiresome about almost everything that they say, do, believe, claim, and worry about. But their visceral reactions anytime the trigger word AI is posted in any context is becoming a particular pet peeve of mine. AI Slop, which usually accompanies AI, isn't any worse than human-created slop, of which there's way too much. I'd honestly rather read an AI slop replica of some old-fashioned pulp stories than human-created woke garbage. Hollywood in particular has been banging the "AI is scary" drum for a few years. But Hollywood produces tons of slop that people don't like, and their livelihood is directly threatened by AI democratizing the ability of normal people to get past their gatekeepers and produce content that competes directly with them. Average writers  of all kinds of slop, which sells as ebooks on Amazon are also worried... but that's because fundamentally their business model is to try and monetize slop, and AI slop is faster, more prolific, and unlikely to really be much worse than what they're producing, causing them to inevitably get lost in the crowd. 

I recently read the following passage, which I think sums up my perspective on AI. It's about AI being used to write fiction, but it really applies to almost any usage of AI:

Writing fiction isn't like riding a bicycle. You don't just figure it out once and coast forever. It's more like learning to play piano, where your first attempts produce noise instead of music, and only through deliberate practice do you develop the skills to create something worth hearing. This reality becomes even more important when you're working with AI. You can't edit what you don't understand. You can't guide AI toward quality output if you don't know what quality looks like. You can't maintain consistency across a novel if you don't grasp the fundamental elements that need to remain consistent. The writers producing AI slop aren't failing because they chose the wrong tool—they're failing because they never learned their craft. The writers succeeding with AI assistance aren't lucky—they're skilled enough to make informed creative decisions regardless of their tools.

Ripping off the mask

Not shocking. But this Breitbart article is still interesting. I'm copying and pasting most of the text.

Given their voluminous schedule of speaking engagements and media appearances, politicians often suffer slips of the tongue, though most are of little consequence.

But while ordinary gaffes are daily occurrences, witnessing a lawmaker commit an infamous Kinsley Gaffe is extraordinarily rare. The term, coined by political journalist Michael Kinsley, refers to when a politician accidentally tells the truth, specifically one they are not supposed to say publicly. Unlike a simple slip of the tongue, it’s an inadvertent and major reveal of a politician’s genuine thoughts, or an admission of their party’s undisclosed positions or motivations.

Such was the case in 2024 when Democrat Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut appeared on MSNBC and committed a classic Kinsley Gaffe while responding to a question about the status of his party’s longstanding push for illegal alien amnesty. “Well, I mean, Chris, that’s been a failed play for 20 years. So you are right that that has been the Democratic strategy for 30 years, maybe, and it has failed to deliver for the people we care about most, the undocumented Americans that are in this country.”

Inasmuch as the senator attempted to euphemize “illegal aliens” as “undocumented Americans,” the message was loud and clear; those are the people his party cares most about.

The clip resurfaced recently in the context of the ongoing debate over Department of Homeland Security funding, and while it justifiably sparked conservative outrage, Sen. Murphy’s disclosure shouldn’t be surprising given the Democrat’s decades-long advocacy on behalf of illegal aliens.

Their opposition to enforcement and support of illegal aliens is well documented and extensive. While hundreds of immigration-related bills have come and gone, a few highlight the Left’s consistent advocacy of illegal aliens over time. In 2005, the Sensenbrenner bill sought to criminalize unlawful presence as a felony. It was opposed by 82 percent of House Democrats, who argued it would “criminalize” millions and militarize the border without offering a legal path forward. In 2013-2014, Democrats opposed the Gang of 8 bill. Even though it included a path to citizenship, the party rejected House Republican efforts to add enforcement elements to it. And in 2023, Democrats opposed the Secure the Border Act, criticizing it for wasting billions on a border wall, ending certain parole programs, and limiting asylum grounds, calling it an “ineffective” strategy that ignored broader reform (amnesty).

At the state and local levels in mostly blue areas, Democrats have demonstrated their affinity for illegal aliens even more robustly over many years. Sanctuary policies now exist in 1,003 jurisdictions; 19 states and the District of Columbia issue driver’s licenses to illegal aliens; and 20 states grant them in-state tuition subsidies. The net result is that 18.6 million illegal aliens now reside in the U.S., costing taxpayers $151 billion, clear evidence of the accuracy in Senator Murphy’s admission that his party elevates the interests of illegal aliens over Americans.

Senator Murphy unwittingly revealed who the Democrats prioritize, but he stopped short of revealing why. No matter; others have. In 2009, Eliseo Medina, Secretary-Treasurer of the far-left Service Employees International Union (and an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America) unabashedly stated, “We can create a governing coalition for the long term … if we can get immigrants on a path to citizenship, we can create a governing coalition for the long term that will allow us to win on all the issues that we care about.”

Medina was well connected to the Obama White House as a surrogate voice pushing “immigration reform” (amnesty) yet not a single Democrat at the time objected to his audacious statement, likely because most agreed with his comments suggesting that illegal immigration serves their electoral needs.

That is, of course, why Democrats have rallied in opposition to today’s SAVE Act (H.R.22) which imposes stronger identification requirements that would prevent illegal aliens from voting.

Based on the Left’s words and actions over many years, it’s clear that mass migration is their tactic to incubate future voters and solidify party dominance for all perpetuity. This explains why Senator Murphy wants to “deliver for the people we care about most, the undocumented Americans that are in this country.”

To be fair though, others also corrupt immigration for their narrow self-interests. Industry favors mass immigration to replace American workers and suppress wages; Third World nations rely on porous borders as a safety valve to export citizens they cannot support or do not want; churches, charities, and NGOs depend on flows of migrants to fuel their virtue-signaling and fundraising initiatives; socialists, communists, and anarchists promote mass migration as means to achieve a disorderly, non-consensual make-over of the U.S.

In the end, Senator Murphy shouldn’t fret too much about having committed that Kinsley Gaffe. Sure, he spilled the beans by revealing that Democrats favor the interests of illegal aliens over Americans. And sure, he violated his party’s Sacred Veil of Secrecy that cloaks their true immigration motives, but it really was no big deal because here’s the thing:

Americans have known it all along.