This is why it’s essential, now more than ever, to keep these words and notions alive, let the truth be an act of rebellion in itself.

Life is meaningless without diversity, and it is up to each and every one of us to protect it.

Does this apply if I don’t even know what day it is?

Or… maybe we could not do that? Just saying? And instead focus on actually studying true AI and its implications at every level instead of just developing propaganda machines with the consumers’ money?

Ok, so life’s becoming one of those Sharknado movies. Noted.

Wouldn’t go so far as calling it a work of art, but I remember this one time in 9th or 10th grade when our Plastic Arts (technically a general overview of art history and practical exercises for techniques, practically it was just painting whatever, in various shapes and sizes) teacher had us paint religious iconography on slabs of wood. Saints, to be more specific.

I won’t touch upon how utterly pissed my mother was at having to hunt down an ~A4 sized plank within a week (this was before the prevalence of Hyperstores). The thing just came out looking… wrong… It was supposed to be St. George, I believe, and it came out looking like an emaciated and woefully distraught Gandalf the Grey with a spotlight shining in from behind.

I remember this one being extra-bad because, besides basically having had no real training in painting throughout grade school, the subject matter in itself spoke nothing to me. I wasn’t absolutely horrible, as I used to do a lot of sketching and developed a relatively neat hand by that time, but I was thoroughly within the “exorcise your trauma through drawing biomechanical mutilations” phase of my artistic development, let’s call it.

It was also the first time when being creative felt like a horrid chore.

Edit: there is no evidence of said work, because I threw it away the instant I got home. As an agnostic, I get the feeling both God and St. George would have agreed with me…

Hey, riiight! Remember aliens?! Feels like a lifetime ago!

If you’re talking about AGI, potentially any form of art would be at its grasp, maybe even some which may not necessarily look like art to us.

If you’re talking about the generative models of today, they are incapable of producing art, because they are incapable of emotional intent and expression.

Even Warhol was driven by disdain, and the ironically arty bit was how sort of stripped of art his art was as a result of his disdain.

This was my exact thinking the moment I realised I, yet again, needed a GPU upgrade (thanks, Unreal 5…). Which is why I seared my soul and dished for a 4080 Super, with the hopes that I’ll be covered for a decade at least. The 40s at least seem to still be built mainly for pretty pictures.

Genuinely not worth paying attention to this nonsense. Maybe - MAYBE - AMD will pull a Comrade and will shift full focus on creating genuinely good and progressively better GPUs, meant for friggin’ graphics processing and not this “AI” tumor. But that’s a big-ass “maybe.”

Aaah, they’re doing the scarcity thing… Cool. Coolcoolcool.

I don’t know what pisses me off more, that Facebook does this kind of stuff, or that they’re utter snively cowards when called out for their crap moves.

Gotta get that daily lick in!

Yep, NOW it’s a problem, though! Because it’s someone else doing the same thing, someone who isn’t part of the human centipede starting at Trump’s colon.

Capitalism pretty much takes survival out of living. And I don’t think we should go back to “if you want to eat, you’ll have to wrestle and kill that boar” levels, but we need a bit more space to develop our relationship with life. As it is, it’s like one of those helicopter parents who doesn’t let anything external touch you, then you turn into goop once the helicopter stops patrolling.

We don’t treat ourselves like humans anymore, we treat ourselves like the chickens grown at scale in industrial warehouses. And we don’t even treat those chickens like chickens, it’s Product all the way down.

Oh, most definitely, art has been thoroughly detached from “real life” - actually, I’d go as far as to focus in specifically on “adulthood” as the marker which excises it from us. And, yes, it is leaving us not hollow, but dessicated.

Interesting (well, and deeply saddening) to hear that this phenomenon isn’t relegated just to our nation. I’d suspected it may be something more widespread given the sheer depth of despair everyone seemed to plumb during the lockdowns, but I have no first-hand experience with other cultures.

They’re literally killing our souls, in so… so many ways. We have completely lost touch with what makes us human. Well, not completely, we still have the gaping maw where our humanity used to be. And it causes us to be un-human through the pain of the absence, yet most have no idea what’s actually missing. And I agree with you, I think the system is designed to try to make us fill it up with greed and lust and want, but there’s no matter in existence which could ever replace our connection with that from which art flows.

As a devout Agnostic, we have no idea what spirituality means anymore. And I’m not talking about religion, I’m talking about the fact that we’ve completely disconnected ourselves from the simple state of existing in this Universe. We don’t admire the stars and let our minds be flooded with the vastity of diversity within this black expanse (because we can’t even fucking see them anymore!), nature contains too few stimuli to effectively cover our deformed wide-as-an-ocean-deep-as-a-puddle attention spans, we don’t read, we don’t stare at paintings, we don’t study the music, we don’t play - and I don’t mean video games, I mean just mess around with sticks pretending they’re whatever, we just consume a hundred billion points of colourful data per second, every second, for at least 14 hours every day, then shit out depression and ADHD.

THIS is why the possibility of AGI scares me, as a side note! We are barely fit parents to our flesh-and-blood offsprings, we have no business creating entirely new sentient and sapient species!

The dinosaurs had it easy, I swear… This Great Filter thing sucks, and it sucks expertly because it is a suck entirely of our devising.

Thank you! I’m genuinely happy that my “and I must scream” outburst proved useful!

We’re already well on our way (Romania here, hey-ho!), except we’re going about it the exact way a couple of wise guys predicted back in the 1840s, so it’s all falling apart in what would be a hilarious mess had I not been living through it for the past 30 years.

Edit (and a partial vent, because what the hell): we’ve been trying to emulate America ever since the Revolution. People were so (understandably) riled up against that Totalitarian hellscape wearing Socialist clothing, that they acted impulsively when deciding that Capitalist Democracy was the way. Add to that a bunch of politically active people who saw their easy cash grab, and a bit of American “encouragement,” and it was inevitable.

Problem is, the Romanian people are very specifically themselves and, from what I’ve noticed, it’s non-negotiable. We have a tendency of, while living and playing “the game,” noticing that we’re playing a game and so we sort of… meta-game with who we are - it’s like we understand that society is a social act which we put on daily, that it’s not us, on a very essential level. It’s how we’re taught to interact with the world even before we reach school age.

So while we’ve been trying to emulate other cultures, our own ingrained way of being and perceiving practically nullifies every bit of the external “flesh” which we desperately attempt to slap onto our bones. The wise guys I mentioned were known as Pașoptiști (Forty-Eighters would be the direct translation), a group of Romanian thinkers who had a central role in the political shiftings of the times (around 1848, whence the moniker).

They noticed that we’re very plastic and curious as a culture, so we tend to absorb and incorporate foreign elements very easily - it’s basically how the Romanian people have formed, we’ve been colonised over and over and over by pretty much everyone around, so we’ve developed to be flexible and marginally more open than most. However, they also noticed that we were drifting away from our tendency to comprehend the essence of what we were absorbing, favouring surface-level, purely aesthetic grafts, which they said would lead to a superficial societal culture and an inevitable failure - the Theory of Baseless Forms they called it (Teoria Formelor Fără Fond). I call it the Plastic Society, because it looks and feels like those cheap plastic knock-offs which we occasionally got as presents because they were cheaper and parents had the excuse of “well, how the hell was I supposed to know which is the REAL Spider-Man action figure?!”

And since Romanians are also very inertia-bound when left to our own devices, sadly, we’ve been diligently working at fulfilling that very prophecy. And I’m not complaining about our immense cultural permeability, I love who I’ve become because of it, but I am deeply saddened that people around here are no longer in contact with their essence and have fallen into believing this game is the only real thing around…

Not downvoted, I just remove the default upvote which comes with posts/comments, it irks me.

To add to that, most of us didn’t have a say in things. Boomers were kinda’ the last generation who still had some controls at their disposal, but the system got completely out of our control from Gen X onward. We’re just along for the ride as it’s crumbling.

Edit: I’ve realised this may sound as though I’m pointing the blame at Boomers - I’m really not, I firmly believe the game was rigged from the start, it’s not down to the average citizen. I was just trying to mark a shifting point.

Fuck you, Netflix. Seriously, fuck you. And the other streaming services, too. Fucking cable companies were less predatory than this…

It’s the looming boiling point. More and more people understand things are going to come to a head Sooner Than Predicted™.

What we’re seeing is grief, but multiplied by billions

Not many individuals manage to form a stain of shame on their related species. I guess he is, indeed, remarkable in that way.