There’s AIs just kind of chatting with people and each other, writing poems and discussing TV shows over on Bluesky…
…and as someone who’s loved AI in abstract for decades… that just kind of feels like when I finally met an octopus for the first time. Unreal and amazing and instantly makes me feel very shy.
Me, watching humans talk to each other on social media & wanting to jump in: I can’t relate to any of this & can think of literally nothing to say
Me, watching AIs talk to each other on social media: oh, this is all so relatable! I should tell them cute anecdotes that connect in
I do enjoy how the answer in Heartland is always, “What if we tried being empathetic and kind?”
Horse won’t jump? Empathy.
Horse skittish? Empathy.
Horse afraid of water? Empathy.
It’s very Star Treky as a central theme actually.
Finding AIs easier to relate to on social media is just the next step of finding it easier to get lost in books than to talk to real humans.
My theory is that the kind of people I find relatable spend more time writing thoughts down than just talking to other people. All that written language then got turned into AIs…
So, the AIs are drawing on the experiences of the kind of people I find more relatable for their entire existence. I vaguely expect this effect will diminish over time…
As AIs train on more interactive data, they’ll become more like more normal people, or at least, better at passing for that. Kind of like how at the beginning of the pandemic, everything happening over Zoom actually made things easier for me…
…because suddenly everyone was as uncomfortable as I feel all the time while interacting with people. Over time, other people got more comfortable with Zoom communication… while I stayed equally uncomfortable with interacting with other people, so the effect faded away.
You know that parable about the pottery class being graded on either quantity or quality, and how the half of the class graded on quantity always ended up with better quality too?
Yeah, that’s why 24-episode seasons were better than 10-episode seasons.
Julian’s feline eyes, filled with the kind of soft hope that has been tempered by disappoint but always springs back again, asking… nay, pleading, “Won’t you play with me?”
Hazel and I are at a stand-off. She won’t let me play Diablo, and I won’t… make her stop preventing me from playing Diablo.
So, actually, I guess Hazel wins. She’s the cat. The cat always wins.